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Maintaining American Sovereignty

"The recent quantum leap in the ability of transnational corporations to relocate their facilities around the world in effect makes all workers, communities and countries competitors for these corporations' favor. The consequence is a "race to the bottom" in which wages and social conditions tend to fall to the level of the most desperate." Jeremy Brecher, historian and author

Presidential candidates will be forced to debate creating and keeping American jobs. But the real debate should be maintaining American sovereignty.

MBA's argue that corporations have to be able to compete, even if that means sending jobs overseas. On the surface this is a reasonable argument. But nation states and corporations grew out of the need to establish property rights, rule of law and the creation of abundance for the governed.

Corporations are the inventions of man's mind and cannot exist separate from people. The question for America's electorate is should corporations be allowed to take on a life of their own? Should the carpenter bow down and worship his tools?

International corporations want one set of rules to comply with worldwide. This is what is driving the move toward one world government. But one world government will require great compromise from nation states. A new one-world religion will need to replace diverse religions practiced today. The American Bill of Rights will not be tolerable to many dictatorial nation states. Property rights will have to be redefined. The ability of American citizens to elect representatives and demand redress of grievances will be greatly diluted when the whole world votes.

Do we really want to hobble America's winning team? The preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America reads; WE THE PEOPLE.

Already:

Nafta and GATT (WTO) treaties have relinquished much of America's sovereignty to the World Court.

American troops are used as the UN's police force
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"It is necessary to go back to some fundamentals in our history to understand how the modern corporation, initially a creature of the state, has managed to turn things around so that today, the state is a creature of the corporation." -Molly Rush, "Rethinking the Corporation, Rethinking Democracy" workshop participant

"I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." -Thomas Jefferson, 1816

Every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add... artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society--the farmers, mechanics, and laborers--who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government. (President Andrew Jackson, veto of national bank bill, July 10, 1832).

The system of corporate life is a new power, for which our language contains no life. We have no word to express government by monied corporations. (Charles Francis Adams, A Chapter of Erie, 1869).

"[A U.S.] Supreme Court ruling in 1886 ... arguably set the stage for the full-scale development of the culture of capitalism, by handing to corporations the right to use their economic power in a way they never had before. Relying on the Fourteenth Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1868 to protect the rights of freed slaves, the Court ruled that a private corporation is a natural person under the U.S. Constitution, and consequently has the same rights and protection extended to persons by the Bill of Rights, including the right to free speech. Thus corporations were given the same "rights" to influence the government in their own interests as were extended to individual citizens, paving the way for corporations to use their wealth to dominate public thought and discourse. The debates in the United States in the 1990s over campaign finance reform, in which corporate bodies can "donate" millions of dollars to political candidates stem from this ruling although rarely if ever is that mentioned. Thus, corporations, as "persons," were free to lobby legislatures, use the mass media, establish educational institutions such as many business schools founded by corporate leaders in the early twentieth century, found charitable organizations to convince the public of their lofty intent, and in general construct an image that they believed would be in their best interests. All of this in the interest of "free speech." -- (Bold Emphasis Added) Richard Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), p.100

"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

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country...Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the dollar power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." -Abraham Lincoln

As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear, or is trampled beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters (President Grover Cleveland, 1888, quoted by Hughes, Jonathan, R. T. The Governmental Habit Redux: Economic Controls from Colonial Times to the Present, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1991, p. 112, citing Swisher, Karl Brent, American Constitutional Development, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1954, p. 422).

We all know that, as things actually are, many of the most influential and most highly remunerated members of the Bar in every center of wealth, make it their special task to work out bold and ingenious schemes by which their wealthy clients, individual or corporate, can evade the laws which were made to regulate, in the interests of the public, the uses of great wealth. (T. Roosevelt, 1905, at his Harvard Commencement address).

Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process." Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, 1907

When one of JP Morgan's lawyers advised him about something he was about to do, "I don't think you can do that legally," Morgan replied, "I don't know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do." (Ida M. Tarbell, The Life of Elbert H. Gary: The Story of Steel, New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1925, p. 81).

"The legal make-believe that the corporation is a person, the ingenuities by which it has been fitted out with a domicile, the elaborate web of 'as-ifs' which the courts have woven, have put corporate affairs pretty largely out of the regulations we decree. [The corporation, unlike real persons has] no anatomical parts to be kicked or consigned to the calaboose; no conscience to keep it awake all night; no soul for whose salvation the parson may struggle; no body to be roasted in hell or purged for celestial enjoyment. [No one can lay] bodily hands upon General Motors or Westinghouse...or incarcerate the Pennsylvania Railroad or Standard Oil of New Jersey with all its works." -Walton H Hamilton, philosopher, in - On the Composition of the Corporate Veil, written in the 1940's

Giant corporations... trusts and mergers... [are] the natural, even logical outcome of [the profit motive] coupled with the new technologies of mass production and corporate organization... Mergers... sought to... remove the disturbing influences of the marketplace from the production and distribution of commodities. Mergers... were efforts to replace the invisible hand of market forces with the visible hand of managerial administration (Heilbroner and Singer, The Economic Transformation of America: 1600 to the Present, p. 220).

There is not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in the free market. Not one. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians. (Wayne Andreas, CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, Z Magazine, April 1997, p. 29).

Today we know that corporations, for good or bad, are major influences on our lives. For example, of the 100 largest economies in the world, 53 are corporations while only 47 are countries, based on a comparison of corporate sales and country GDPs (See the facts page for more examples). In this era of "globalization", marginalized people are becoming especially angry at the motives of multinational corporations, and corporate-led globalization is being met with increasing protest and resistance. How did corporations ever get such power in the first place?

"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]

Posted by: Repeal   Posted on: 08/31/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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