-Caveat Lector-
My thanks to [EMAIL PROTECTED] whose criticism of the book as "Myopic crap"
prompted your most poetic remark: "Sides? We don't need no stinkin' sides!
Not unless ya want to play their game.
Just a-slinging through space on a mudball."
>From the website, I found the following comment, with which I have long
agreed. Corporate structure is the very essence of fascism.
Linda Minor
http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/colaw.htm
And here we have the crux of the problem, regulation. Regulation of
corporations is not socialism, when done to promote the common good it is
liberalism at its finest hour. As paper entities, corporations have no
rights only people have rights corporations only have conditional
obligations to fulfill for the society that created them. It is the
obligation of that society in creating a corporation to ensure that it works
to the common good or welfare of the society and not just to the benefit of
a few moneyed interests. And that is liberalism not socialism....
Before proceeding further one needs to understand how corporate law and
regulations have evolved. In doing so many myths commonly held by the hard
right today about the founding fathers will be dispelled. The founding
fathers were indeed liberals and did believe in a capitalistic economy. But
likewise, they also believed strongly in regulating trade. So much so that
one of the enumerated powers in the constitution granted the federal
government to the regulation of commerce. It is a bold face lie to assume
that the enumerated power concerning the regulation of commerce between
states only applied to tariffs between the thirteen colonies or that the
founders were supportive of corporations.
Corporations first came about in the middle of the 1600s in England where
the crown vested governmental authority to certain commerce groups. The
royal charters granted regulated the trading company or corporations since
only the Crown had the right to govern trade. The right of the Crown to
regulate or control the corporation largely went unused leading to much
abuse and monopolistic power. Some such royal charters had their own
governors and armies like the East India Company.
In fact it was the East India Company that led to the Boston Tea Party. At
the time the colonies were boycotting tea which was owned almost solely by
the East India Company. In an effort to prop up sagging profits from the
boycott taxes on tea were cut. This in turn cut into the profit of a group
of Americans smuggling tea into the colonies. Seeing their profits eroded by
the tax cut they then raided the English ships in the harbor. While the
classical story of the Boston Tea Party of a protest over rising taxes and
tax without representation makes for good patriotic propaganda it is indeed
patently false and has taken on mythical proportions.
This was but one of the many abuses the colonies suffered at the hands of
English corporations. There were many other abuses. Often American colonial
settlements were patents granted to English corporations by the Crown. South
and North Virginia were two such patents. These corporations obtained their
labor supply with indentured slaves. Typically after seven years of labor
the indentured slave would be given a hundred acres. As many as two thirds
of the colonists are estimated to have been indentured slaves. Virginia,
Maryland and Pennsylvania all began as commercial enterprises ran by
chartered corporations.
A full listing of such abuses is beyond the scope of this book. But the
example provided is sufficient to illustrate the contempt many of the
founders had for corporations as well as the need to regulate them. Perhaps
the eloquent words of Thomas Jefferson best sums up the founder’s outlook
toward corporations. .
"I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its
birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to
challenge our Government to trial, and bid defiance to the laws of our
country "
The concept of granting a charter as a privilege and not a right carried
over into early American corporate law. Thus the present view that
corporations hold a property right is based on another myth. This point will
be expanded further a little later in a look at court case and the Dartmouth
case. In fact the view of this property right did not come about until after
the Civil War. Prior to this time the concept of a corporate charter as a
privilege was the commonly held view. The present view of a corporate
charter having property rights only came about through judicial activism and
through various state legislators.
The concept of corporate charters as a privilege was clearly carried forward
into the Articles of Confederation when in 1781 Congress granted a national
charter to the Bank of North America. Likewise this concept of a privilege
was carried into the Constitutional Convention of 1787. During the
convention James Madison twice proposed that Congress be given the power to
grant charters. Both proposals were met with failure although no formal vote
on either measure was ever taken. Various members opposed such proposals as
unnecessary or feared they would lead to monopolies. Based on his fears of a
national bank, Jefferson opposed the idea of federal charters fearing they
would create monopolies. Jefferson was to loose on both views when congress
later granted a federal charter for the national bank. Likewise one can
hardly blame the delegates to the convention for believing that there was no
need for proposals regulating corporations, as at the time there was less
than 40 corporations in 1787. That number rose to 334 by 1800.
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