It’s a testament to… something that after multiple reading I’m not sure if you are saying “War of Northern Aggression” ironically, and that you don’t think anything relevant has happened in U.S. history since 1888.
What’s really ironic is that you think I may have been using the term ironically.
The question of corporate personhood began to arise post-bellum after the USG was firmly in the hands of Northern banks and industrial interests and in 1889 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=129&invol=26 SCOTUS finally ruled that corporations are people. ( The 1886 Santa Clara decision did not actually address the question of corporate personhood but it certainly paved the way for it.)
Irony? The corporation “lost” the suit but for the price of 3 hogs, ($24, a familiar bargain price) corporations were awarded personhood.
More irony? The next year, Congress passed the Sherman-Anti-Trust Act:) and wrote corporate personhood into statute. That was the statute that broke up the Std Oil Trust.
For more information see
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/ToPRaP.html
No, that’s not ironic at all. You don’t appear to be saying anything beyond “corporations are evil,” so I couldn’t tell if you thought the Civil War was really a war of Northern aggression or not. I guess you do. Other than that you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.
Yes, I pulled that number from my deep, dark hole in a reverse reach-around. And, I do wash my hands frequently in Ajax Antibacterial. $1.19 for 34 fluid ozs, great dish water suds and handpumped in my bathroom. Active ingredient, Triclosan .08%, which I discover today is linked to genetic malformations. Ah, well. I had myself cut back in the early eighties (half hour in some GP’s office = $20?) and I say, bring 'em on, super bacteria be damned.
I think he had his figures wrong - it’s the top 5%… and if you were in that group, I doubt you’d have the time or the inclination to be typing your opinions on here. Or if you did, you’d be the saddest multi-millionaire I’ve ever heard of.
You would, sadly, be mistaken, as indeed I am in the top 5% (I don’t know where you get the impression that the top 5% means ‘multi-millionaire’…it’s less than $200k per year). I am not in the top 1%, however, fwiw. Perhaps if I were in the top 1% I would not only have received the memo, but I would be able to light my fine Cuban cigars by burning $100 bills lit on the backs of the peasantry. Perhaps, once I get there, you’d be interested in such a position? 
-XT
Any idea what percentile of people have Warren Buffet type clout? Would he be in the top .5 %, or would it be nearer .005%?
No idea but probably less than that. The top 1%? It’s $350k/year or more. I know quite a few people (including my dad) who are in that category, and they aren’t really anything special…and they aren’t in on the whole conspiracy class war thing. I’m actually not that far out of that, and it’s at least remotely conceivable that I’ll get there at some point. I WOULD have been there, in fact, had the whole dot com bust thingy not happened when and how it did.
-XT
So all those dupes are just unknowing pawns of the Capitalists?
Then how do we know the Capitalists aren’t themselves unknowing pawns? Sure they think they’re free agents things but all the groups they control think the same thing. Maybe somebody is just pulling the Capitalists’ strings.
The Capitalists are just pawns for the Tri-Lateral Commission. The TLC are just pawns for the Jews. The Jews are just pawns for the Bildenberg Group. The Bildenbergers are just pawns for the Illuminati. The Illuminati are just pawns for the Lizard People of Alpha Draconis.
But that’s where it stops. It’s all just lizards from there on down.
Nope. Behind the lizards are hyper-dimensional white mice…
-XT
Corporations are not evil. In fact, in early American history, they provided real public service. Corporations were govt sanctioned financial structures. They legally allowed local accumulations of Capital to address real public needs, roads, canals and railroads and make a modest profit doing so. But they were closely regulated.
Corporate operations were limited to the extent of their charters, which,as a rule meant they were confined to a single economic purpose, were term limited and needed periodic charter renewal and were subject to state revocation without exception.
They were not originally established as people with the right to buy and sell each other and Congress.
No, love of money is the root of all evil.
The problem with this analysis is that the federal government really didn’t start broadly taxing its citizens until after WWI, almost 130 years after the Constitution was signed. Until then, with some exceptions, the federal taxman got by on customs duties, liquor licenses, and other limited taxes.
If that’s true, then why can’t I marry one? I love Dairy Queen, and I know that she loves me. Why won’t the Government recognize our union?
Yes, but.
Quite so.
But what we really had until our WONA, was a tightly bound confederation of states scrambling among themselves for economic advantage and representing our two distinct capitalist cultures to the world. Slavery doomed the South and everything associated with it except, of course, slavery, which was reinstated once NC had finished picking SC’s bones during Reconstruction. Then we gave 'em back their niggers til 1965.
Dude, consult The Kama Sutra, size does matter. How does what’s between your legs measure up to Wall Street’s Pipe and Walmart’s Consumer [del]Womb[/del]? Must.remember.to.be. polite.
adhay:
I saw this on a sign being waived about by a guy on the Berkely Campus in the 1990’s. I searched but couldn’t find anything to reinforce my recollection, so you know, I might be misremembering. But I’m sure the same guy was also predicting the end of the world.
Just another wanker, probably all worked up about the S&Ls, Iran-Contra and Star Wars. The end of the world as we know it will most likely show up some time after oil peaks.
Relax. Plenty of time.
If I’m following your logic correctly, corporations were given “citizenship” rights because Northern Capital took over the USG. What did the constitution do to promote this?
And what exactly is southern capital and is it a good thing that it no longer exists?
Southern Capital was income derived from the slave trade, so yes, unless you were a slaveowner.
I don’t take issue with the OP’s version of the founding of the United States. It’s an extremely limited view to be sure but more useful than the usual Great Men Did Great Things For Freedom tripe. But the version of cause of the War Between the States is off base. Northern manufacturing and shipping interests had a strong stake in slavery. Slaves were producing the products they were profiting from after all. They lost money during the war and didn’t see any return on that investment. It was (Northern) banking interests who profited from the (Southern) exploitation in the postwar period. Lumping all of these interests into a single group of Northern Capital obscures this.
The issue had more to do with Southern Aggression. The planter class demanded everything conform to their “peculiar institution” so Northerners couldn’t escape slavery. If it had remained confined out of sight in the South they could have gone on profiting from the human misery while congratulating themselves how much more moral they were than the actual owners of the slaves. The Fugitive Slave Act made it an issue in the North. Northerners lost their comforting distance from slavery. Sharp political disturbances over slavery in new states also upset the applecart. Southern demands that Notherners follow their lead and lynch anyone daring to speak out against the evils of slavery also stuck in the craw of self righteous Northerners.
I believe that in the end it is the slaves themselves who deserve credit for causing the war that led to their freedom. If they had remained passive and not tried to fight back or escape then there would have been no great call to free them. Their continued resistance provided both the proof that slavery was inhumane and the gadfly to provoke the planter class into the foolish and excessive measures to reign them in that led to the War Between the States.
Given that the South started the war, it’s either ironically or something way less charitable.
The amazingly persistent blather about the Santa Clara case is one of the greatest cases of ignorant simplification in the history of the Internet. The SCOTUS did not wave a magic wand and declare corporations to be people. I’d go into the details of the issue, but there’s a few rather obvious points to be made:
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It is absolutely, totally, unamiguously clear from the wording of the Santa Clara decision and supporting documents that SCOTUS did NOT state that corporations were people, had no intent of saying that, and did not imply it. This entire story is based on a note made by a court reporter - not by anything in the decision itself - and which the Chief Justice of the United States himself stated was not a Constitutional decision the Court had made. It was not the intent of the Court to universally apply all protection and rights applicable to citizens to corporations.
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Corporations are legally NOT the same as people in about a hundred stupidly obvious ways. They cannot vote, they have no rights with respect to liberty, can’t leave or re-enter the country (or even necessarily the state) freely, aren’t taxed the same way, can be unilaterally killed, and on and on.
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Every first world democracy in the world treats corporations, legally, in a similar manner to the United States. Don’t you find it curious that that somehow happened despite the Santa Clara decision only applying to the USA?
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The logic and convenience of treating corporations as juristic persons - not the same thing as people - is so obvious that I find it amazing anyone wouldn’t see why we do it this way. In any event, not understanding the difference between a juristic person (e.g. a corporation, or a patnership, or a trust, or a charitable organization, or a government department, etc. etc.) and an actual real person is exactly as ignorant as not knowing the difference between a Siamese cat and an F6F Hellcat.
No, they didn’t. They won the suit. The State of California lost. If you don’t even know who won the suit, don’t you think you might not have read the case very closely? Or… I’m taking a wild guess here… you’ve never read the case at all, have you?
It’s like you’re trying to draw conclusions from Brown V. Board of Education while thinking Brown et al. lost, or discussing the effects of the Second World War under the assumption that the Axis won.
Well, I did say a brief history.
Thanks for you considered response. it’s true that the Northern economy had in good part been built on slave trafficking and that the resulting Northern banks were a power feared in the South. I’ve mentioned this before in other rants and it was an oversight on my part not to have emphasized that here. I idly thought that including “shipping” as a major component of NC covered the issue but I see it can stand some further examination. What follows is also an attempt to answer to Lakai,s question about the Constitution.
In the 200 years prior to our revolution (I prefer to call it The Anglo-American Civil War but in deference to ITR i will stifle myself), there had come into being, North and South, wealthy colonial oligarchies. Their wealth had for the most part been derived from killing and displacing indigenous Americans and, as noted, slavery and not mentioned but also important, indentured servants.
After the revolution which basically got the British East India Company (corporation) off their backs, those most successful in exploiting this human misery, The Thirteen Original Oligarchies (don’t you love it, ITR?) realized that their wealth needed protection on two fronts: at home, (both from each other and from an armed insurrection by the great underclass) and from foreign global powers.
Our Founding Fathers recognized that great concentrations of wealth must corrupt any govt they are allowed to collect in. They had Rome and England as prime examples. Any time there is a legal centralization of wealth, someone is going to end up with it all, no matter how long it takes or how many it kills in the process … that’s Capitalism, then and now.
The FF, N and S sought to avoid that unfortunate inevitability with a Constitution which essentially was (:)) The Patriot’s Rules For Capitalist Engagement, At And Home Abroad.
A federal military satisfied our foreign needs and also put to rest any ideas of resistance either from the native Americans or the hoi polloi. Shay’s Rebellion settled the question of taxation without representation. It’s OK.
As Madison put it James Madison on protecting the minority of the opulent. - Democratic Underground
The entire cite is worth reading.
Corporations? Not mentioned once in the Constitution or it’s 27 amendments. How does SCOTUS get to read them in? Congress turned over the legislative process to SCOTUS by not impeaching them for Marbury Madison.
Enough already. In closing, SC was based on two things, slavery and land. Without slavery, what is land but a lot of work?