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End Corporate Personhood

Tuesday 08 November 2011
by: Thom Hartmann, Berrett-Koehler Publishers | Book Excerpt

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future. — George Bernard Shaw

As we’ve seen through the history of the Sherman Antitrust Act and other legislative attempts to control corporate behavior, the problem faced by citizens as well as directors and stockholders of corporations is systemic and rooted in how corporations are defined under the law.

Virtually every legislative session since the 1800s has seen new attempts to regulate or control corporate behavior, starting with Thomas Jefferson’s unsuccessful insistence that the Bill of Rights protect humans from “commercial monopolies.” Ultimately, most have either failed or been co-opted because they didn’t address the underlying structural issue of corporate personhood.

To solve this problem, then, new laws controlling corporations aren’t the ultimate answer. Instead what is needed is a foundational change in the definition of the relationship between living human beings and the nonliving legal fictions we call corporations. Only when corporations are again legally subordinate to those who authorized them—humans and the governments representing them—will true change be possible.

More @ http://www.truth-out.org/end-corporate-personhood/1320725933