Did you know that wealthy men are corporate men; and that poor men are also corporate men?
The first corporate man was an Abbott who ran a monastery. He considered his shareholders, namely the owners (the church), the physical plant (monastery) and the workers (monks and deacons), important enough to their continued success to devise a means to protect them all from liability. He did this by “incorporating” his monks into entities.It was royalty and aristocrats who took it a step further. They wrote and enacted laws for a chartered body to become a “corporation.” They then wrote the trade laws and granted exclusive rights to those chartered companies.
Professor Douglas Rushkoff, author of Life, Inc. and his dissertation “Monopoly Moneys,” writes about the history of corporatism, how money has been “gradually centralized throughout time,” and “how our society has become defined by and controlled by corporate culture.” In his view of corporate history, contracts that “monarchs and mercantilists wrote (during the Renaissance) not only stopped their own decline from power; they stopped time, locking in place a set of corporatists priorities that to this day have not significantly changed.“
People did less and less business with one another. People and businesses were controlled by mandated corporations that helped write and enforce the laws. Professor Rushkoff adds, “The underlying bias of corporatism would be that everything, and everyone, could be colonized for a profit.”
The right of limited liability of the corporate entity effectively removed the corporate man from the responsibility of his actions. Humane and moral corporate choices took a backseat to the acquisition of legal or illegal tender.
It was during the Lincoln administration that the “evolution of the corporate life-form” would continue. Lincoln made his livelihood as a corporate lawyer for the railroad. He fought the little guy to help give the railroads contractual advantages. As president he signed legislation that gave corporations rights the people didn’t have.
Since corporations live forever it was only a matter of time before the corporate human purse-strings wanted more. They wanted what mortal people had – the privilege of personhood with all the rights and freedoms that real people have. That was accomplished in the 1886decision of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company whereby a Supreme Court clerk summarized that corporations were declared to be “persons within the intent” of the law, effectively granting corporations equal protection under the law. Subsequently, in case after case, corporations established legal precedence to press their claim to possess the legal rights of “natural persons.”
The ever-widening distance between corporations and people is the fact that corporations are “bigger than people, live longer, have more money and more influence.”
