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Something Really Nice and Beautiful for
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Something Really Sexy for Her for Holloween:
http://tinyurl.com/q878y
--
They have plenty of what matters most - and translates directly into power -
in politics: MONEY!!!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Hank Roth" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, June 01, 2006 9:09 AM
Subject: [pnews-news] Gangs of America by Ted Nace - Chapter 1
> -----
> / o o \
> ====OO=====OO===
> http://pnews.org/
> Progressive News & Views (since 1982)
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> Something Really Nice and Beautiful for
> your Honey - http://blackhillsg0ld.com/
> Something Really Sexy for Her for Holloween:
> http://tinyurl.com/q878y
>
> --
>
> URL: http://www.gangsofamerica.com/index.html
>
> o n e
>
> How did Corporations Get So Much Power?
>
> In which the author reads a poll, feels provoked and befuddled, and
> organizes his
> investigation
>
> As corporations gain in autonomous institutional power and become more
> detached from
> people and place, the human interest and the corporate interest
> increasingly diverge. It
> is almost as though we were being invaded by alien beings intent on
> colonizing our planet,
> reducing us to serfs, and then excluding as many of us as possible.
> David Korten
>
> Its not often that Americans get asked by pollsters what they think
> about corporate power.
> Usually the questions are about things like abortion and gun control.
> But in September,
> 2000, Business Week published the results of a series of polls about
> how people felt about
> the power wielded by large corporations in American society.
>
> The polls suggested a massive cultural stomachache: too much corporate
> power, too much
> corporate everything. When the Harris pollsters commissioned by
> Business Week asked people
> what they thought of the statement Business has too much power over too
> many aspects of
> our lives, 52 percent said they agreed strongly and an additional 30
> percent said they
> agreed somewhat.
>
> Two months after doing its first poll, Harris asked a more specific
> question: How would
> you rate the power of different business groups in influencing
> government policy,
> politicians, and policymakers in Washington? Only 5 percent said big
> companies had too
> little power; 74 percent said too much.
>
> Why do large corporations have so much power? The Business Week polls
> didnt ask people for
> their opinions about the underlying factors that create that power. But
> one can perhaps
> imagine what people would have said if they had been asked. They would
> certainly have
> mentioned the power that large corporations derive from their political
> action committees,
> their lobbyists, their lawyers, their control over millions of jobs.
> They might have also
> mentioned the revolving door that moves corporate people in and out of
> government
> agencies, the corporate ownership of media conglomerates, and so forth.
>
> All those factors are well known. Others factors are less so,
> especially the steady
> acquisition by corporations of Constitutional rights, beginning in the
> 1880s. Even though
> corporations are not mentioned at all in the Constitution, they have
> somehow accumulated
> more legal rights than human beings. How did this happen?
>
> As I began reading the literature on the rise of the large corporation,
> I saw repeated
> references to aspects of corporate power whose roots lie buried in
> history, especially in
> obscure Supreme Court decisions that discovered corporate rights hidden
> in the language of
> the Constitution.
>
> How do these corporate constitutional rights translate into political
> power? The answer is
> that they complement the other political resources available to
> corporations (especially
> large ones), providing a trump card to be played when more direct
> political tactics fail.
> When threatened by an unwanted regulation or a pesky piece of
> legislation, corporations
> have plenty of tools to draw on: lobbyists, publicity campaigns,
> threats to transfer
> factories overseas, and so forth. Even so, laws opposed by corporate
> interests do get
> enacted, regardless of conventional corporate clout, especially in
> times of heightened
> public mobilization. Heres where having a few constitutional rights
> comes in handy. The
> CEO or the vice president for legal affairs directs the corporations
> lawyers to challenge
> the nefarious legislation in court. The court finds the law
> unconstitutional and
> invalidates it.
>
> But where did these rights come from? You can read the Constitution
> from front to back,
> including all the amendments added to the document to the present day,
> and not see a
> single instance of the word corporation. For that reason, the rights
> that corporations now
> enjoy have all been established through indirect means, especially a
> handful of key
> Supreme Court decisions.
>
> As I began researching the history of the corporation, I repeatedly saw
> references to one
> case in particular, the 1886 ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern
> Pacific Railroad.
> This case, supposedly, had declared corporations to be persons, and
> thus had given them
> access to the same rights as human begins.
>
> I figured that if Santa Clara was the key case in this century-long
> process of corporate
> rights decisions, then the text of the decision must be worth reading.
> I was curious how
> the Supreme Court had been able to justify declaring corporations to be
> persons. Typing
> Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad into Google, I quickly
> found the decision
> online at:
> www.tourolaw.edu/patch/SupremeCourtcases.html.
>
> The very first sentence of the online version said this: The defendant
> Corporations are
> persons within the intent of the clause of section I of the Fourteenth
> Amendment to the
> Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any
> person within its
> jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
>
> All right, I thought. Lets see how they justify this. The idea that
> corporations should be
> considered persons seemed to be quite a radical metaphysical assertion,
> and I wanted to
> find out how the Court had backed it up. But rather than an
> explanation, I soon came upon
> a rather curious paragraph. Chief Justice Waite, it seems, was in an
> exceedingly crabby
> mood on January 26, the first day of oral arguments by the lawyers:
>
> One of the points made and discussed at length in the brief of counsel
> for defendants in
> error was that Corporations are persons within the meaning of the
> Fourteenth Amendment to
> the Constitution of the United States. Before argument Mr. Chief
> Justice Waite said: The
> court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the
> provision in the
> Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny
> to any person
> within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to
> these corporations.
> We are all of opinion that it does.
>
> Wow! I thought. The Court does not wish to hear argument How
> injudicious. Was the Chief
> Justice experiencing a bout of dyspepsia? Gout perhaps? (Id read
> somewhere that King
> George III suffered greatly from this.) Or was this simply a glimpse
> into that
> whisky-soaked, hard-living era of railroad barons, alcoholic
> ex-generals, and their
> cronies? Maybe a hangover.
>
> I read on, until I got to another sentence that said, Mr. Justice
> HARLAN delivered the
> opinion of the court.
>
> Hmmm. Perhaps this would be the explanation I had been waiting for. So
> I read and read and
> read until my eyes glazed over, 36 exceedingly dry paragraphs about
> roadbeds, rails,
> rolling stock, fences, and rights of way. I went back and checked.
> Nope, nothing about
> corporate personhood. And finally I got to a passage where Justice
> Harlan declares the
> railroad to be the winner of the case, but not on personhood grounds.
> Instead, he awards
> Southern Pacific a thumbs-up on highly technical grounds having to do
> with how the
> assessors categorized the fences attached to the railroads property.
> Indeed, Justice
> Harlan declares that the Court doesnt need to invoke any weighty
> principles to solve the
> case. The technical issues are sufficient.
>
> Now I felt doubly provoked, first, by the idea that corporations should
> be treated on the
> same legal and moral plane as human beings, second, by the absence of
> any discussion of
> whyand in fact, a disavowal that any constitutional issue had been
> decided by the case at
> all!
>
> All this left me more than a bit befuddled, though the whole notion of
> corporate
> personhood still struck me as preposterously, intuitively wrong. I
> reflected on the common
> observation that there is something impersonal, alien, soulless, even
> Frankenstein-like
> about corporations, especially as they become extremely large. If
> anything, I ruminated,
> it is the people inside the corporation that need to have rights, not
> the corporation.
>
> As I began researching the Santa Clara decision, I found out that I
> wasnt the only person
> who had found it confusing. The case is surrounded with complexities
> and even intrigue. As
> related in Chapters 810, there are schemers with hidden agendas,
> handwritten notes of
> untold consequence, false clues, deliberate obfuscation, even a secret
> journal. Studying
> it is like peeling an onion. Beneath one layer of myth is another, and
> then another. The
> whole thicket of complications makes the Santa Clara decision
> interestingthough perhaps a
> bit too interesting, because all the intrigue and complexity tend to
> distract attention
> from other things, especially aspects of corporate empowerment that may
> be hidden even
> more deeply in history. Thus Santa Clara becomes its own myththe
> mistaken idea that the
> entire octopus of corporate power stems from one Supreme Court
> decision.
>
> One tip-off that there is more to the story of corporate power than
> Santa Clara is the
> date of the decision: 1886. Something must have been going on earlier,
> because beginning
> in the mid-1860s a number of prominent Americans suddenly began issuing
> a stream of
> near-hysterical alarms about corporate power. For example, in 1864
> Abraham Lincoln wrote
> the following in a letter to his friend William Elkins:
>
> 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.
>
> Similarly, in 1870, Henry Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of
> Presidents, predicted
> that corporations will ultimately succeed in directing government
> itself. Under the
> American form of society, there is no authority capable of effective
> resistance
>
> Clearly, the process by which corporations accumulated the political
> and legal power they
> enjoy today neither started nor ended with Santa Clara in 1886. While
> that case is
> important, it represents a single gene on the entire chromosome of
> corporate empowerment.
> As I sought to map this chromosome, I used the Santa Clara decision as
> my reference
> pointas the most famous and most significant example of how
> corporations used the legal
> system to gain particular privileges. Slowly I identified other rights
> and quasi-rights,
> tracing back to the early nineteenth century and forward to the present
> day. As shown in
> Table 1.1, this process of empowerment falls into three rough phases.
> In the first phase,
> which is described in Chapters 6 and 7, corporations acquired a number
> of powerful
> quasi-rights such as limited liability and perpetual existence, but the
> Supreme Court had
> still not granted them any formal constitutional rights. In the second
> phase, described in
> Chapters 8 through 145, corporations gained at least eleven distinct
> constitutional rights
> as a result of a string of Supreme Court decisions over the course of a
> century. In the
> third phase, described in Chapter 16, the process of empowerment moved
> to the
> international stage as international trade agreements began creating
> mechanisms by means
> of which corporations could override the authority of sovereign
> nations.
>
> This process of steady empowerment extends back nearly two centuries in
> the United States.
> But to put it in context, we have to go back much furtherto the British
> roots of the
> American corporation. It is with that history that we begin our
> account.
>
>
> TO READ IT ALL FILLOW THE LINK
>
> URL: http://www.gangsofamerica.com/index.html
>
> OR BUY THE BOOK.........
>
>
> H
>
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>
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