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The corporations powers in our constitution is a reflection of the corrupt judicial system that followed the US civil war. The powers that have been granted to corporations have never been properly challenged and are certainly against the original intent of early legislative controls. Unfortunately we adopted a corrupted model of these powers into or constitution from the American model. Perhaps we should re-examine the benefits that these powers bring to our commercial and working life……

Although the US Constitution makes no mention of corporations, the history of constitutional law is, as former Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter said, “the history of the impact of the modern corporation upon the American scene.”
British kings granted charters to the British East India Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company and many American colonies, enabling the kings and their cronies to control property and commerce. The royal charter creating Maryland, for example, required that all of the colonies exports be shipped to or through Great Britain.
The American colonists did not revolt simply over a tax on tea. The laborers, small farmers, traders, artisans, seamstresses, mechanics and landed gentry who sent King George III packing, feared corporations. As pamphleteer Thomas Earle was to write in 1823: “Chartered privileges are a burden, under which the people of Britain, and other European nations, groan in misery.”
While American volunteers were routing the king’s armies, they vowed to put corporations under democratic command. After the revolution, people were determined to keep investment and production decisions local and democratic. They believed corporations were neither inevitable nor always appropriate.
Craft and industrial workers feared absentee corporate owners would turn them into “a commodity being as much an article of commerce as woolens, cotton, or yarn,” according to historian Louis Hartz.
Citizens governed corporations by specifying rules and operating conditions—not just in the charters, but also in state constitutions and laws. Incorporated businesses were banned from taking any action that citizens and legislators did not specifically allow.
States limited corporate charters to a set number of years. Citizen authority clauses dictated rules for issuing stock, for shareholder voting, for obtaining corporate information, for paying dividends and for keeping records. They limited corporate capitalization, debts, land holdings and sometimes profits. They required a company’s books to be turned over to a legislature upon request.
The power of large shareholders was limited by scaled voting, so that large and small investors had equal voting rights. Interlocking corporation directorates were outlawed. Shareholders had the right to remove directors at will.
Side by side with these legislative controls, citizens experimented with various forms of enterprise and finance. Artisans and mechanics owned and managed diverse businesses. Farmers and millers organized profitable cooperatives, shoemakers created unincorporated business associations. None of these enterprises had the rights and powers of modern corporations.
In 19th-century America, many citizens believed that it was society’s inalienable right to abolish an evil. The penalty for abuse or misuse of corporate charters, therefore, was not simply a plea bargain or corporate fine. It was revocation of the charter and dissolution of the corporation.
In 1825, Pennsylvania legislators adopted broad powers to “revoke, alter or annul” corporate charters whenever they thought proper. An 1857 constitutional amendment instructed the state’s legislators to “alter, revoke or annul any charter of a corporation hereafter conferred . . . whenever in their opinion it may be injurious to citizens of the community. . . .” By the 1870s, the people of 19 states had amended their constitutions to make corporate charters subject to alteration or revocation by legislatures.
New York, Ohio, Michigan and Nebraska successfully revoked the charters of oil, match, sugar and whiskey trusts. In 1894, the Central Labor Union of New York City, citing a pattern of abuses, asked the state’s attorney general to request the state supreme court to revoke the charter of the Standard Oil Trust of New York, which the court did.
During the last third of the 19th century, “Corporations confronted the law at every turn,” according to Harvard law professor Lawrence M. Friedman. “They hired lawyers and created whole law firms. They bought and sold governments.” Courts began creating legal doctrines to protect corporations and corporate property, subverting charter law and constitutional amendments.
These judges gave certain corporations, such as railroad, mining and manufacturing companies, the power of eminent domain—the right to take private property with minimal compensation to be determined by the courts. They eliminated jury trials to determine corporation-caused harm and to assess damages. Workers, the courts also ruled, were responsible for causing their own injuries on the job. This came to be called the “assumption of risk.”
Judges created the “right to contract” doctrine, which stipulates that the government cannot interfere with an individual’s “freedom” to negotiate with a corporation for wages and working conditions. Former George Washington University law professor Arthur Selwyn Miller called the creation of the right to contract doctrine “one of the most remarkable feats of judicial law-making this nation has seen.”
Responding to banking, shipping, railroad, manufacturing and agribusiness corporations and their lawyers, judges creatively interpreted the commerce and due process clauses of the US Constitution. Inventing the concept of “substantive due process,” they ruled that laws passed as a result of widespread citizen organizing—e.g., state wage and hours laws, fees and rates for grain elevators and railroads—were unconstitutional.
Judges also established the “managerial prerogative” and “business judgment” doctrines, giving corporations legal justification to arrest workers’ civil rights at factory gates and to blockade democracy at boardroom doors.
The biggest blow to citizen constitutional authority came in 1886. The US Supreme Court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad [[118 U.S. 394], that a private corporation was a “natural person” under the US Constitution, sheltered by the 14th Amendment, which requires due process in the criminal prosecution of “persons.” Following this ruling, huge, wealthy corporations were allowed to compete on “equal terms” with neighborhood businesses and individuals. “There was no history, logic or reason given to support that view,” Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas wrote 60 years later.
Within just a few decades, appointed judges had redefined the “common good” to mean the corporate use of humans and the Earth for maximum production and profit—no matter what was manufactured, who was hurt or what was destroyed. Corporations had obtained control over resources, production, commerce, jobs, politicians, judges and the law. Workers, citizens, cities, towns, states and nature were left with fewer and fewer rights that corporations were forced to respect.

Yours

John Ward
20 Grosse Road
Gordon
Tasmania
7150
03 62 92 12 11