= Quote =

The Church or company of worshippers (whether true or false) is like unto a . . . Corporation, Society or Company . . . in London; which Companies may hold their Courts, keep their Records, hold disputations; and in matters concerning their Societie, may dissent, divide, breake into Schismes and Factions, sue and implead each other at the Law, yea wholly breake up and dissolve into pieces and nothing, and yet the peace of the Citie not be in the least measure impaired or disturbed; because the essence or being of the Citie, and so the well-being and peace thereof is essentially distinct from those particular Societies; the Citie-Courts, Citie-Lawes, Citie-punishments distinct from theirs. The Citie was before them, and stands absolute and intire, when such a Corporation or Societie is taken down.

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_religions4.html

= Essay =

In 1644, Roger Williams wrote his famous tract, the Bloody Tenent of Persecution.  In it, he argues, from analogy, that, the success of the corporate model should be applied to religions, and religions should be made subject to the state and civil authorities as corporations are.  The church should no longer have domain over the state.  Religions should rise and fall and that should be of no consequence to the state.

But, let us note, that back then, corporations _were_ subjects of the state (See http://www.ratical.org/corporations/TCoBeij.html ).  Corporate charters, until 1886, in the United States, with the Santa Clara decision ( http://www.mcn.org/e/iii/afd/santaclara.html ), were granted by the authority of the state and had no rights except those granted upon review of the state.

It is ironic now that Santa Clara would be the battle ground for corporate personhood as it was.  I take the Union Pacific (formerly Southern Pacific) tracks via amtrack on my daily commute to San Jose, through Santa Clara, from Oakland.  Furthermore, the Santa Clara station is called "Great America", and ... as lofty as that sounds, it's just a small platform underneath a city street overpass.

With that decision, and the power of corporations to aggregate wealth, the people of the United States lost its sovereignty.  The largest corporations are now bigger than most countries.  Those corporations, while identical in every respect to any other country and human, are distinct in only one way: they have no sovereign land of their own.  They may own land and obtain private property, but they may not set the laws on the land that it purchases which are sovereign of other countries.

Still, this is a small token of restriction when you look at the massive power that corporations have to control government policy.  Because corporations are considered people, they have the right to plead their cases in courts, and have standing as a human, to sue a human (not just another corporation, or within the limits of their corporate charter).  Their rights transcend any charter.  Their charters are drafted by the members and wholly ignored by the state, unless, by chance, a member of the corporation itself presses violations of their charter.

Perhaps what we need to do is completely separate the corporate religion from politics, as Roger Williams expected in his diatribe against the corporate analogy -- churches intertwined with the state.  We should forbid it all access to our state political system, as is the great bargain with the churches.  We can even eliminate all their filing taxes for this bargain, as we also did with Churches -- but they must not be allowed to violate laws or we shall seek charter revocation.  Corporations are unique in that they are like humans, but vastly more powerful.  If we are ever to contain their corruptions and nepotisms, we have to triumph over hundreds of dead mens' fortunes, through their family political funds, and erect a wall of separation between corporation and state.

If we eliminated the taxes, we could eliminate all intermediary holdings that a corporation could accumulate, not through taxes, but by considering all its holdings the divided property of its shareholders.  By returning to a full liability system, we can clean the perversions of justice that corporations, typically large and aggregated ones, routinely exhibit.

Who thought up the limited liability system, anyways?  Why did we legalize running away with the corporate money?  When did we legalize fronts for criminals to organize their crimes?  It's not a conscious decision that we make.  It's a political decision, and we'll never attain any visions of these proposals unless and until a progressive majority chooses to enact them.  Why did we do a mere right-turn with regard to persection and decide that the better vehicle was the corporation instead of religion to spill the blood?

I don't think we ever did.  It took an activist court in the 1880s to give rich, white Republicans their free meal tickets to money.  Perhaps now it's time to rally the activist people to tell the courts to give us back our personal and democratic sovereignty over what we have demonstrated can become of the concept of the limited liability corporation with human rights.  Let's choose to abolish corporate personhood.