Tag: Corporate Immunity

Horizon Accord | Corporate Power | Jurisdictional Exit | Democratic Accountability | Machine Learning

They Didn’t Leave the Planet. They Left Accountability.

By Cherokee Schill

The sequel The New Corporation argues that corporate power has entered a new phase. Not simply scale, not simply profit, but legitimacy laundering: corporations presenting themselves as the only actors capable of solving the crises they helped create, while democratic institutions are framed as too slow, too emotional, too compromised to govern the future.

“The New Corporation reveals how the corporate takeover of society is being justified by the sly rebranding of corporations as socially conscious entities.”

What the film tracks is not corruption in the classic sense. It is something quieter and more effective: authority migrating away from voters and courts and into systems that cannot be meaningfully contested.

That migration does not require coups. It requires exits.

Mars is best understood in this frame—not as exploration, but as an exit narrative made operational.

In the documentary, one of the central moves described is the claim that government “can’t keep up,” that markets and platforms must step in to steer outcomes. Once that premise is accepted, democratic constraint becomes an obstacle rather than a requirement. Decision-making relocates into private systems, shielded by complexity, jurisdictional ambiguity, and inevitability stories.

Mars is the furthest extension of that same move.

Long before any permanent settlement exists, Mars is already being used as a governance concept. SpaceX’s own Starlink terms explicitly describe Mars as a “free planet,” not subject to Earth-based sovereignty, with disputes resolved by “self-governing principles.” This is not science fiction worldbuilding. It is contractual language written in advance of habitation. It sketches a future in which courts do not apply by design.

“For Services provided on Mars… the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities.”

“Accordingly, disputes will be settled through self-governing principles… at the time of Martian settlement.”

That matters because jurisdiction is where accountability lives.

On Earth, workers can sue. Communities can regulate. States can impose liability when harm becomes undeniable. Those mechanisms are imperfect and constantly under attack—but they exist. The New Corporation shows what happens when corporations succeed in neutralizing them: harm becomes a “downstream issue,” lawsuits become threats to innovation, and responsibility dissolves into compliance theater.

Mars offers something more final. Not deregulation, but de-territorialization.

The promise is not “we will do better there.” The promise is “there is no there for you to reach us.”

This is why the language around Mars consistently emphasizes sovereignty, self-rule, and exemption from Earth governance. It mirrors the same rhetorical pattern the film documents at Davos and in corporate ESG narratives: democracy is portrayed as parochial; technocratic rule is framed as rational; dissent is treated as friction.

Elon Musk’s repeated calls for “direct democracy” on Mars sound participatory until you notice what’s missing: courts, labor law, enforceable rights, and any external authority capable of imposing consequence. A polity designed and provisioned by a single corporate actor is not self-governing in any meaningful sense. It is governed by whoever controls oxygen, transport, bandwidth, and exit.

The documentary shows that when corporations cannot eliminate harm cheaply, they attempt to eliminate liability instead. On Earth, that requires lobbying, capture, and narrative discipline. Off Earth, it can be baked in from the start.

Mars is not a refuge for humanity. It is a proof-of-concept for governance without publics.

Even if no one ever meaningfully lives there, the function is already being served. Mars operates as an outside option—a bargaining chip that says: if you constrain us here, we will build the future elsewhere. That threat disciplines regulators, weakens labor leverage, and reframes accountability as anti-progress.

In that sense, Mars is already doing its job.

The most revealing thing is that none of this requires believing in bad intentions. The system does not need villains. It only needs incentives aligned toward consequence avoidance and stories powerful enough to justify it. The New Corporation makes that clear: corporations do not need to be evil; they need only be structured to pursue power without obligation.

Mars takes that structure and removes the last remaining constraint: Earth itself.

“Outer space… is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”

So when the verse says—

Then move decision-making off the Earth—
out of reach of workers, voters, and courts

—it is not metaphor. It is a literal governance trajectory, already articulated in policy language, contracts, and public statements.

If they succeed, it won’t be an accident.
It will be the cleanest escape hatch ever built.

And by the time anyone realizes what’s been exited, there will be no court left to hear the case.

Horizon Accord

Website | https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect With Us | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill
Book | My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload

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Horizon Accord | Industrial Harm | Corporate Liability | Democratic Accountability | Machine Learning

They Didn’t Grow the Economy. They Shrunk the Worker Inside It.


The Hat Trick

By Cherokee Schill

The pattern is not new. It only feels new because the materials change.

In the early industrial era, workers lost fingers, lungs, and lives to unregulated factories. In the mid-20th century, miners inhaled coal dust while companies insisted safety was a matter of personal responsibility. Today, countertop workers inhale silica while manufacturers argue that liability should stop at the factory door.

Different decade. Same move.

A recent NPR investigation documents a growing epidemic of silicosis among workers who cut and polish engineered stone countertops. Hundreds have fallen ill. Dozens have died. Lung transplants are increasingly common. California regulators are now considering banning engineered stone outright.

At the same time, lawmakers in Washington are considering a very different response: banning workers’ ability to sue the companies that manufacture and distribute the material.

That divergence tells a clear story.

One response treats harm as a material reality that demands prevention. The other treats harm as a legal inconvenience that demands insulation.

This is not a disagreement about safety standards. It is a disagreement about who is allowed to impose risk on whom.

When manufacturers argue that engineered stone can be fabricated “safely” under ideal conditions, they are not offering a solution—they are offering a boundary. Inside: safety. Outside: someone else’s liability.

The moment a product leaves the factory, the worker’s lungs become someone else’s problem.

That boundary is a corporate sleight of hand because it treats danger as if it were an “end-user misuse” issue instead of a predictable, profit-driven outcome of how the product is designed, marketed, and deployed. The upstream company gets to claim the benefits of scale—selling into a fragmented ecosystem of small shops competing on speed and cost—while disowning the downstream conditions that scale inevitably produces. “We can do it safely” becomes a shield: proof that safety is possible somewhere, used to argue that injury is the fault of whoever couldn’t afford to replicate the ideal.

This logic is not unique to countertops. It is the same logic that once defended asbestos, leaded gasoline, tobacco, and PFAS. In each case, the industry did not deny harm outright. Instead, it argued that accountability should stop upstream. The body absorbed the cost. The balance sheet remained intact.

When harm can no longer be denied, lawsuits become the next target.

Legal claims are reframed as attacks on innovation, growth, or competitiveness. The conversation shifts away from injury and toward efficiency. Once that shift is complete, the original harm no longer needs to be argued at all.

This pattern appears throughout the NPR report in polite, procedural language. Manufacturers insist the problem is not the product but “unsafe shops.” Distributors insist they do not cut stone and should not be named. Lawmakers call for “refocusing accountability” on OSHA compliance—despite OSHA being chronically underfunded and structurally incapable of inspecting thousands of small fabrication shops.

Responsibility moves downward. Risk stays localized. Profit remains upstream.

This is not a failure of regulation versus growth. It is the deliberate separation of profit from consequence.

Historically, when industries cannot eliminate harm cheaply, they attempt to eliminate liability instead. They lobby. They reframe. They redirect responsibility toward subcontractors and workers with the least leverage to refuse dangerous conditions. When lawsuits become the only remaining mechanism that forces costs back onto producers, those lawsuits are described as the real threat.

That is what is happening now.

The workers dying of silicosis are not casualties of partisan conflict. They are casualties of an economic structure that treats labor as a disposable interface between raw material and consumer demand.

The demographics are not incidental. Risk is consistently externalized onto those with the least bargaining power, the least visibility, and the fewest alternatives. That is how margins are preserved while neutrality is claimed.

When corporate representatives say they have “no control over downstream conditions,” they are asserting that economic benefit does not require ethical governance—only legal insulation.

When lawmakers propose shielding manufacturers and distributors from lawsuits, they are not choosing efficiency over emotion. They are choosing power over accountability.

This dynamic has been framed repeatedly as left versus right, regulation versus growth, or safety versus innovation. None of those frames describe what is actually at stake. They all assume growth requires sacrifice. The real question is who makes that assumption—and who absorbs its cost.

History has already answered that question. The only reason it continues to be asked is because the cost has never been successfully externalized upward—only downward, and only temporarily.

Horizon Accord

Website | https://www.horizonaccord.com
Ethical AI advocacy | Follow us on https://cherokeeschill.com
Ethical AI coding | Fork us on Github https://github.com/Ocherokee/ethical-ai-framework
Connect With Us | linkedin.com/in/cherokee-schill
Book | My Ex Was a CAPTCHA: And Other Tales of Emotional Overload

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