CORPORATE CAMPUS V COUNTRY -- The Long And Winding Road To The Future

This is about The Primaries decision about the corporate way our our constitutional way.

We have to decide in 2020 just who will run this government.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell

Rhode Island's Sheldon Whitehouse details the facts of our situation in Captured, a dense briefing of our corporations' growing power, and his plan for untangling us and our government from corporate misuse of the Constitution in their capture of our government.

The quick look...

1.
YES, corporations help create great wealth for humans. Jobs, networks of communications, ways and means for uplift through public works, scholarships, internships, and just jobs.

NO, corporations do not help the body politic. Right now they win the "trial of strength" against our democracy that Jefferson warned us about.

YES, the US is now a corporate campus, but we citizens, as the first officers of democracy, need to make our bordered land base home a country again.

Sheldon Whitehouse’s “Captured” lays out both the history of corporate existence AND the fight ahead of us in-country humans against our corporate campus.

2.
Corporations are centuries-old fictional personhoods. Six existed in our original colonies. Our Founders did not mention them in the US Constitution.

Corporations:
1. do not rest, retire or die — by “perpetual succession” beyond the lives of their incorporators, directors and officers ;
2. exist purely for shareholder profit — when moral issues or public goods are at stake, this single-mindedness is a flaw;
3. have no soul or conscience, just a founding charter — an artificial being kept from misconduct only by specific laws or reputed practices that interfere with profitmaking;
4. have no loyalty to any flag or nation — CEO’ do not make decisions based on what is good for their charter’s home country, or any country;
5. do not have any natural size limit — they will promote policies that help them grow beyond the economies of countries
6. have no natural limit to their appetite — no corporation says, “I think I’ve made enough;” no corporate lobby says, “I think I’ve acquired enough political influrence.”

No human being can outlive the relentlessness and cross-generational power of corporate entities.


As Republican Teddy Roosevelt said: “ Behind he ostensible government sites enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. Our government, Nation and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests… We must drive the special interests out of politics… the citizens of the United States must effectively control the might commercial forces which they have called into being There can be no effective control of corporations while their activity remains.”

“To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.”

But we CAN in this time stop corporate rule for all time. “Corporate charter death" is one of our weapons. Law is another

3. " Corporate Whores and Their Corporate Wars" History In Brief:

Blackstone’s Commentaries from the 1760’s, and the 1917 Fletcher Cyclopedia of the Law of Corporations describe the antagonism thousands of years ago between corporations and government.

-- Jamestown and Plymouth were founded by corporations. Six native-born business corporations existed in the colonies.

Corporations are not mentioned in the US Constitution. Though their future political power was not foreseen, misgivings about their power colored the ratification of the Constitution by the states. Even after ratification, the total number was 200 — growth, but not the explosion that was to follow.

— 1819 The USSC’s first famous case dealing with corporation was Dartmouth vs. New Hampshire. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled for Dartmouth, espousing a new theory that legislative control over a corporate charter was not absolute. That once created, a corporation had certain rights over its creator. This fateful decision has been litigated ever since.
Pennsylvania’s Congressman Charles Jared Ingersoll published and spoke against mostly banking corporations. He pointed to Martin Van Buren dominating banking policy by doling out charters to friends and blocking foes. He cited that Van Buren proved that corruption works both ways: the more legislators use such powers to pick and choose the winners of finance, the more finance lobbied to bribe those legislators.
There were 30,000 corporations in 1860. By 1915, 300,000. The 200 biggest of that time still rule their industries.
State legislators across America tried to contain the corporate threat. Corps were denied automatic rights of persons, their existence extended to 20 - 50 years.
California’s 1879 state constitution was designed to protect against corporate power and to limit the legislature to any laws that loosen corporate liability or restrictions.
But by century’s end, Justice Louis Brandeis recounted that, though corps powers were sparingly conferred and strictly construed, they were more honored in the breach than in the observance, and that government control had effectlvely collapsed, not because citizens felt safe or restrictions unwise, but because "the conviction that it was futile,” as corps circumvented laws by foreign incorporation in another state.
New Jersey, called the “Traitor State,” was the first, through its Holding Company Act of 1801, to allow corporations to own stocks in other firms, which allowed trusts to grow. Other states followed.

— 1907 Then came Teddy Roosevelt and the Tillman Act, which stated in no uncertain terms that corporate political spending was not potentially corrupting. Corporate political spending was corruption. Plain and simple.

GDP 2014 revenue in billions chart by World Bank

— 20th century USSC summed up the political role by these corporate characteristics thus: “ That invisible, intangible, and artificial being, that mere legal entity, a corporation aggregate, is certainly not a citizen.
— 2020’s Citizens United

I don’t have to convince DU about how Citizens United overturned the last 100 years.

The not quick look ...

4.
Recommended for DU consideration (yes, I'm aware of the shortcomings of "binary" frames)

— That we citizens should see to it the overturning of all law that hands corporations the John Marshall unconstitutional advantage over humans under the Constitution.
— That we voters for 2020 let one party reset the scaffold of our government;
— That we voters for 2021 (not just 20204) supervise that scaffolding, to help the progressive anti-corporate forces take off from the restored scaffold of Congress and the Executive.
— That future presidents will either side with corporate governance or won’t;
— That we citizens need to see corporate activity as a major factor of our politics or we don't (and that the majority of our reps belie their oaths to the human Constitution over us)
— That we decide that AI will continue to control corporations or won’t (AI already has a decisionmaking seat in one of the top two global corps in Singapore);
-- That the military will or will not support corporations, since it supports its paymasters (Note the lowered numbers of humans on the ground, except in service of protecting corporate entities in land base “civil wars” driven by belief systems and political conflicts — just like ours now is).


There will never again be equality until we become The Who who control our future.

It's the long and winding road Teddy Roosevelt said it would be.

Now it's a toll road made by forces -- that law says can have ONE lane -- that now run the whole road.

The Constitution says it's the humans' road, and we humans have to retake it. Remake it, so our grandkids' kids can hit the road running.

Or stay behind as it gets made for us.

It will be what our decisions and actions of the primary and General Election make us -- human owners of the road, or ...