How Detroit Benefits from NAFTA

[Octafish]

40. Cold Case Democracy and the Doctrine of “Corporate Personhood”

“There have been two principal aspects to the growth of democracy in this century (20th): the extension of the popular franchise (e.g. the right to vote) and the growth of the union movement. These developments have presented corporations with potential threats to their power…” Alex Carey & Andrew Lohrey, “Taking the Risk Out of Democracy”

By Vi Ransel
Global Research, January 28, 2010

Corporations have been a successful means to minority rule because they are a stunningly efficient means of accumulating and concentrating wealth and property, which can then be translated into political power. As long as the ownership of property determined eligibility to vote, minority rule remained intact, but as more people got the right to vote the threat of real democracy hung over minority rule like the Sword of Damocles.

Under the Constitution, corporations had no rights. They had only the privileges granted them by the people of their chartering states, because there are only two parties to the Constitution, the people, who are sovereign and have constitutional rights, and the government, which is accountable to the people, and has duties it must perform to their satisfaction.

The word “corporation” appears nowhere in the Constitution. Corporations are a creation of government, and government must perform to the satisfaction of the people. This meant that property – corporations – would have to discontinue being a creation of government – which serves the people - and, in effect, become people, entitled to the rights of the sovereign under the Constitution, if wealthy corporate shareholders were to continue minority rule.

Within 100 years of the ratification of the Constitution, corporate shareholders had animated a lifeless business arrangement into the legal equivalent of a living human being by using the Supreme Court as a scalpel to excise the protections and immunities of the Fourteenth Amendment from human beings and transplant them into their property – corporations. That operation allowed shareholder property to begin assuming control of the United States government by exercising the constitutional rights of United States citizens, and further, to assume the protections and immunities of the entire Bill of Rights under the mantle of “corporate personhood.”

The doctrine of “corporate personhood” is based on a legally meaningless “obiter dictum,” or offhand remark, made by Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite before the decision was read in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). It was not the decision. It was not part of the decision. But it subsequently found its way into the court reporter’s summary, of the case.

Just three years later, in Minneapolis & St. Louis Railroad v. Beckwith (1889), Justice Stephen Field cited Santa Clara as precedent, giving it the force of law when the Court ruled that a corporation is a “person” for both due process and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. But Justice Field knew that he was lying as he cited the obiter dictum that corporations were “persons” for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment, because he was there when Justice Waite made the offhand remark. Nevertheless, this fallacious precedent is still cited as if it were the law of the land.

And as shareholders secured more constitutional “rights” for their property, they used their accumulated wealth to infiltrate the people’s legislatures, where they lobbied for, and often wrote, laws to strip citizens of their right to regulate the businesses they brought into being by granting corporate charters. States’ governments found their attempts to regulate corporations struck down by Supreme Court decisions based on a series of new legal doctrines and practices that protected the corporate “person,” such as “substantive due process” and “liberty of contract.”

Under “substantive due process,” the Court recognizes rights that do not appear in the plain text of the Constitution. What these implicit rights are is often unclear, but once recognized, laws that infringe on them are either unenforceable or very limited. Substantive due process was often used to shield railroads and trusts from government regulation.

CONTINUED...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/cold-case-democracy-and-the-doctrine-of-corporate-personhood/17201

More on corporate power, money and propaganda, and how they work to stop democracy from Maria Galardin's TUC (Time of Useful Consciousness) Radio:

Alex Carey: Corporations and Propaganda
The Attack on Democracy


The 20th century, said Carey, is marked by three historic developments: the growth of democracy via the expansion of the franchise, the growth of corporations, and the growth of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy. Carey wrote that the people of the US have been subjected to an unparalleled, expensive, 3/4 century long propaganda effort designed to expand corporate rights by undermining democracy and destroying the unions. And, in his manuscript, unpublished during his life time, he described that history, going back to World War I and ending with the Reagan era. Carey covers the little known role of the US Chamber of Commerce in the McCarthy witch hunts of post WWII and shows how the continued campaign against "Big Government" plays an important role in bringing Reagan to power.

John Pilger called Carey "a second Orwell", Noam Chomsky dedicated his book, Manufacturing Consent, to him. And even though TUC Radio runs our documentary based on Carey's manuscript at least every two years and draws a huge response each time, Alex Carey is still unknown.

Given today's spotlight on corporations that may change. It is not only the Occupy movement that inspired me to present this program again at this time. By an amazing historic coincidence Bill Moyers and Charlie Cray of Greenpeace have just added the missing chapter to Carey's analysis. Carey's manuscript ends in 1988 when he committed suicide. Moyers and Cray begin with 1971 and bring the corporate propaganda project up to date.

This is a fairly complex production with many voices, historic sound clips, and source material. The program has been used by writers and students of history and propaganda. Alex Carey: Taking the Risk out of Democracy, Corporate Propaganda VS Freedom and Liberty with a foreword by Noam Chomsky was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1995.

SOURCE: http://tucradio.org/new.html

If you find a moment, here's the first part (scroll down at the link for the second part) on Carey.

http://tucradio.org/AlexCarey_ONE.mp3

I know that's old hat to you, AzDar. The stuff is news to most of the USA.