On Tue, 01 Oct 2002 17:59:45 -0700, you wrote: >The car belongs to GM. Keeping it after the lease is over is not civil >disobedience, it's theft.
Civil Disobedience involves, by definition, breaking the law. If I'm not mistaken, civil disobedience often involves breaking the law, on purpose, for reasons of conscience. The reason I could see to not call this civil disobedience would be that this would be violating a corporation's property rights rather than some government edict, which is the usual connotation I've heard for civil disobedience. Also, it would be an action (theft) rather than the refusal to take action (to move, to leave, to pay) that I usually see associated with cases of civil disobedience. Looking into it a bit more, this aspect of my understanding is born out here: http://www.san.beck.org/WP16-Thoreau.html "It was published in 1849 as "Resistance to Civil Government" and posthumously in 1866 as "Civil Disobedience."" So, it was clearly originally as reistance to Government and not to a corporation's actions. I think a lot of people are just very upset with GM, but would not be able to identify it as something where stealing the vehicle would amount to following a higher moral command. Some, though, might say that the deliberate destruction of what might be the best vehicle ever nearly-produced by any American manufacturer, in the face of a war which could be arguably helped by further manufacture of such car (by denying our enemies valuable money), and in the face of an economy which begs for American workers to be put to work building popular in-demand American vehicles, is sufficient grounds to disobey the law. Some would say the opposite, that if GM was put out of business by dozens of billions of dollars going down the drain to a shift to EV's, then it would be a tragedy. Thoreau refused to pay taxes and was jailed. His refusal wasn't just tax evasion (a crime) it was civil disobedience as he defined it (literally). >Thoreau asks whether it is not better to decide right and wrong by conscience which >everyone has. "It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for >the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time >what I think right." But a corporation has no conscience, although conscientious >people may be a corporation with a conscience. I do not necessarily agree that this thinking is appropriate to the GM EV-1 case, but I think it's the only thing that would be sufficient grounds for someone to go to jail, because I'm pretty sure that's where someone would end up, who pulled anything.
