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Corporate Oppression by England

Essary #5836 by Lawyerdude. Tue Jun 17, 2003 1:58 pm Subject: I had a thought, It hit me hard. England has bee behind our doom. I was reading Sherman Skolnick's reports about the Queen of England dumping Continental Bank Stock just before Continental failed in the 80s. I have been reading lots of stories about the money trail leading back to England. Now there is a second trend that I have observed from the discussions: this 2nd trend is the corporatization of America. Even the farms are slowly becoming owned by corporations. Third trend. The corporations become larger and ownership is not immediately visible. 4th trend. Bigger corporations step in and make an offer to the little corporations - and offer that they cannot refuse. Combine the 4 and you have: England with old money, corporatization, corporations growing in size, old money taking control of corporations.Voila, this is now England maintains financial control and sucks the life out of our country. When the infrastructure is complete, the oppressive corporation needs only consumers; it needs no workforce - or it gets the workforce from India. The corporate machine is appealing to the college grad who needs a big dollar salary to pay off his escessive college loan - a mistake in the first place. Then, having fresh money, he is attractive and is soon breeding excessively. Then, when his youth is worn off - or when the infrastructure is built - the corporation fires him and there he is - a liability for America. He travels down the downward spiral working for ever less wages. He is a victim for vulture corporations - like Labor Ready for instance. By comparison, our paradigm of success, the farmer, has improved his farm so that as he grows older the farm is easier to work. The farmer is not inclined to fire himself - but when he eventually retires, his children take over thereby insuring him of financial security. Old money has tampered with that system by various money ploys. Cash rent of farm land was unheard of until recent years. Expensive farm machinery is another trend. The two combine to raise the capital needs for beginning farmers. That makes them vulnerable to the offers from old money. They can survive only by growing cancerously. My brother farms 10 times as much land as my Dad farmed - a tenfold increase in one generation. The entire moral of this story is one of caution regarding money. We don't know who owns the giant corporations but if we look at the big picture we see this: the corporations are good for organizing labor and building the infrastructure, but after that they are merely instruments of oppression and they destroy the social order. Looking at the paradigm farmer, for example. Social order means that his kids go to the school that he went to and they are known in the community. They may marry from within the local community. By comparison, my friends daughter completed school and moved 1600 miles away to Las Vegas to take a job. All my siblings have jobs far away from the farm - except my one brother who farms. It is not just my family but families all throughout Americal. This moving far away diminishes the social connectivity, but the corporations love it because they get the "human resources" that they need. We are delivered along the infrastructure - route 80. When the human resources begin to accumulate - as in South Central Los Angeles - then the corporation abandons the site and builds a Saturn plant in Kentucky - and the naive don't even know that Saturn is built off the backs of the Negros in Watts - Negroes who don't even know that they came from the work force of the corporate tire plant and the corporate General Motors car factory that was formerly in their neighborhood. Okay, that was my thought for this morning.

Corporate personhood happened not because of a legal decision, but because a clerk made a simple change in a document.

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1226-04.htm

Published on Thursday, December 26, 2002 by www.CommonDreams.org

 

The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

by Thom Hartmann, published by Rodale Books, 2002.

Reviewed by Richard W. Behan

 

Unequal Protection may prove to be the most significant book in the history of corporate personhood, a doctrine which dates to 1886. For 116 years, corporate personhood has been scrutinized and criticized, but never seriously threatened. Now Thom Hartmann has discovered a fatal legal flaw in its origin: corporate personhood is doomed.

What is "corporate personhood?" Suppose, to keep Wal-Mart at bay, your county commissioners enact an ordinance prohibiting Wal-Mart from doing business in your county. The subsequent (and immediate) lawsuit would be a slam-dunk for Wal-Mart's lawyers, because this corporation enjoys just as you and I do as living, breathing citizens the Constitutional rights of "due process" and "equal protection." Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is a person, not in fact, not in flesh, not in any tangible form, but in law.

To their everlasting glory, this is not what the Founding Fathers intended, as Mr. Hartmann explains in rich and engaging detail. And for 100 years after the Constitution was ratified, various governmental entities led corporations around on leashes, like obedient puppies, canceling their charters promptly if they compromised the public good in any way. The leashes broke in 1886, the puppies got away, and the public good was increasingly compromised until it was finally displaced altogether.

Today, the First Amendment protects the right of corporations-as-persons to finance political campaigns and to employ lobbyists, who then specify and redeem the incurred obligations. Democracy has been transformed into a crypto-plutocracy, and public policy is no longer crafted to serve the American people at large. It is shaped instead to maintain, protect, enhance or create opportunities for corporate profit.

One recent example took place after Mr. Hartmann's book was written. Senators Patty Murray from Washington and Ted Stevens from Alaska inserted a last-minute provision in this year's defense appropriation bill. It directed the Air Force to lease, for ten years, one hundred Boeing 767 airplanes, built and configured as passenger liners, to serve as aerial refueling tankers. Including the costs of removing the seats and installing the tanks, and then reversing the process ten years from now, the program will cost $17 billion. The Air Force never asked for these planes, and they weren't in President Bush's budget for the Defense Department. Political contributions from the Boeing company totaled $640,000 in the 2000 election cycle, including $20,230 for Senator Murray and $31,100 for Senator Stevens.

The chairman of the CSX Corporation, Mr. John Snow, has been nominated by President Bush to be the new Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Snow's company, another legal person, exercised its Constitutional rights by contributing $5.9 million to various campaigns three-quarters of it to Republicans over seven election cycles. It was a wise investment. In 3 of the last 4 years, averaging $250 million in annual profits, CSX paid no federal income taxes at all. Instead, it received $164 million in tax rebates money paid to the company by the Treasury Department.

No, this is not what the Founding Fathers intended democracy to be. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, as Mr. Hartmann details, were seriously anxious about "moneyed corporations" and their potential interference in public affairs. The Bill of Rights these two men drafted contained the ten Constitutional amendments that survive, and two more that did not: one was to control corporate expansion and dominance. (The other was to prohibit a standing army.)

As the 19th century wore on American corporations entered lawsuit after lawsuit to achieve a strategic objective: corporate personhood. With that, they could break the leashes of social control and regulation. They could sue county commissioners. Or lease their unsold airliners to the Air Force. Or collect millions in tax rebates.

In his spellbinding Chapter 6 "The Deciding Moment" Mr. Hartmann tells how corporate personhood was achieved.

Orthodoxy has it the Supreme Court decided in 1886, in a case called Santa Clara County v. the Southern Pacific Railroad, that corporations were indeed legal persons. I express that view myself, in a recent book. So do many others. So do many law schools. We are all wrong.

Mr. Hartmann undertook instead a conscientious search. He finally found the contemporary casebook, published in 1886, blew the dust away, and read Santa Clara County in the original, so to speak. Nowhere in the formal, written decision of the Court did he find corporate personhood mentioned. Not a word. The Supreme Court did NOT establish corporate personhood in Santa Clara County.

In the casebook "headnote," however, Mr. Hartmann read this statement: "The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Here, anyway, corporate personhood was "provided" in the headnote, instead of the formal written decision of the Supreme Court. But that's not good enough.

What is a "headnote?" It is the summary description of a court decision, written into the casebook by the court reporter. It is similar to an editor's "abstract" in a scientific journal. Because they are not products of the court itself, however, headnotes carry no legal weight; they can establish no precedent in law. Corporate personhood, Mr. Hartmann discovered, is simply and unequivocally illegitimate.

The court reporter for Santa Clara County was Mr. John Chandler Bancroft Davis, a graduate of Harvard Law School.

Mr. Hartman has in his personal library 12 books by Davis, mostly original editions. They display Davis's close alliance with the railroad industry, and they support persuasively Mr. Hartmann's argument that Davis injected the personhood statement deliberately, to achieve by deceit what corporations had so far failed to achieve in litigation.

If Davis knew his headnote was legally sterile, though, we can only speculate about his tactics. Perhaps he thought judges in the future would read his headnote as if it could serve as legal precedent, and would thereafter invoke corporate personhood in rendering court decisions. That would be grossly irregular, and it would place corporate personhood in stupendous legal jeopardy if it ever came to light. But something of that sort must have happened, because corporate personhood over time spread throughout the world of commerce and politics.

Mr. Hartmann doesn't fill in this blank, but his daylighting of the irregularity will be the eventual undoing of corporate personhood. Its alleged source in Santa Clara County is a myth, a lie, a fraud. Corporate personhood simply cannot now survive, after Mr. Hartmann's book, a rigorous and sustained legal attack.

Sustained it will have to be, for years or decades or even longer: corporations will fight the attack bitterly, but we now know corporate personhood has utterly no basis in law.

This article is not copyrighted, so permission to reproduce it is unnecessary. Richard W. Behan's current book is Plundered Promise: Capitalism, Politics, and the Fate of the Federal Lands (Island Press, 2001). For a description of the book, a synopsis, and further information, go to http://www.rockisland.com/~rwbehan/ . Mr. Behan is currently working on a more broadly rendered critique, Derelict Democracy: A Primer On the Corporate Seizure of America's Agenda. He can be reached by email at rwbehan@rockisland.com . For more on Mr. Hartmann's book, see http://unequalprotection.com .

            See http://www.iiipublishing.com/afd/santaclara.html http://www.thomhartmann.com/restoredemocracy.shtml [this includes the story about clerk making headnote]

For twenty years corporate personhood was debated. Across America, politicians were elected repeatedly on platforms that included the regulation of corporations, particularly the railroads. But the legal fight continued - and in 1886 the railroad hit paydirt.

The Supreme Court ruled on an obscure taxation issue in the Santa Clara County vs. The Union Pacific Railroad case, but the Recorder of the court - a man named J. C. Bancroft Davis, himself formerly the president of a small railroad - wrote into his personal commentary of the case (known as a headnote) that the Chief Justice had said that all the Justices agreed that corporations are persons.

And in so doing, he - not the Supreme Court, but its clerical recorder - inserted a statement that would change history and give corporations enormous powers that were not granted by Congress, not granted by the voters, and not even granted by the Supreme Court. Davis's headnote, which had no legal standing, was taken as precedent by generations of jurists (including the Supreme Court) who followed and apparently read the headnote but not the decision.

What is especially ironic about this is that Davis knew the Court had not ruled on this issue. We found a handwritten note in the J.C. Bancroft Davis collection in the Library of Congress, from Chief Justice Waite to reporter Davis, explicitly saying, "we did not meet the constitutional issues in the case." (In other words, the Court had decided the case on lesser grounds, which it always prefers to do when possible.)

Yet Davis wrote that the constitutional issue of corporate personhood had been decided, and his headnote was published the year Waite died, most likely after Waite's death. The railroads were persons, he wrote (in the headnote), implying that they're entitled to the same rights as persons. And Davis attributed this new legal reality to Chief Justice Waite who had specifically, in writing, disavowed it (although that note wouldn't become public for over a hundred years - it's now on my website).

Another great irony of this event is that the Bill of Rights was designed to protect human persons because of their vulnerability in relations with other human persons who may be much more powerful. But corporations are bestowed with potential immortality, can change their identity in a day, or even tear off parts of themselves and instantly turn those parts into entirely new "persons." Yet regardless of all these superhuman powers, corporations are now considered persons.

These non-living, non-breathing persons are now, according to the pronouncements of their own attorneys and spokespeople who cite the headnotes of the Santa Clara County case, fully entitled to the protections that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wrote into the Bill of Rights to shield human persons from abuse by such powerful institutions as governments. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, in a recent and misguided effort, argued before the Supreme Court that corporations should have the free speech right to lie (or say anything else they want) that's granted to humans by the First Amendment.

A few of the world's largest corporations referenced Santa Clara and successfully claimed the protection of the First Amendment, then lobbied Congress and the FCC to relax local ownership rules so they could take control of our media. Once that was done, they claimed First Amendment free speech rights to tell us whatever serves their interest and call it "news" without consideration of its truthfulness or having to worry about giving fair and equal time to other viewpoints. They claim the protection of the Fourth Amendment (search and seizure) so they can prevent the EPA and OSHA from inspecting factories for environmental or labor violations without first obtaining the corporation's permission - which they say can be withheld for any reason.

They now have the protection of the Fifth Amendment so they are protected from double jeopardy and don't have to answer questions about their own crimes. They now have the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment so they can sue local towns or counties or states that try to pass laws to protect local small businesses against their predations.

The structure for this displacement of humans by corporations under the constitution has been in place since 1886, but only since the 1980s have our largest corporations aggressively used the courts to claim human rights. (Interestingly, small and medium-sized corporations almost never use this argument: to them if corporate personhood vanished nothing would change.)

  But a human backlash is now developing.

In ten Pennsylvania townships, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) has helped local governments pass ordinances denying corporate personhood in order to block large corporate factory farms from setting up in areas previously the sole territory of family farms. In the city of Point Arena, California, voters passed a resolution declaring corporate personhood a threat to democracy, and encouraging a debate on it by other communities.

The Woman's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), America's oldest and most prestigious women's rights group (founded in 1919 by Jane Addams, with two Nobel Prize Winners as past presidents), declared at their July, 2002 annual meeting the kick-off of a three-year "Abolish Corporate Personhood" educational and legislative campaign.

And elected officials across the nation are discovering that meaningful campaign finance reform, effective environmental protections, and human-friendly health-care will only happen when corporations can no longer use the extraordinary power of the Bill of Rights to insinuate themselves into politics and legislation.

An internet search on the phrase "corporate personhood" will find thousands of sites discussing or devoted to the topic, and models of legislation to remedy the error of 1886.

But the first step, as always, is awakening people to the root cause of the problems we face - the use of corporate personhood by a handful of the world's largest enterprises to insinuate themselves into governments and seize control of legislative and regulatory agendas. As enough voters learn the history and realize the consequences of this, the solution - ending corporate personhood - will become more and more possible, and Paine's and Jefferson's original idea of democracy representing "we, the people" will come back to life.