A Zen Buddhist’s View Of The Illusion Of Corporate Personhood - 1

I'm working on an essay about the illusion of corporate personhood as viewed by the perspective of this zen student. My grand design (or delusion of grandure) is to have sections dealing with:

1. How Buddha Dharma Views The Illusion of Personality.

2. A Brief History of the Stranger Than Fiction Doctrine of Corporate Personhood
A. The Heart of the American Revolution Was a Revolt Against Corporate Political Power.
B. The Corporate Trial of Strength by the Banks and Railroads
C. The Strange Case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R.R. Co. (1886)
D. The Development of the Doctrine of Corporate Personhood

3. The Modern Political Power of Corporations is the American Brand of Fascism

4.  A Path to Pierce the Illusion of Corporate Personhood
A.  What Would a Real 21st Century Tea Party Revolt Against Corporate Property and Profits Look Like?
B. What is a Buddhist to Do?

This first installment is not actually what I've conceived of as the first section.  This is the first draft of the first section of Part 2. Though based on the arising inspiration, the whole thing may be rearranged when all the parts are completed.
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2. A Brief History of the Stranger Than Fiction Doctrine of Corporate Personhood

A. The Heart of the American Revolution Was a Revolt Against Corporate Political Power.

            Because it is a perfect example of how the more things change the more they stay the same, let’s begin our story of corporate political influence with the founding of our nation.  Few people realize that the birth of the United States of America was in large part a reaction to the power of corporations at the initial stages of the development of Corporate Personhood (CP).  

            In the middle of the 18^th century there was no more powerful corporation than the East India Company of England (EIC) with its great wealth from trade specializing in cotton, silk, dyes, saltpeter, salt, tea, and opium.  Its power was so vast that it ruled over its trade territories as an autonomous pseudo-government, printing money, enforcing its laws, and claiming land in its own name.  But like the corporations of today it was not immune to the depressions of economic fortunes, and at the beginning of the 1770s it faced bankruptcy due to changes in financial conditions.  The EIC went to Parliament, and not unlike today, it’s leaders claimed that it was a corporation too big to fail and successfully sought a governmental bail out.  The bail out bill was known as the Regulating Act of 1773. 

            As a concession for bailing out the corporation, Parliament exacted acknowledgement from the EIC that any act of sovereignty that was made by the operators of the EIC as subjects of the Crown was in fact for the benefit of the sovereignty of the Crown and not in EIC’s own right.  Thus Parliament exerted its ultimate political control over the EIC, but in so doing it admitted, both in the Act and de facto, the “right” of the EIC to have influence over Parliament through the political process.  As part of the 1773 Act’s bail out program, the EIC was given both greater autonomy in its business enterprises in the American Colonies and tax relief in the form of rebates and exemptions from tea import duties that the much smaller Colonial traders were still forced to pay. 

            As the result of their bail out and tax favoritism, the EIC was able to undersell its Colonial entrepreneurial competitors to drive many of them out of business.  The response to this exercise of raw transnational corporate power was the revolt that has became known as the Boston Tea Party where the patriotic rioters destroyed the private property of the corporation by throwing the bales of tea into the salt water and ruining them.  This illegal destruction of corporation property was among the first acts of open defiance leading up to our nation’s Declaration of Independence. 

            Of course today, destroying the property of the powerful transnational corporations is still considered illegal by the political powers that be, yet no one can deny that such destruction of corporate property has a hallowed place in the shrine of American history.  It seems that today’s Tea Party adherents have completely forgotten the lesson of the original Tea Party as they fawn over the rich and powerful in the corporations who control their agenda, such as today’s Tea Party’s love of corporate controlled health care.  If it were not for the powerful corporations’ control of Colonial economics and the Colonists’ revolt against those transnational corporations, the USA might never have been born.

            It was this experience with the scope of political power of the large corporations that informed the founding fathers’ view of corporations and explains why the word “corporation” does not appear in the U.S. Constitution or Bill of Rights. The compatriots of the original Tea Party knew that corporations need to be limited in their political power and influence.  Thus, with the founding of our nation the American laws protected people from corporations in ways that other nations did not.  For example, only natural humans were considered to be the “people” who had the protection of the First Amendment for their free speech.  Only natural humans had the protection of the Fourth Amendment right to privacy.  Only natural people had the Fifth Amendment protection against double jeopardy and the right to silence if accused of a crime.  Only natural people could be shareholders and Corporations were not allowed to be shareholders of other corporations. Corporations could not give money to politicians or try to influence elections on the rationale that they had no business doing so because they could not vote. Corporations were only chartered for specific purposes with at least a colorable claim that the purpose was “for the public good” and they were typically established for a specific term of years related to that purpose.  The requirement of a single purpose that was for the benefit of the public (such as building a bridge, operating a toll road, running a university, etc.) was far different from today’s view that the only purpose of a corporation is to make profits for its owners.

            In fact the threat of the power of corporations was so well known to the founding fathers such as Sam Adams who participated in the original Boston Tea Party, that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison apparently proposed a so-called  “11^th Amendment” that would have placed corporations into the Constitution for the purpose of a Federal restriction on their power in the manner of the other restrictions on the power of the Federal Government and making most of the above restrictions on corporations part of the Constitution. The story goes that their proposed Amendment was rejected by Congress with the help of the argument that it was not necessary to put it into the Constitution because the states already had those regulatory restrictions in place in their state laws.   

            I have not found original source material for this story of a Jefferson-Madison Amendment aimed at corporations, however, whether or not the legend of their proposal is true, it is undeniable that both Jefferson and Madison expressed clear reservations about corporations.  Jefferson said in 1816, “I hope that we shall crush ... in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country. I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.”  And by the end of his life, Madison’s views on corporations were equally plain as stated in a letter dated March 10, 1827, “Incorporated Companies with proper limitations and guards, may in particular cases, be useful; but they are at best a necessary evil only.”   There can be no doubt that both of these founding fathers were advocates for strong limitations and safeguards against the political power of corporations.

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Comments invited.

Back Street Gets the Shaft While Wall Street Gets Welfare & Main Street Gets Conned

We hear a lot about Wall Street and Main Street these days but the politicians and the main stream media are doing their absolute best to ignore the Back Street as usual.

Every single Democrat and Republican who is supporting the Wall Street welfare plan is nothing but a hypocrite!

Republicans voting for the $700 Billion gift to the rich, whose platform is to oppose the "welfare" state, are completely hypocritical because they support the welfare-for-the-rich state. Hating the very word "socialism," the Republicans eagerly engage in privatizing their profits while socializing their risk.

Democrats who are voting for the boondoggle are hypocritical because, while they may support welfare (as I do), they are not giving the welfare to the people who need it and instead are giving it to the rich who don't. While claiming to be for working people the Democrats are working against the interests of working people and those on the back streets.

This scenario is as old as our nation and is the direct echo of the first Congress' consideration of the first funding bills in the new Congress of 1790.

Among the most important of the very first issues the new Congress had to deal with was the funding crisis. The primary issue was paying off the national debt owed to people holding Continental Dollars that were the script issued by the Revolutionary Army to fight the war. Most of the debt was owed to farmers and shopkeepers when the Army was taking supplies to fight the war. Much of it was also in soldier's pay some of it held by the widows of the soldiers. The Continentals had the name of the person they were issued to written on them along with the dollar amount. They were more like today’s checks than currency.

During the time of the Articles of Confederation between 1783 and 1789 there was no assurance at all that these Continentals would be paid by the new nation while the Confederation Congress fought over whose responsibility it was to pay, the states or the federal government.

Some states, like Pennsylvania, just went ahead and honorably paid off the Continentals. Others did not, claiming it was the National debt.

When the first Congress convened under the new Constitution the debt payment issue came up again. In the mean time speculators had been going around the country buying up Continentals paying widows, poor farmers and other note holders at only pennies on the dollar. While the debate was going on in Congress, many Congressman were buying up Continentals using agents and brokers.

The Debate boiled down to the positions between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Hamilton wanted to give anyone currently holding the Continental its full dollar value. That of course meant that anyone holding them in speculation having paid only pennies on the dollar would make a giant windfall profit. Hamilton used the exact same arguments we are hearing today: it is necessary to being about confidence in the financial system, the people who bore the risk should not have to lose anything, it is good for the country.

Madison's position was that any original note holder currently holding a Continental should be paid full face value but if the current note holder was not the original person it was issued to then the current holder should only get a reasonable rate of interest on his investment and the remainder should go back to the original note holders, the widows, farmers and merchants who had to sell them to survive while Congress diddled.

Needless to say with so many Congressmen themselves holding Continental notes in speculation the Hamilton position won out and the rich shared in the spoils at the taxpayer's expense.

The parallels should be obvious today as we watch the rich both inside and outside of Congress put out the phony claim that this is needed for Americans to have "confidence" in the system when what they are doing is actually a confidence game on American taxpayer no less egregious than Hamilton's was.

There are many good solutions out there but the majority in Congress are not interested in listening. They know where and how their bread is buttered and even with all their stated concerns about Main Street, their only care is for Wall Street. And Wall Street is only a legalized gambling institution.

Where are the Back Streets in this debate?

Some Democrats and Republicans supporting this Wall Street welfare would tell you that there is help for Main Street in this package. But I don't take tax breaks for Microsoft, Wal-mart, and Harley-Davidson to be helping the people on the Back Streets. I don't see the tax breaks for toy wooden arrow makers in Oregon and Wisconsin to be helping the Back Streets or Back Roads. Those business interests are on the up side of the tracks and such pointed specific tax breaks are exactly the kind of special interest loopholes that the people want Congress to stop dealing out.

The increase of FDIC insurance from $100K to $250K isn't about the Back Street or even most of Main Street. The people I know are going from pay check to pay check and if they have $10,000 in the bank they feel lucky.

Only the Progressive Democrats like Dennis Kucinich, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, Lynn Woolsey, et al., have so far seemed to really care about the Back Streets of America.

What does the Bible have to offer?

As a Buddhist, I find it very hypocritical of Republican and Democratic congresspeople voting for the Wall Street welfare package to be claiming to be good Christians in this con game.

It used to be--in the long ago days before Nixon and Reagan--that good Christians saw Wall Street as a dens of gamblers who were nothing but parasites on society. Nixon began and Reagan solidified the unholy marriage of fundamentalist Christians and Republican Wall Street gamblers where each agreed to ignore their animosity for the other if they agreed to support the specific narrow issues of the other. Essentially Wall Street speculators said, "If you support us and stop calling us parasites we will support you and you anti-abortion crusade."

Of course the fundamentalist evangelical Christians were sold on that con-game and even though the promise was false from the beginning-- because Wall Street knew it could not deliver--the gamblers of Wall Street have reaped the profits of their con.

If anyone considers themselves to be a Christian, then I tell you the Bible couldn't be clearer: the rich are not on your side, they are not to be trusted, they are not to be honored, they are gamblers and thieves who are parasites on society. There is nothing at all in the Bible about being against abortion, yet how many Christians really take the teachings on riches to heart?

Sure there are some nice rich people, but the fact remains that no wealth has ever been amassed in the entire history of the world that was not at root ill-gotten gains, created in some manner by greed, hatred, or ignorance.

Most of us know the Jesus quote from Matthew 19:23-24:

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

How many really give it their attention?

And take these for instance:

Proverbs 28:5-7:

5 Evil men do not understand justice,
but those who seek the LORD understand it fully.
6 Better a poor man whose walk is blameless
than a rich man whose ways are perverse.
7 He who keeps the law is a discerning son,
but a companion of gluttons disgraces his father.

Proverbs 28:27:

He who gives to the poor will lack nothing,
but he who closes his eyes to them receives many curses.

Proverbs 20:9:

A generous man will himself be blessed,
for he shares his food with the poor.

Proverbs 22:16:

He who oppresses the poor to increase his wealth
and he who gives gifts to the rich—both come to poverty.

Proverbs 22:22-23:

Do not exploit the poor because they are poor
and do not crush the needy in court,
for the LORD will take up their case
and will plunder those who plunder them.

Psalm 49:16

Do not be overawed when a man grows rich,
when the splendor of his house increases;
17 for he will take nothing with him when he dies,
his splendor will not descend with him.

Micah 3:

9 Hear this, you leaders of the house of Jacob,
you rulers of the house of Israel,
who despise justice
and distort all that is right;
10 who build Zion with bloodshed,
and Jerusalem with wickedness.
11 Her leaders judge for a bribe,
her priests teach for a price,
and her prophets tell fortunes for money.
Yet they lean upon the LORD and say,
"Is not the LORD among us?
No disaster will come upon us."
12 Therefore because of you,
Zion will be plowed like a field,
Jerusalem will become a heap of rubble,
the temple hill a mound overgrown with thickets.

Micah 6:

6 With what shall I come before the LORD
and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
7 Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
8 He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

What's the point? The Wall Street Welfare for the rich has nothing to do with benefitting the people of Main Street or the Back Streets. Those who support the Wall Street Welfare are not doing so for any religious or moral reason. So, why are they doing it?

As always: FOLLOW THE MONEY!