A Potted History of the growth of Corporations.

British kings granted charters to the British East India Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company and many American colonies, enabling the kings and their cronies to control property and commerce. The American colonists did not revolt simply over a tax on tea.
Craft and industrial workers feared absentee corporate owners would turn them into “a commodity being as much an article of commerce as woolens, cotton, or yarn,” according to historian Louis Hartz.

Incorporated businesses were banned from taking any action that citizens and legislators did not specifically allow.
In 19th-century America, many citizens believed that it was society’s inalienable right to abolish an evil.
During the last third of the 19th century, “Corporations confronted the law at every turn,” according to Harvard law professor Lawrence M. Friedman.
Workers, the courts also ruled, were responsible for causing their own injuries on the job.Judges created the “right to contract” doctrine, which stipulates that the government cannot interfere with an individual’s “freedom” to negotiate with a corporation for wages and working conditions.
Judges established the “managerial prerogative” and “business judgment” doctrines.
The US Supreme Court ruled that a private corporation was a “natural person” under the US Constitution, sheltered by the 14th Amendment, which requires due process in the criminal prosecution of “persons.” Following this ruling, huge, wealthy corporations were allowed to compete on “equal terms” with individuals.

“There was no history, logic or reason given to support that view,” Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas wrote 60 years later.
Within just a few decades, appointed judges had redefined the “common good” to mean the corporate use of humans and the Earth for maximum production and profit—no matter what was manufactured, who was hurt or what was destroyed. Corporations had obtained control over resources, production, commerce, jobs, politicians, judges and the law. Workers, citizens, cities, towns, states and nature were left with fewer and fewer rights that corporations were forced to respect

and your point is?

DEMOS,
That’s the comment of a mushroom living in a box just like most loyal corporate slaves, I would like to have my say on this topic but Graham wont leave them up for more that a couple of hours. It must be upsetting to his mates in the Liberal Party, or whats left of it.

Dear Demos,

Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite in 1886, simply pronounced before the beginning of arguement in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that

"The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does".

Thus it was that a two-sentence assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law, prepared the way for the rise of global corporate rule, and thereby changed the course of history.
The doctrine of corporate personhood creates an interesting legal contradiction. The corporation is owned by its shareholders and is therefore their property. If it is also a legal person, then it is a person owned by others and thus exists in a condition of slavery -- a status explicitly forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. So far as I have been able to determine, this contradiction has not been directly addressed by the courts.

Corporations exist beyond time and space: they are legal creations that only exist on paper. They do not die a natural death; they outlive their own creators. They have no commitment to locale, employees or neighbours. Having no morality, no commitment to place and no physical nature. A corporation can relocate all of its operations at the first sign of inconvenience—demanding employees, high taxes and restrictive environmental laws.

The Howard Government used the Corporation Powers adopted into Australia's Constitution to crete WorkChoices and circuvent the Industrial relations System.

My point is, that if the corporation tree has grown from a poisoned fruit, our present labour laws are dubious and and therefore reqire an examination by the High Court of the Corporation Powers in our constitution.

Your belief in the Corporate boggy man is about as silly as small child’s belief in the monster living under his bed.

The facts are corporation that you attack so bitterly provide hundreds of thousands of jobs to people in Australia and tens of millions too people around the world. They are the backbone of our economic success like it or lump it.

Sure people who vote for the democrats and greens like lorry and young dan are only showing there poor education and lack of understanding of the world we live in.

Corporations are not perfect but what is?

ok. now that we have established that some of us don't like corporations, we can move on to the next step: what to do about it.

i think it's not good enough to say "somebody should do something!" unless, of course, your mother didn't tell you what happened, "the day the mice decided to bell the cat."

what can you do, to change the power of corporations?

[fair warning: unless you're in parliament, nothing. if you are in parliament, nothing. i'm actually sucking you into a discussion of real democracy]