Independence Day
The 4th of July marks the 233rd anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, a call for an end of corporate colonial rule and for a more representative government of the people. The eloquence of the second paragraph is timeless…
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. —Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity, which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.”
Our colonies were, in fact, large corporations, the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Maryland Company, the Virginia Company, the Carolina Company, etc., and were, in fact, just subsidiaries of a mega-corporation in the West India Trading Company, the “little brother” to the world’s largest corporation at the time, the East India Trading Company. The long train of abuses was, in fact, the corporate decisions made by the Elites and enacted through the Parliament that made a mockery of the established English common law along with the monarchical decrees of King George, whose power established and sustained the charters of all English corporations. It is worth noting that no for-profit corporations were allowed to be retained after the Revolution, only a small handful of non-profit corporations for higher education such as Harvard, William and Mary, and a few others that comprise the cream of our university system today. The newly independent states all enacted constitutions to replace their corporate charters while the federal government took much longer to develop.
It is a shame that what little history is taught in our public schools today is built upon a mythology of the Founders rather than the details to the power structure that was so repulsive to the People that they were swayed to not only to fight, but to sustain that battle to the end against the world’s greatest military power of that era. Then again, those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them, so perhaps there is purpose to be found here.
Today, we have many problems in our society, which rise from the lack of responsibility in both individuals and institutions. By all objective measures, the problems are systemic in nature and arise from our means of economy. An important point, too, considering our Revolution was fought over economics. For all the lip service in America today about justice, the battles to be waged over sexuality, gender, race, and so on, there is no true War on Poverty and leaders of the Democratic Party have no backbone or stomach for establishing justice from an economic standpoint. Just look at the basic American business model…the corporation. The founding principle of incorporation is to avoid personal culpability for the harms that your decisions affect or create, either directly or indirectly. The corporate lawyers have a word for this…indemnification.
Our elected leaders today, for the most part, are so steeped in business culture, that they too must believe they are indemnified from the people so they can sleep well at night. As Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States: “In premodern times, the maldistribution of wealth was accomplished by simple force. In modern times, exploitation is disguised - it is accomplished by law, which has the look of neutrality and fairness.” We all realize this too, though we too often do not understand the fundamentals involved. The law is complex and convoluted by design to maintain the need for legal specialists and the high wages they demand.
Most activists seem to be misguided or lost too as they attempt to focus attention on the symptoms of our political cancer rather than address to root causes or fundamentals driving the system itself. Corporate personhood, the legal fiction that property can be organized into an artificial person and thus is endowed with those same inalienable rights as a natural person, is the root of our injustice. One can verify this by broaching the subject with any state or federal elected official, who will avoid direct public dialogue on the topic and quickly change the subject or flee the scene. People lose their desire to be politically active as a result of unending failure, drained of their energy by fighting the wrong battles.
http://www.iiipublishing.com/afd/santaclara.html
I urge everyone to learn more about corporate personhood, its creation, and the effect it made upon our laws and courts. Organizations such as the Program on Laws Corporations and Democracy, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and others do a good job educating activists in revamping their strategy and tactics to become more effective agents of change. After all, if you don’t take on the struggle for justice through the law, it leaves only war and bloodshed as a viable means to achieve such.
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Bob Johns comments:
Since RR barrons, latter 1800, wished to make lobbying Congress easier, they thought. Look up “Buckley vs. Valejo”, also led to our present lobby problem, and the argument favoring Corporate personhood easier.
Stefan Kosikowski comments:
Indeed, Buckley v. Valejo is a defining principle proving our laws are not about justice, rather they are about protecting the established wealth concentrations here in America.
For those not familiar, Buckley v. Valejo is a Supreme Court decision from 1976 concerning campaign finance laws, in which the Court declared that campaign donations (money) is the equivalent of free speech.
Clearly, money is property, but in true corporate fashion, property must be endowed with those same inalienable rights as human beings so that the owners of the same can remain indemnified, not personally responsible for any harms to individuals or society as a whole.
It is no surprise that there is little discussion on the topic of wealth or the economy in general in America, for we all know it is a sham. Corporations allow people to conceal their wealth as well.
Why do people have to hide their wealth if they truly earned it, if they truly deserve what they have?
I am not saying they broke the law, but that is the point is it not; that the law creates the injustice, and it is by design as Howard Zinn so clearly laid out in “A People’s History of the United States.”
So much of our Economy today is about exploitation, from using a communist dictatorship in China to control the Corporate Empire’s new forced labor to driving peasants from South of our border into America to force down wages for those jobs that can not be “outsourced” to despotic regimes. And people have the gall to call this the greatest nation on Earth.
If we are a nation of god, then that god is clearly Mammon, not the God of Abraham as described in those Holy Books!
Stefan Kosikowski comments:
An nice 4th of July piece from Buzzflash…
http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/8902
>>>Our unique American ability to progress without boundaries is being shut down by the brute force of unseemly sums of dollars.
Oh, we can complain that Harry Reid is spineless, that Barack Obama is too cautious and exhibits more timidity than audacity — and we do — but the problem is systemic. Weakness among the Democrats triumphs because too many of them are bought off. And Barack Obama probably quickly discovered that he wasn’t top dog: Wall Street and the corporate oligarchy are. And so he made his piece with them.
Instead of change we can believe in, we are getting more of the same. In fact yesterday, President Obama chastised progressives — yes progressives — for criticizing the “centrist” Dems who are holding up a government healthcare payer option. That’s not change; that’s more of the same.
Bob Johns comments:
Thanks Stephan;
I’m always surprised when “Libratarians” or Corporate “Republicans” claim some more than special connection to “our founding fathers”. Absurd on the face of it. “An airplane cannot fly with two right wings”.Corporate influence, or too close a relationship, is the definition of Facism, resembeling 1930’s Italy under Benito Musolini.More to the point, there was little if any, seperation twixt the English Monarchy and other, more direct,Corporate interests.Conservatism did not bring us seperation from the King or would they have ever caused a “WORKING” middle class.Says I.
Stefan Kosikowski comments:
Another good editorial from Buzzflash…
http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/9214
The Power Behind the Throne: The Legalization of Corporate Personhood
By Mark Karlin
Of course, there is no simple analysis to understanding the forces lurking beneath the surface of political conflict in America today.
But a good place to start would be with the legal enshrinement in the late 1800s of a concept called “corporate personhood.” In essence, this means a business institution has the same — indeed, currently enhanced — legal rights as individual American citizens.
Thom Hartmann outlined this brilliantly in his under-appreciated book of a few years back, “Unequal Protection.”
As noted in a description of “Unequal Protection”:
Hartmann then describes the history of the Fourteenth Amendment–created at the end of the Civil War to grant basic rights to freed slaves–and how it has been used by lawyers representing corporate interests to extend additional rights to businesses far more frequently than to freed slaves. Prior to 1886, corporations were referred to in U.S. law as “artificial persons.” but in 1886, after a series of cases brought by lawyers representing the expanding railroad interests, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations were “persons” and entitled to the same rights granted to people under the Bill of Rights. Since this ruling, America has lost the legal structures that allowed for people to control corporate behavior.
As a result, the largest transnational corporations fill a role today that has historically been filled by kings. They control most of the world’s wealth and exert power over the lives of most of the world’s citizens. Their CEOs are unapproachable and live lives of nearly unimaginable wealth and luxury. They’ve become the rudder that steers the ship of much human experience, and they’re steering it by their prime value–growth and profit and any expense–a value that has become destructive for life on Earth. This new feudalism was not what our Founders–Federalists and Democratic Republicans alike–envisioned for America.
Yes, the pockets of Republican and Democratic elected officials on Capitol Hill get stuffed with campaign contributions from corporate backers, but what is equally alarming is that corporations are equal to us in terms of their legal role in the legislative and legal process. Backed with huge war chests and legal funds, corporations are actually able to fix the system to where they have greater legal rights and legislative impact than people.
A new book expands upon Hartmann’s incisive legal and historical analysis about how corporations used the legal system to leverage their power by gaining “personal rights” for businesses. In the just released “Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back,” we learn how we have come to accept the worldview of corporations, even progressives. They have become the power behind the throne that controls D.C. and that even the President of the United States cannot force to heel.
It’s very abstract for most people to get their arms around this concept, but we are going to have to choose between the interests of corporations and the interests of the American people.
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