Comments

1
Ah, yes. Perhaps they need to be introduced to a legal procedure called "piercing the corporate veil." I've done it myself - successfully - and when it workd it generally tends to bankrupt everybody involved, including the officers and directors.
2
Wait, so where does the Sheinhardt Wig Company fit into all of this?
3
translation:
The Stranger sees a chance to rag endlessly on the company that owns Seattle Weekly and takes it. again. and again. and .....
4
@1, who in daily life wears veils anymore? I think a hymen or sphincter metaphor would be much more to the, um, point.
5
Nevertheless, that's what it's called. I don't make this shit up; if I did, I guarantee I'd have a much better imagination about it.
6
Did I mention that there's a "five-pronged test" you apply when piercing the veil?

Forget about my imagination - I think they're doing pretty well on their own.
7
This makes it look like VVM/NT set up a hall-of-mirrors corporate structure specifically to facilitate a wide-ranging network of alt weeklies that could, with fairy-godmother-like infusions of cash, engage in all kinds of anti-competitive shenanigans. I'm just a simple country boy, but isn't that evidence of premeditation, or malice aforethought, or something?
8
Yep, that's one of the "prongs." If you can prove all five, the whole house of cards comes down. Including, as I said earlier, exposing the officers and directors to personal liability too.
9
Two funny quotes from the 2005 NYT article linked by Eli:
James Larkin, the chairman and chief executive of New Times, said in an interview that the merger, unlike those in the broader newspaper industry, where consolidation has led to accusations of uniformity and boilerplate coverage, "allows us to get stronger and to have stronger content."...

"I'm doing it because I love good journalism," Mr. Larkin said. "I want to have newspapers in the most exciting markets in the country. This is not a financial play."
10
The whole idea of shell corporations is making the public take all the risk and privatize all the profit.

It's evil, but that's why our activist justices on the Supreme Court made corporations people that couldn't be jailed.
11
@10 pretty well said, but you can't improve on Ambrose Bierce:

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility
12
But how is it that New Times Media, LLC, which controls so many money-making alt-weeklies across the country, and according to a document from the case had $190 million in assets in 2007, now has only "monies that don't exist," aka $0?


A holding company is a company whose sole purpose is to hold stock in other companies. Typically, they will have high % of ownership in these companies so that they can dictate policy and direct activity to benefit their ownership.

All assets in a holding company are shares of stock in other companies. Any revenue, profit or loss of a company in their portfolio only impacts them if it changes the value of the shares.

So, it is plausible that they would see a quick and dramatic decrease in assets if they have 1) divested from their holdings (sold their shares), or 2) if the market value of their holdings has significantly changed in value.

My bet is on #2. The market value of print media has seen double digit declines year-over-year since before 2007. You could easily make a case that the value of stocks in each of these companies has declined to $0 simply because there is no longer a market willing to pay anything for the stock.
13
@10, corporations, in the sense of businesses with corporate, or person-like, rights, have been around a lot longer than the US Supreme Court, or the US. Try ancient Rome. It's also rather unclear how the US Supreme Court has jurisdiction not just across time but space, in the hundreds of countries with corporation law similar to ours.

And this company we're talking about isn't a corporation at all, it's an LLC.

Other than that, yeah, you make a good point. Except that there isn't anything in your post other than that. So, alas, once again you are completely full of shit up to your eyebrows and beyond. How can you breathe?
14
@8, if you're willing, would you post the other four prongs?
15
Oh, hell, it's been so long since I've done it that I'd have to look them up again myself if I needed to know it. It's a minor miracle I remembered that there are five of them.
16
@14, @15, it's not quite as cut-and-dried as "five points". There's more than that, but you don't need all of them, and the interpretation is up to the local court you're in. You might only need one if it's egregious enough. Most of them are obvious and commonsensical -- "Mingling of assets of the corporation and the shareholder", "faked corporate records", and so on.

The summary on Wikipedia is pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_th…
17
@fnarf, its not as cut and dried as you make it seem, the corporate form only became the mode of choice for US business since the late 19th century when states relaxed the requirement that the corporation be limited to a specific purpose.

That the corporation was deemed a person for the purposes of constitutional rights was another factor in the modern explosion of corporate influence. Though i hesitate to side with WiS, he is mostly right here.
18
@17, so go on, finish the thought. How does a US Supreme Court decision extend this right of personhood to corporations in other countries?

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