The following is mirrored from inside
http://www.dayton.net/~lucas/#CORPORATIONS and reproduced here to expand
it's visibility. See the latest publication from the Ohio Committee on
Corporations, Law and Democracy, Democracy For Sale -- How Ohioans Kept
Corporations out of Politics; How and When They Re-entered.
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Citizens Over Corporations
A Brief History of Democracy in Ohio
and Challenges to Organizing in the Future
by the Ohio Committee on Corporations
Citizens over Corporations: A Brief History of Democracy in Ohio
and Challenges to Organizing in the Future is a 56-page booklet
produced by the Ohio Committee on Corporations, Law and Democracy,
an ad-hoc group of activists and individuals across the state
concerned with the growing power of corporations to govern and
harms this poses to democracy in our state, nation and world.
Single copies are $3 plus $1 postage. Bulk rates available. Order
from the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee (AFSC),
513 W. Exchange St., Akron, OH 44302
The booklet looks at the history of the corporate form in Ohio. It
details how corporations were closely controlled by citizens and
their elected representatives in the early decades of the state's
history (including examples of strict controls contained in early
corporate charters -- NOTE: most corporations, even today, are
chartered at the state level), what legal tools people used in the
legislature and courts to control corporations, how corporations
began to gain legal "rights" and "privileges" that our ancestors
never intended, what resistance came from working and other
people, how Corporations are, in many ways, equal or superior to
human beings today, and what we can do to "rethink" the current
relationship between "we the people" and corporations.
What follows is the Forward from the booklet:
In 1996, twenty-five Ohioans came together at the Procter House
(former summer estate of William Procter of Procter and Gamble
Corporation fame) south of Columbus to participate in a workshop
titled "Rethinking the Corporation, Rethinking Democracy." These
environmental, labor, peace, and justice activists were drawn to
the gathering because each was struggling against or concerned
about repeated corporate assaults upon their communities in
particular, and upon democracy in general.
Stirred by presentations about corporate histories and people's
struggles for democracy, we discussed our own organizing
experiences. We began to grapple with the idea that our efforts at
opposing corporate violations of laws and harms one at a time,
over and over again, have been tiring, erratic, and not
particularly effective.
It struck us that we had a lot to learn about and from corporate
history. Among other things, while we were educating on single
issues, researching areas of science and technology, and
organizing mostly around local, state and federal regulatory
agencies, corporations were focusing in constitutional arenas.
There, they lobbied for the property and civil rights of human
persons.
While we were writing drafts of health, environmental, consumer
and labor laws that would curb corporate behaviors, corporations
were writing state corporation codes and amending state
constitutions to define giant business corporation as private --
essentially beyond the authority of "We the People".
While we were considering creative ways to boycott corporate
sweatshops; stop the next corporate toxic/radioactive
factory/dump; persuade corporate executives to sign voluntary
codes of conduct and act responsibly; and prevent factory closings
or employee layoffs, corporations were getting state and federal
courts to deny people basic constitutional rights.
And while we were bringing our causes to regulatory agencies
(having been taught that state and federal regulators were our
allies), corporations were too often using these same regulatory
laws and agencies as barriers to justice.
Since that gathering, a number of us continued meeting and
rethinking. We concluded there was a need for iscussions across
the state about the proper role of corporations in our society,
and for citizen groups to craft new goals and strategies. To
encourage such discussions and reorientation, we have produced
this brief history of citizens and corporations in Ohio.
Readers will quickly see that since revolutionary days people were
well aware that property owners could use the corporate form
equipped with special privileges to operate as private
governments, causing sustained harms to people, places, liberty
and democracy. So we Buckeyes, like people in all states, used our
constitution, corporate charters and state corporation codes to
define corporations as subordinate, and to restrain legislators
from favoring property over people.
But as land, railroad, banking, insurance and other corporations
began to acquire wealth, they crafted a different agenda.
Investing some of their huge profits from the Civil War, they
lobbied for legal doctrines and laws which privileged private over
public interests, and favored property rights over human rights.
As they increased their influence over local, state, and federal
governments, they kept rewriting Ohio's (and all states')
constitutions and corporations laws as they shaped the culture to
legitimize corporate dominance. By the end of the World War II,
giant corporations routinely called upon our governments to deny
people's rights -- for example, by declaring that workers have no
free speech or assembly rights on corporate property, or that
regulated industrial corporate poisons are legalized industrial
corporate poisons.
At the same time, people's protests and political activism were
increasingly channeled into administrative and regulatory agencies
such as the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications
Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Environmental
Protection Agency, and scores more. In fact, corporations helped
design many of these agencies, starting with the Interstate
Commerce Commission in 1887, so that the most which We the People
can accomplish via such agencies is to get corporate property
owners to cause a little less harm.
Today, global corporations define us as shareholders, consumers,
or workers. They exert tremendous power over our legislatures,
courts, executive branches, press, information -- all the
essentials of democratic self-governance.
Corporations possess, in many respect, greater rights than human
beings. Unlike people, corporations can live forever, operate even
after breaking laws, and write-off fines and penalties. Corporate
leaders are immune from liability and are free from public recall.
Corporations want to be collective but want people to remain
individualistic -- unable to act collectively or live in
community.
One important thing we learned from our research is that our
problems go way back to the nation's founding: a minority in the
original 13 states had been organized enough to gain power and
rights. Opposed to democratic self-rule, this minority defined the
majority of people as non-persons, denying them fundamental
rights, including the right to self-governance. From the
beginning, this country has been shaped by sustained contests
between propertied minorities using corporations as their
political vehicles and whole classes of people struggling for
basic human and constitutional rights. But given the dominance by
a corporate system over the past century, it is logical that the
stories of the African American, Native People, women, the
propertyless, workers, immigrants, gays and lesbians who peopled
these struggles are still generally unknown.
We also realized that the Populist Movement was the last American
movement that drew upon the people's rights and sovereignty to
challenge the very essence of corporate rule. And contrary to what
most of us had been taught, the Progressives of the early 20th
Century took a step backward when they gave up on rights and
settled for regulating corporate behaviors.
Like the Populist farmers, mechanics, small business people and
intellectuals of the 1870s-1890s, we too can call upon the
nation's founding ideals as we redesign our organizations to
challenge the legitimacy of corporate rule. For such action, we
need to know our histories. We need to understand how corporations
turned us into workers and consumers, stripped our rights, and
often led our activist organizations into regulatory dead ends.
We hope this publication will provoke curiosity and debate about
corporations and democracy. But it is only a first step: others
will need to look closely at past struggles by workers, women and
people of color, and others to gain their rights. More people will
need to examine how a few owners of vast property used the
corporate form to capture the Bill of Rights. We offer our
assistance to any person or group who desire to learn their
history as a beginning step to rethink, reassess and reassert
control over corporations.
The more we know about the origins of today's corporate rule, and
about corporations' persistent insurgencies against democracy, the
more easily we can reorient our civic organizations to undo what
corporations have done to our minds, constitutions, laws, culture,
air, water and governance.
Ohio Committee on Corporations, Law and Democracy
c/o Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee
513 W. Exchange St.
Akron, OH 44302
Phone: 330-253-7151
Email: AFSCole@aol.com