Corporate Death Star

[Goeroeboeroe]

What started this thread has not too much to do with governments. The biggest threat is there are coming bodies that can OVERRULE government decisions. If this agreement is going to happen, non-democratic international bodies can overrule decisions made by the US government (or any other government). It doesn't mater if democrats or republicans are in power: international bodies ruled by big corporations can overrule both parties.
So my suggestion is not to look too much to republicans or democrats or marxists of liberals or left or right: this treaty is a threat to every government that doesn't listen to big corporations.

[GreyGeek]

In the early history of America, the corporation played an important but subordinate role. The people -- not the corporations -- were in control. So what happened? How did corporations gain power and eventually start exercising more control than the individuals who created them?

The shift began in the last third of the nineteenth century -- the start of a great period of struggle between corporations and civil society. The turning point was the Civil War. Corporations made huge profits from procurement contracts and took advantage of the disorder and corruption of the times to buy legislatures, judges and even presidents. Corporations became the masters and keepers of business. President Abraham Lincoln foresaw terrible trouble. Shortly before his death, he warned that "corporations have been enthroned . . . . An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people . . . until wealth is aggregated in a few hands . . . and the republic is destroyed."

President Lincoln's warning went unheeded. Corporations continued to gain power and influence. They had the laws governing their creation amended. State charters could no longer be revoked. Corporate profits could no longer be limited. Corporate economic activity could be restrained only by the courts, and in hundreds of cases judges granted corporations minor legal victories, conceding rights and privileges they did not have before.

Then came a legal event that would not be understood for decades (and remains baffling even today), an event that would change the course of American history. In Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, a dispute over a railbed route, the US Supreme Court deemed that a private corporation was a "natural person" under the US Constitution and therefore entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights. Suddenly, corporations enjoyed all the rights and sovereignty previously enjoyed only by the people, including the right to free speech.

This 1886 decision ostensibly gave corporations the same powers as private citizens. But considering their vast financial resources, corporations thereafter actually had far more power than any private citizen. They could defend and exploit their rights and freedoms more vigorously than any individual and therefore they were more free. In a single legal stroke, the whole intent of the American Constitution -- that all citizens have one vote, and exercise an equal voice in public debates -- had been undermined. Sixty years after it was inked, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas concluded of Santa Clara that it "could not be supported by history, logic or reason." One of the great legal blunders of the nineteenth century changed the whole idea of democratic government.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Co...ations_US.html


When one examines the that court case a curious fact stands out:
http://money.howstuffworks.com/corporation-person1.htm

In the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the Supreme Court decided that only the state that charters a corporation can tax it. This decision upheld the long-standing custom in America of state governance of corporations. It's the state that grants a corporation its charter -- its license to do business -- and it's up to the state to tax and regulate the corporation.


But a note written by the court reporter at the heading of the decision went further than that. Although another, private note from the Chief Justice said that the court had purposely avoided the issue of Constitutional corporate protection, the reporter chose to make his own addition to the records. He noted that the court had decided that corporations are persons under the 14th Amendment, and as such are subject to the same protections under the law as anyone else [source: Hartmann].


What's strange, Hartmann points out, is that the justices hadn't ruled that way at all. Even fishier, the court reporter was a former railroad president [source: Hartmann]. Ultimately, since it was a headnote (a commentary prefix to the court record) written by the reporter, it didn't constitute law. But it did set precedent. Two years later, this idea was upheld in another case: Pembina Consolidated Mining and Milling Co. v. Pennsylvania [source: Aljalian].


Just how much Constitutional protection corporations should be afforded is still being hammered out today, court case by court case. Read about some of these cases on the next page.

What that article didn't say but other records on the subject to, is that the court reporter was a former railroad executive.
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-s...od-challenged/

It was back in 1886 that a Supreme Court decision (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company) ostensibly led to corporate personhood and free speech rights, thereby guaranteeing protections under the 1st and 14th amendments. However, according to Thom Hartmann, the relatively mundane court case never actually granted these personhood rights to corporations. In fact, Chief Justice Morrison Waite wrote, “We avoided meeting the Constitutional question in the decision.” Yet, when writing up the case summary -that has no legal status-the Court reporter, a former railroad president named J.C. Bancroft Davis, declared: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a state to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” But the Court had made no such legal determination. It was the clerk’s opinion and misrepresentation of the case in the headnote upon which current claims of corporate personhood and free speech entitlements now rests.
In 1978, however, the Supreme Court further entrenched the idea of corporate personhood by deciding that corporations were entitled to the free speech right to give money to political causes – linking free speech with financial clout. Interestingly, in a dissent to the decision, Chief Justice William Rehnquist pointed out the flawed 1886 precedent and criticized its interpretation over the years saying, “This Court decided at an early date, with neither argument nor discussion, that a business corporation is a ‘person’ entitled to the protection of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

So, based on an OBVIOUS and DELIBERATE LIE, "personhood" for corporations was wedged into the law like a crook stealing a birthright.

[whatthefunk]

I'll let the Repubs go after porno all day long as opposed to the Dems just giving the Prez carte blanche.

How exactly do you think Republicans are going to do this? There is no way to enforce an anti-internet porn law without comprehensive monitoring of internet usage. Thats a slippery slope youre standing on there.

[woodsmoke]

I know that and you know that, but they just love to bang the drum slowly as it were, thus keeping their base ginned up.

But, again, I'd rather let them bang that drum than what the Dems are doing which is trying to give Pres. Obama AND....a possible future REPUBLICAN president the whole circus orchestra.

In that way, BOTH parties can point at the "evil president' of whichever party he is, and blame him for all those encroachements on "liberties" and "free speech".

And of course any sitting president wants the power so that he has...power.....

That combined with the money of the multinational corporations give "power" that is almost unrestrained.

A good example being the Krupp organization, sold arms to BOTH sides during the war to end all wars.

Just like a modern U.S. corporation that is beloved of Pres. Obama was selling "nuclear equipment" to both sides....

going along with the theory of "M.A.D." or Mutually Assured Destruction.

However, the assumption of M.A.D. is that both sides are rational, whereas the leader of Iran thinks that to get the thirtheenth Imam to come out of the well and save the world "sooner" and to establish the world wide Caliphate, that he needs to cause l;arge scale chaos and war NOW to get him to come out of the well to "save the world" for Islam.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_al-Mahdi

woodsmoke

woodsmoke