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An American Team

Do you have a favorite American ball team.

Why not move it to India? I am sure you could hire Indian players for a lot less money. Look at the money that could be saved building and maintaining stadiums.

But would it still be an American ball team? Would the owners be able to charge American prices?

Early Americans distrusted corporations. Some of our ancestors did not like the British East India Trading Company monopoly on goods and prices. They expressed their distaste with a little tea party in Boston Harbor.

Early American corporations were chartered by a state, for a limited time and a public purpose. Corporations were strictly regulated and charters were revoked if they strayed from the conditions of their charter.

Corporations tried unsuccessfully for one hundred years to get Congress to grant them rights. Then the error of Supreme Court clerk was used to implement their request:

"the Supreme Court ruled no such thing in 1886. The 'corporations are persons' ruling was a fiction created by the court's reporter. He simply wrote the words into the headnote of the decision. The words contradict what the court actually said. There is, in fact, in the US National Archives a note by the Supreme Court Chief Justice of the time explicitly informing the reporter that the court had not ruled on corporate personhood in the Santa Clara case." -- Thom Hartmann, Dinosaur War, The Ecologist, December/January 2002 Issue

"The United States does not have an automatic call on our resources. There is no mind-set that puts this country first." Cyrill Stewert, Chief Financial Officer of Colgate-Palmolive Corporation
"The so-called "defense" corporations are multinational conglomerates that have no great loyalty to the United States; they are in fact no longer U.S. corporations but transnational entities loyal only to themselves. " John Stockwell, former CIA official and author]

Corporations are the invention of man's mind .. a tool to facilitate the creation of wealth. Corporations in America should be chartered for a limited time and the benefit of the American public. Tools should serve their master and not the other way around!


corporations are not people!
Excerpt from Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America!
by Kalle Lasn

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.

Posted by: Repeal   Posted on: 03/04/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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