During the last third of the 19th century, Corporations confronted the law at every turn, according to Harvard law professor Lawrence M. Friedman. They hired lawyers and created whole law firms. They bought and sold governments. Courts began creating legal doctrines to protect corporations and corporate property, subverting charter law and constitutional amendments. In hundreds of cases decided in the latter half of the 19th century, judges declared that the corporate rate of return on investments (i.e., profit) was corporate property and, hence, could not be meddled with by citizens or by their elected representatives. These judges gave certain corporations, such as railroad, mining and manufacturing companies, the power of eminent domain -- the right to take private property with minimal compensation to be determined by the courts. They eliminated jury trials to determine corporation-caused harm and to assess damages. Workers, the courts also ruled, were responsible for causing their own injuries on the job. This came to be called the assumption of risk. Judges created the right to contract doctrine, which stipulates that the government cannot interfere with an individuals freedom to negotiate with a corporation for wages and working conditions. Former George Washington University law professor Arthur Selwyn Miller called the creation of the right to contract doctrine one of the most remarkable feats of judicial law-making this nation has seen. Responding to banking, shipping, railroad, manufacturing and agribusiness corporations and their lawyers, judges creatively interpreted the commerce and due process clauses of the US Constitution. Inventing the concept of substantive due process, they ruled that laws passed as a result of widespread citizen organizing -- e.g., state wage and hours laws, fees and rates for grain elevators and railroads -- were unconstitutional. Judges also established the managerial prerogative and business judgment doctrines, giving corporations legal justification to arrest workers civil rights at factory gates and to blockade democracy at boardroom doors. The biggest blow to citizen constitutional authority came in 1886. The US Supreme Court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad [[118 U.S. 394], that a private corporation was a natural person under the US Constitution, sheltered by the 14th Amendment, which requires due process in the criminal prosecution of persons. Following this ruling, huge, wealthy corporations were allowed to compete on equal terms with neighborhood businesses and individuals. There was no history, logic or reason given to support that view, Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas wrote 60 years later. Within just a few decades, appointed judges had redefined the common good to mean the corporate use of humans and the Earth for maximum production and profit -- no matter what was manufactured, who was hurt or what was destroyed. Corporations had obtained control over resources, production, commerce, jobs, politicians, judges and the law. Workers, citizens, cities, towns, states and nature were left with fewer and fewer rights that corporations were forced to respect. We cannot command the modern corporation with laws that require only a few days notice before a corporation leaves town or with laws, such as the Clean Air Act and the Toxic Substances Control Act, that assess an occasional fine while allowing a corporation to continue to spew toxic chemicals. We should not have to plead with corporations to be socially responsible, or grant them concessions and incentives to cause a little less harm. If we citizens want to control the corporation, we must be the ones to define it. By rewriting the laws governing corporations, we citizens can reassert the convictions of the people who struggled to resist corporate rule in the past: • The corporation is an artificial creation and must not enjoy the protections of the Bill of Rights. • Corporate owners and officers must be liable for all the harms they cause. • No corporation should exist forever. Our sovereign right to decide what is produced and to organize our work is as Australian as a self-governing peoples right to vote. We can assert our historical and legal rights over the fiction that is the modern corporation.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 13:37:51 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015