President Abraham Lincoln, wrote. We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. . . . It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless. The passage appears in a letter from Lincoln to (Col.) William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864. Increasingly through their corporations, the ruling class started influencing legislators, bribing public officials, and employing lawyers to write new laws and file court cases challenging the existing laws that restricted corporate behaviour. Lincoln again. These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the peoples money to settle the quarrel. speech to Illinois legislature, Jan. 1837. See Vol. 1, p. 24 of Lincolns Complete Works, ed. by Nicolay and Hay, 1905) Bit by bit state legislatures increased corporate charter length while they decreased corporate liability and citizen authority over corporate structure, governance, production, and labor. But they were only going to be able to go just so far with this strategy. Because corporations are a creation of the government — chartered by the state legislatures — they still fell on this side of the line with duties accountable to the people. If minority rule by property was going to be accomplished through corporations, they had to cross this line and become entitled to rights instead. And their tool to do this was the 14th Amendment, which was passed in 1868. After a series of lower court cases, the watershed moment came in 1886 when the US Supreme Court heard a case called Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. Citing the 14th Amendment, and without hearing any arguments, the Supremes declared unanimously that corporations are persons deserving the law’s protection. There was no public debate about this and no law passed in Congress — corporations received the status of persons by simple judicial fiat. And they did this at a time when all women, all Native Americans, and even most African American men were still denied the right to vote. A key witness before the Supreme Court in the lead up to the 1886 was Roscoe Conkling. A former Senator who helped draft the 14th amendment. In his evidence he claimed that reading from his diaries of the time, it was the intention of the drafting commitee that the rights to be conferred on former slaves to citzenship were meant to be equally applied to corporations. It was not till thirty years after his death that his diaries were examined and found to have no such reference. He had lied to the Supreme court , but by then the legal fiction of corporate personhood had defined corporates as natural persons. Ten years later, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court established the “separate but equal” doctrine that legalized racial segregation through what became known as “Jim Crow” laws. Fifteen years later the writers of the Australian Constitution included reference to corporation powers in Section 51 xx. Four referendums from 1911 to 1926at which the people of Australia had been asked to enlarge the scope of Commonwealth power in relations to corporations were defeated. However in 1971 the high Court overruled its 1908 decision and therby rendered those four referendums irrelevant. In less than 30 years, African-Americans had effectively lost their legal personhood rights while corporations had acquired them. And in case you’re still wondering whether the primary purpose of the Constitution and the body of law it spawned is about protecting property rather than people, listen to this. Of the 14th Amendment cases heard in the Supreme Court in the first 50 years after its adoption, less than one-half of one percent invoked it in protection of African- Americans, and more than 50% asked that its benefits be extended to corporations. When you look at two-plus centuries of US legal history, the pattern is that people acquire rights by amendment to the Constitution — a long, drawn-out, difficult process — and corporations acquire them by Supreme Court decisions. Rights for corporations, because they’re about property, is about who is excluded; rights for human beings is about who is included. Once corporations had jumped the line, they proceeded to pursue the Bill of Rights through more Supreme Court cases. In 1893 they were assured 5th Amendment protection of due process. In 1906 they got 4th Amendment search and seizure protection. In 1925 it was freedom of the press and speech. In 1976 the Supreme Court determined that money is equal to speech, and since corporate persons have First Amendment rights, they can basically contribute as much money as they want to political parties and candidates. And so we find ourselves in a time when corporations have amassed enormous power and wealth, and control nearly every aspect of our lives, because they masquerade — under the law at least — as one of us. But most of us don’t know it. A key reason for that is that the whole thing is pretty esoteric. A corporation is a legal fiction, an abstraction. You can’t see or hear or touch or smell a corporation — it’s just an idea that people agree to and put into writing. But because they have legal personhood status, corporations are like super humans with all the advantages and none of the disadvantages that we mere mortals have. Corporations now have infinite lifespans so they can continue to accumulate wealth and power forever. You can cut off the figurative arm or leg or even head of a corporation and it can still continue to exist. Furthermore, corporate lawyers invoke their personhood status or not at their convenience, allowing them to be whatever they want according to their needs. Along with this abstract existence, corporations have acquired a lot more abstract property. Ownership of land and buildings is still important, but now corporate property also includes concepts like mineral rights, drilling rights, air pollution credits, intellectual property, and even — under NAFTA — rights to future profits.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 14:28:46 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015