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By
the third decade of the US Constitution, President Jefferson’s
spending habits had pulled his young nation into severe crises.
Corporate interests reemerged in New England states – where
they had previously been disdained – justified around the time
of the War of 1812 as necessary means for feeding and clothing the
populace. Within a few years, the US Supreme Court rendered its
1819 landmark decision in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (17 U.S.
518), citing the "contract obligation clause" of the
US Constitution – and you can bet that those SOBs in
their luxury SUVs will have heard about it! That decision placed
charters of existing corporations outside the jurisdiction of states
which had chartered them, establishing the first federal corporate
law, and effectively nullifying the states’ rights to keep
corporate powers in check. So much for death and taxes… Arguably,
the point of even having a legislature was pretty well toast by
1819, as far as providing any real "checks and balances"
to contest the will of corporate interests.
The story becomes even more tangled. One outcome of 17 U.S. 518 was an inter-regional political dispute that became known as "States Rights." Northern political interests distrusted the Southern economic model as not being able to provide sufficient expansion for their corporate endeavors. Southern political interests distrusted the Northern influence on federal courts for determining how to enforce corporate law – which sounds surprisingly like grassroots arguments against the WTO today. Conflict ensued, popularly known as the US Civil War, and popularly regarded as having been fought over the issue of slavery. Not to wax conspiratorial, but one should not believe the history books issued in public schools (i.e., those produced and subsidized by corporate publishers) without asking a few questions. For instance, what did the US President at the time actually say about slavery and civil warfare? What you might not have read, without digging deeply into archives, was that Abraham Lincoln remarked bitterly during the close of the Civil War about how the conflict had been fought primarily on behalf of corporations. It can be argued that after 1865, the executive branch of the US government retained almost no further means for contesting the will of corporate interests. One immediate outcome of the war was passage of the 14th Amendment. On the surface it appeared to provide "equal protection under the law," effectively outlawing practices such as slavery. However, "equal protection" (a.k.a. "civil rights") for African Americans did not even begin to emerge until nearly a century after the 14th Amendment was passed. According to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, in the fifty years following the 14th Amendment, less than 0.5% of the case law related to that amendment sought to protect the rights of African Americans, while over 50% sought to extend the rights of corporations. That’s a 100:1 ratio… not good odds, unless your ancestors had bylaws instead of DNA. |
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