The history of America is the one story every kid knows. It's a
story of fierce individualism and heroic personal sacrifice in the
service of a dream. A story of early settlers hungry and cold,
carving a home out of the wilderness. Of visionary leaders
fighting for democracy and justice, and never wavering. Of a
populace prepared to defend those ideals to the death. It's the
story of a revolution (an American art form as endemic as
baseball or jazz) beating back British Imperialism and launching
a new colony into the industrial age on its own terms.
It's a story of America triumphant. A story of its rise after
World War II to become the richest and most powerful
country in the history of the world, "the land of the free and
home of the brave," an inspiring model for the whole world
to emulate.
That's the official history, the one that is taught in school and
the one our media and culture reinforce in myriad ways every
day.
The unofficial history of the United States is quite different. It
begins the same way -- in the revolutionary cauldron of colonial
America -- but then it takes a turn. A bit-player in the official
history becomes critically important to the way the unofficial
history unfolds. This player turns out to be not only the
provocateur of the revolution, but in the end its saboteur.
This player lies at the heart of America's defining theme: the
difference between a country that pretends to be free and a
country that truly is free.
That player is the corporation.
The United States of America was born of a revolt not just
against British monarchs and the British parliament but
against British corporations.
We tend to think of corporations as fairly recent phenomena,
the legacy of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. In fact, the
corporate presence in prerevolutionary America was almost
as conspicuous as it is today. There were far fewer corporations
then, but they were enormously powerful: the Massachusetts
Bay Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the British East
India Company. Colonials feared these chartered entities.
They recognized the way British kings and their cronies used
them as robotic arms to control the affairs of the colonies, to
pinch staples from remote breadbaskets and bring them home
to the motherland.
The colonials resisted. When the British East India Company
imposed duties on its incoming tea (telling the locals they could
buy the tea or lump it, because the company had a virtual
monopoly on tea distribution in the colonies), radical patriots
demonstrated. Colonial merchants agreed not to sell East India
Company tea. Many East India Company ships were turned
back at port. And, on one fateful day in Boston, 342 chests of
tea ended up in the salt chuck.
The Boston Tea Party was one of young America's finest hours.
It sparked enormous revolutionary excitement. The people were
beginning to understand their own strength, and to see their own
self-determination not just as possible but inevitable.
The Declaration of Independence, in 1776, freed Americans not
only from Britain but also from the tyranny of British corporations,
and for a hundred years after the document's signing, Americans
remained deeply suspicious of corporate power. They were careful
about the way they granted corporate charters, and about the
powers granted therein.
Early American charters were created literally by the people, for
the people as a legal convenience. Corporations were "artificial,
invisible, intangible," mere financial tools. They were chartered
by individual states, not the federal government, which meant
they could be kept under close local scrutiny. They were
automatically dissolved if they engaged in activities that violated
their charter. Limits were placed on how big and powerful
companies could become. Even railroad magnate J. P. Morgan,
the consummate capitalist, understood that corporations must
never become so big that they "inhibit freedom to the point
where efficiency [is] endangered."
The two hundred or so corporations operating in the US by the
year 1800 were each kept on fairly short leashes. They weren't
allowed to participate in the political process. They couldn't buy
stock in other corporations. And if one of them acted improperly,
the consequences were severe. In 1832, President Andrew
Jackson vetoed a motion to extend the charter of the corrupt
and tyrannical Second Bank of the United States, and was
widely applauded for doing so. That same year the state of
Pennsylvania revoked the charters of ten banks for operating
contrary to the public interest. Even the enormous industry
trusts, formed to protect member corporations from external
competitors and provide barriers to entry, eventually proved
no match for the state. By the mid-1800s, antitrust legislation
was widely in place.
In the early history of America, the corporation played an
important but subordinate role. The people -- not the
corporations -- were in control. So what happened? How did
corporations gain power and eventually start exercising more
control than the individuals who created them?
The shift began in the last third of the nineteenth century --
the start of a great period of struggle between corporations
and civil society. The turning point was the Civil War.
Corporations made huge profits from procurement contracts
and took advantage of the disorder and corruption of the
times to buy legislatures, judges and even presidents.
Corporations became the masters and keepers of business.
President Abraham Lincoln foresaw terrible trouble. Shortly
before his death, he warned that "corporations have been
enthroned . . . . An era of corruption in high places will follow
and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by
working on the prejudices of the people . . . until wealth is
aggregated in a few hands . . . and the republic is destroyed."
President Lincoln's warning went unheeded. Corporations
continued to gain power and influence. They had the laws
governing their creation amended. State charters could no
longer be revoked. Corporate profits could no longer be
limited. Corporate economic activity could be restrained
only by the courts, and in hundreds of cases judges granted
corporations minor legal victories, conceding rights and
privileges they did not have before.
Then came a legal event that would not be understood for
decades (and remains baffling even today), an event that
would change the course of American history. In Santa
Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, a dispute over
a railbed route, the US Supreme Court deemed that a
private corporation was a "natural person" under the US
Constitution and therefore entitled to protection under
the Bill of Rights. Suddenly, corporations enjoyed all the
rights and sovereignty previously enjoyed only by the people,
including the right to free speech.
This 1886 decision ostensibly gave corporations the same
powers as private citizens. But considering their vast financial
resources, corporations thereafter actually had far more power
than any private citizen. They could defend and exploit their
rights and freedoms more vigorously than any individual and
therefore they were more free. In a single legal stroke, the
whole intent of the American Constitution -- that all citizens
have one vote, and exercise an equal voice in public debates --
had been undermined. Sixty years after it was inked, Supreme
Court Justice William O. Douglas concluded of Santa Clara that
it "could not be supported by history, logic or reason." One of
the great legal blunders of the nineteenth century changed
the whole idea of democratic government.
Post-Santa Clara America became a very different place. By
1919, corporations employed more than 80 percent of the
workforce and produced most of America's wealth. Corporate
trusts had become too powerful to legally challenge. The
courts consistently favored their interests. Employees found
themselves without recourse if, for example, they were injured
on the job (if you worked for a corporation, you voluntarily
assumed the risk, was the courts' position). Railroad and mining
companies were enabled to annex vast tracts of land at minimal
expense.
Gradually, many of the original ideals of the American Revolution
were simply quashed. Both during and after the Civil War,
America was increasingly being ruled by a coalition of government
and business interests. The shift amounted to a kind of coup d'tat
-- not a sudden military takeover but a gradual subversion and
takeover of the institutions of state power. Except for a temporary
setback during Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal (the 1930s), the
US has since been governed as a corporate state.
In the post-World War II era, corporations continued to gain
power. They merged, consolidated, restructured and
metamorphosed into ever larger and more complex units of
resource extraction, production, distribution and marketing,
to the point where many of them became economically more
powerful than many countries. In 1997, fifty-one of the world's
hundred largest economies were corporations, not countries.
The top five hundred corporations controlled forty-two percent
of the world's wealth. Today corporations freely buy each other's
stocks and shares. They lobby legislators and bankroll elections.
They manage our broadcast airwaves, set our industrial,
economic and cultural agendas, and grow as big and powerful
as they damn well please.
Every day, scenes that would have seemed surreal, impossible,
undemocratic twenty years ago play out with nary a squeak
of dissent from a stunned and inured populace.
At Morain Valley Community College in Palos Hills, Illinois, a
student named Jennifer Beatty stages a protest against corporate
sponsorship in her school by locking herself to the metal mesh
curtains of the multimillion-dollar "McDonald's Student Center"
that serves as the physical and nutritional focal point of her
college. She is arrested and expelled.
At Greenbrier High School in Evans, Georgia, a student named
Mike Cameron wears a Pepsi T-shirt on the day -- dubbed
"Coke Day" -- when corporate flacks from Coca-Cola jet in from
Atlanta to visit the school their company has sponsored and
subsidized. Mike Cameron is suspended for his insolence.
In suburban shopping malls across North America, moms and
dads push shopping carts down the aisle of Toys "R" Us.
Trailing them and imitating their gestures, their kids push
pint-size carts of their own. The carts say, "Toys 'R' Us
Shopper in Training."
In St. Louis, Missouri, chemical giant Monsanto sics its
legal team on anyone even considering spreading dirty
lies -- or dirty truths -- about the company. A Fox TV
affiliate that has prepared a major investigative story
on the use and misuse of synthetic bovine growth hormone
(a Monsanto product) pulls the piece after Monsanto
attorneys threaten the network with "dire consequences"
if the story airs. Later, a planned book on the dangers of
genetic agricultural technologies is temporarily shelved after
the publisher, fearing a lawsuit from Monsanto, gets cold feet.
In boardrooms in all the major global capitals, CEOs of the
world's biggest corporations imagine a world where they
are protected by what is effectively their own global charter
of rights and freedoms -- the Multinational Agreement on
Investment (MAI). They are supported in this vision by the
World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International
Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the European Round Table
of Industrialists (ERT), the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) and other
organizations representing twenty-nine of the world's richest
economies. The MAI would effectively create a single global
economy allowing corporations the unrestricted right to buy,
sell and move their businesses, resources and other assets
wherever and whenever they want. It's a corporate bill of
rights designed to override all "nonconforming" local, state
and national laws and regulations and allow them to sue
cities, states and national governments for alleged
noncompliance. Sold to the world's citizens as inevitable
and necessary in an age of free trade, these MAI negotiations
met with considerable grassroots opposition and were
temporarily suspended in April 1998. Nevertheless, no one
believes this initiative will remain suspended for long.
We, the people, have lost control. Corporations, these legal
fictions that we ourselves created two centuries ago, now
have more rights, freedoms and powers than we do. And
we accept this as the normal state of affairs. We go to
corporations on our knees. Please do the right thing, we
plead. Please don't cut down any more ancient forests.
Please don't pollute any more lakes and rivers (but please
don't move your factories and jobs offshore either). Please
don't use pornographic images to sell fashion to my kids.
Please don't play governments off against each other to get
a better deal. We've spent so much time bowed down in
deference, we've forgotten how to stand up straight.
The unofficial
history of America, which continues to be
written, is not a story of rugged individualism and heroic
personal sacrifice in the pursuit of a dream. It is a story of
democracy derailed, of a revolutionary spirit suppressed,
and of a once-proud people reduced to servitude.
<end>
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 2:48
PM
Subject: [lds_freemen] England is
controlling the U.S. ?
I was given this website to study and it does not seem possible, however I
would like your opinion on it as many of you are far more educated than
I.
If there is a way we could post it on our sites for others who may
be interested in researching it as well. I am not computer literate enough to
do that.
If this is true and England owns the 10 square miles in D.C.
this explains the other other United States of America Corporation that I have
been hearing about.
Supposedly this is the Act of 1871. D.C,
Incorporated under the Queen of England, thus we are again being run by a King
and Queen if it is
true.
www.federationofstates.org/articals/rcsavssn.htm
.
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