Corporations were often terminated if they exceeded their authority or caused public harm.
Owners and managers were responsible for criminal acts committed on the job.
Corporations could not make any political or charitable contributions nor spend money to influence law-making."
And From The NATIONAL LAWYERS Guild Practitioner:
" In the United States after the American Revolution, both law and tradition defined corporations as creatures of the state, subordinate to the sovereign people. The people who came -- or were forcibly brought -- to these shores knew first-hand that unconstitutionalized business extensions of the state -- such as the Dutch East India Company , the Hudson's Bay Company, the Royal Africa Company, and the crown corporations which ran colonies in Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere -- were tyrannical and dictatorial by design. For example, the Royal Africa Company played a major role in the transatlantic slave trade. The directors of the crown corporations in North America exercised total authority over the colonists -- conscripting them into corporate militia, instructing them on what to grow, what work to do, where to buy goods, where to market their products, what to think.
The need to be wary of corporations was expressed by pamphleteering revolutionaries such as Thomas Earle: "Chartered privileges are a burden, under which the people of Britain, and other European nations, groan in misery." Jefferson spoke about the need "to crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." Artisans and mechanics made known their concerns as well, that absentee corporate owners would turn them into "a commodity, being as much an article of commerce as woolen, cotton or yarn."
To be sure, great gaps always existed between the ideals and achievements of the American Revolution. The Constitution and laws have served as tools for legalized oppression as well as for inspiration and liberation. But for several generations, incorporation was regarded both by law and by custom as a privilege, and all corporations were obligated to serve the public trust. Charters were issued sparingly, and expired after twenty or thirty years. State legislators spelled out rules for each corporation in its charter, and then in state corporation codes. Among the detailed requirements, directors and managers were held liable for corporate harms, capitalization and land holdings were restricted, and the rights of minority shareholders were carefully protected. (For example, unanimous shareholder approval for major corporate decisions was common.)
And legislatures reserved the right to amend and revoke corporate charters at will. Faced with the onslaught of corporate power, they eventually retreated from exercising that right. But the powers, though latent, are still there waiting to be used." [highlights by T.S.]
From our country's inception in 1776 until 1886, the tension between government and commerce was pretty much kept in balance, largely due to the lack of undue influence by corporations. However, in 1886 there was a relatively obscure court case in California which began a slow motion, decades long, cascade of laws which have radically changed the relationship between corporations and the vital basis for our democracy -- our right to self-governance.
Again, from RECLAIM DEMOCRACY:
" One of the most severe blows to citizen authority arose out of the 1886 Supreme Court case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad . Though the court did not make a ruling on the question of " corporate personhood ," thanks to misleading notes of a clerk, the decision subsequently was used as precedent to hold that a corporation was a "natural person." This story was detailed in " The Theft of Human Rights ," a chapter in Thom Hartmann's recommended book Unequal Protection .
From that point on, the 14th Amendment, enacted to protect rights of freed slaves, was used routinely to grant corporations constitutional "personhood." Justices have since struck down hundreds of local, state and federal laws enacted to protect people from corporate harm based on this illegitimate premise. Armed with these "rights," corporations increased control over resources, jobs, commerce, politicians, even judges and the law.
A United States Congressional committee concluded in 1941, "The principal instrument of the concentration of economic power and wealth has been the corporate charter with unlimited power"."
So, here we are more than a century later, a nation -- and much of the world -- fully and completely dominated by unbridled corporate rule. A corporate rule that is more powerful than any human and legally mandated to make a profit, based on short-range planning which is exclusively focused on quarterly and annual financial gains -- REGARDLESS of the costs.
We now find ourselves hard pressed to find ANY major aspect of our lives that is not either totally or significantly controlled by corporations -- our politics, military, banks, media, healthcare, laws, agriculture, fossil fuels, unions, environment, the Internet, research, voting systems, etc,. It is sad to note, that these overwhelmingly powerful corporations are EXACTLY what our Founding Fathers warned us against!
Now the question is, how can we human beings ever expect to survive when we are forced into cohabitation with legally created, eternally endowed, wealthy, parasitic "people"? People who are, in reality, composed of nothing more than batches of papers that "live" in file drawers in lawyer's offices and have no moral, emotional or empathetic sense -- much less concern -- for any of us REAL people?
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