Corporate Personhood Vs Democracy

Is a Corporatation a person?

Large corporations have the rights of a single person and the power of kings. Corporate priesthood is closer to the truth. Below is a selection of information on the creation of corporate personhood and the slow decay of corruption that fires their progress worldwide.

What Is Corporate Personhood?

Corporate Personhood is a legal fiction. The choice of the word "person" arises from the way the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was worded and from earlier legal usages of the word person. A corporation is an artificial entity, created by the granting of a charter by a government that grants such charters. Corporation in this essay will be confined to businesses run for profit that have been granted corporate charters by the States of the United States. The Federal Government of the United States does not grant corporate charters to businesses.

A corporation is owned by a person or group of people called stockholders. It is required by law to have officers and a board of directors (in small corporations these may all be the same people). In effect the corporation is a collective or partnership of individuals with a special legal status and privileges not given to ordinary unincorporated businesses or groups of individuals.

Obviously a corporation is itself no more a person (though it is owned by persons) than a locomotive or a mob. So how is a corporation legally a person?

In the United States of America all natural persons (actual human beings) are recognized as having inalienable rights which the government cannot take away. These rights are recognized, among other places, in the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment.

Corporate personhood is the idea (legal fiction, currently with force of law) that corporations are enough like natural persons to have the same inalienable rights (sometimes called constitutional rights) as real, natural, human persons.

That this idea has the force of law both resulted from corporate power and wealth, and resulted in even greater corporate power and wealth. It effectively inverts the relationship between the government and the corporations. Recognized as persons, corporations lose much of their status as subjects of the government. Although artificial creations of their owners and the governments, as legal persons they have a degree of immunity to government supervision.

The History of Corporate Personhood

Corporations were not considered to be persons in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence severed the States from Great Britain. There had been only a few corporations in colonial America, but they had been very powerful. The Dutch West India Company had founded New York. Corporations had effectively governed the such colonies as Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas. The political history of the colonies up until 1776 was largely one of conflict between citizens trying to establish rule by elected government and the corporations or King ruling through appointed governors.

The new "nation" or confederation of 13 sovereign states was free of native business corporations. The corporations that survived the revolution were all non-profit institutions such as colleges [Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819)]. There was not a single bank in the United States until 1780, most of that first bank's stock was owned by the confederate government, and the bank's charter was revoked in 1785. "The agrarian charges were numerous... the bank was a monstrosity, an artificial creature endowed with powers not possessed by human beings and incompatible with the principles of a democratic social order." [Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 48-54] By 1790, however four banks had been granted corporate charters by states, but these banks were not originally purely private institutions, but had a state function. [Ibid, pp. 65-67]

The federal Constitution which was adopted in 1788 did not mention corporations at all. But in the late 1700's and early 1800's corporations began to be chartered by the states. This was not without opposition. Thomas Jefferson said, "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

Like the banks, other early corporations were closely supervised by the state legislatures that granted their charters. When the Supreme Court of the United States in Dartmouth College v. Woodward in 1819, ruled that Dartmouth's charter granted in 1769 by King George III was a contract and could not be revoked by the New Hampshire legislature, a public outcry ensued. State courts and legislatures, supported by the people, declared that state governments had an absolute right to amend or repeal a corporate charter. [Richard L Grossman and Frank T. Adams, Taking Care of Business, Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation (Cambridge: Charter, Ink., 1993), p. 11-12]

Until 1886 corporations were not considered persons. It was clear what they were: artificial creations of their owners and the state legislatures. They could be regulated and taxed. They could sue and be sued. They were subject to all of the laws of the land as well as any restrictions placed in their charters.

During the 1800's the United States went through and enormous economic expansion, sometimes called the Industrial Revolution, but that term is misleading. The United States expanded geographically by grabbing native American Indian territories formerly claimed by France, Great Britain, and Mexico. The population exploded. Farm production exploded, and international trade exploded, with U.S. grain feeding both growing U.S. cities and Europe. Manufacturing in the U.S., protected by tariffs from British competition, also progressed rapidly. The favored form for large businesses became the corporation. And as these corporations came to dominate business life, they also began to dominate America's politicians, lawyers, and courts.

The Civil War accelerated the growth of manufacturing and the power of the men who owned the corporations. After the war corporations began a campaign to throw off the legal shackles that had held them in check. The systematic bribing of Congress was instituted by Mark Hanna, sugar trust magnate Henry Havemeyer, and Senator Nelson Aldrich and their associates. [Jonathan Shepard Fast and Luzviminda Bartolome Francisco, Conspiracy For Empire, Big Business, Corruption and the Politics of Imperialism in America, 1876-1907 (Quezon City, Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1985), p. 92-97] Most Supreme Court judges that were appointed were former corporate lawyers.

In 1886 the supreme court justices were Samuel F. Miller, Stephen J. Field, Joseph P. Bradley, John M. Harlan, Stanley Matthews, William B. Woods, Samuel Blatchford, Horace Gray, and chief justice Morrison. R. Waite. Never heard of a one of them? These men subjected African Americans to a century of Jim Crow discrimination; they made corporations the real government of our society; they vastly increased the power of the Supreme Court itself over elected government officials. How quaint they are forgotten names. In all fairness, Justice Harlan dissented from the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision [163 U.S. 537 (1896)], which, as he said, effectively denied the protection of the 14th Amendment to the very group of people (former slaves and their descendants) for whom it was designed..

In 1868 the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution had become law. Section 1 of that Amendment states:

SECTION 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

"The one pervading purpose . . ." [of the 14th Amendment] "was the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppression of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him." That is exactly what Justice Samuel F. Miller said in 1873 in one of the first Supreme Court opinions to rule on the 14th Amendment. [83 U.S. 36, 81 (1873)]

But the wealthy, powerful men who owned corporations wanted freedom for their corporations. Their lawyers came up with the idea that corporations, which might be said to be groups of persons (though one person might in turn belong to (own stock in) many corporations), should have the same constitutional rights as persons themselves. If they could get the courts to agree that corporations were persons, they could assert that the States, which had chartered the corporations, would then be constrained by the 14th Amendment.

Abolishing Corporate Personhood – Thomas Hartmann

Thomas Hartmann

Citizens Intent on Reforming Corporate Accountability

CIRCA - Corporate Personhood

What Corporate Personhood Is

iii - Publishing

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