Peter Hume,money has no intrinsic worth,it just represents human potential,store of wealth and the medium of exchange.Our financial wizards have turned money into a commodity thus perverting the direction to the true productive economy.

Who should own your increases in productivity Peter? New money needs to be created to equal it,other wise your potential withers away.Should a private banking system own it or should it be shared in a collective system of tax credits ie you pay less tax because your Govt can create this new money as a credit.

When we let private banks create new money to equal increases in GDP,the wealth can never be realised since the harder we work the more debt we incur, ie the private banking system creates increases in our productivity as debt.Do you now understand the conundrum.

What would change if corporations did not have personhood?
Well, here are a few examples. If corporate persons no longer had first amendment right of free speech, we could prohibit all corporate political activity — no more contributions to candidates or parties, no more lobbying. Just think of the ripple effect on our political process if no corporate money could contaminate it!
We could have done without the idiocy of Work Choices.

Queen Elisabeth I gave limited liability to the 'Golden Hind' and allowed piracy to benefit the royal purse; we still live with privateers feathering their nests behind the corporate Person.

Corporate persons are now protected against search without a warrant under the 4th Amendment.

This means that OH&S and the EPA have to schedule their inspections at a time convenient to corporate managers. If you think the air, land, or water in your community is being polluted, or the workers mistreated, neither you nor the government can go on corporate property to get information without legal permission. Just think of the consequences if corporate polluters were no longer shielded by the Constitution!
Here in Tasmania whether it is Poisoning of forests or OH&S the directors simply plead guilty on the corporations behalf, pay the fine, and carry on doing whatever they were doing. No real person is held accountable.
If Directors and Executives were licensed as Doctors are to be struck off if they do harm to society, other industries and the corporation the are responsible for, we would see less robber baron or sociopathic behaviour by corporations.

If we simply accept the "way it is" we will continue to have more GFC's, Massive environmental damage and remain powerless to confront Global Warming or avoid wars made to profit Halliburton and others.


If corporate Personhood is eradicated; a floodgate of possibilities opens for citizen sovereignty to replace corporate governance.

In Tasmania we must not let Corporate Personhood contaminate the Human Rights Charter. We can prevent this by inserting a clear and unambiguous exclusion into the charter to turn this insidious legal disease back on itself.

Hi, AlGorish,
1. We can start by revoking the charters of especially harmful corporations who have inflicted mass harm on innocent people..
2. We can recharter corporations to limit their powers and make them entities subordinate to the sovereign people. For making corporate managers and directors liable for the harms done by corporations.
3. We need to reduce the size of corporations by breaking them into smaller units with less power to undermine democratic institutions.

4. We can initiate referendum campaigns, or take action through state legislatures and the courts, to end constitutional protections for corporate persons.
5. We can prohibit corporations from making campaign contributions to candidates in any elections, and from lobbying any local, state, and federal government bodies.

6. We can stop subsidy abuse and extortion by corporations through which large corporations rake off billions of dollars from the public treasury.
7. We need to launch campaigns to cap salaries of corporate executives.
8. We can encourage worker and community-owned and -controlled cooperatives and other alternatives to conventional limited liability profit-making corporations.
9. We can prepare model corporation codes based on the principle of citizen sovereignty, and begin the campaign for their adoption.
10. We can invigorate, from the grassroots up, a national debate on the relationship between public property and private property -- including future value -- and the rights of natural persons, communities, and other species when they are in conflict with those corporations.
This whole subject of how we define property rights is at the heart of much of the accumulation and codification of corporate power.

Why are so many corporations plowing their excess cash into mergers and dividends and buybacks instead of jobs and research and development? Top corporations are plowing their cash into mergers, buybacks, and dividends because the executives who run these corporations have all the incentive in the world to do just that.
Top executives today don’t get rich making the sorts of investments that create jobs and make their companies more efficient and effective. Those investments, after all, may take years to produce positive results. Instead, 21st century execs take the fast track to fortune. They manipulate their corporate share price. The higher and quicker their share price rises, the bigger their personal windfall — since top execs get the vast bulk of their pay in stock-related compensation.
Since then, stock-based awards have sent executive pay soaring. After adjusting for inflation, as an Institute for Policy Studies report recently noted, CEO pay last year more than doubled the CEO pay average for the 1990s and more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s.
Since the 1980s, the economic recovery from recessions have also been getting weaker and weaker. The share price manipulation strategies that work just fine for executives aren’t working for everyone else.

Lawmakers certainly could — if they dared to leverage the power of the public purse. Almost every major corporation currently profits big-time off that public purse, either via government contracts or subsidies or tax breaks. Lawmakers, if they chose to deny these benefits to companies that pay execs excessively more than workers, could turn corporate pay incentives upside-down.

JJW
The purpose of economic activity is not to “create jobs”. We could create jobs by digging holes and filling them in again.

The purpose of economic activity is to satisfy human wants so as to allocate scarce resources to more urgent and important wants in priority to lesser.

So your argument against corporations is not that they are not creating jobs per se, but that they are misdirecting scarce resources from more to less urgent or important uses, fair enough?

The problem is more radical than you diagnose. If corporate personhood and limited liability cannot be justified, then they should be abolished.

You criticize corporate personhood and limited liability, but then go on to assume they should continue, with a whole lot of proscriptions and compulsions which assume that you know how to run the economy. You don’t. No-one does. You make all the same assumptions that were made by central planners in socialist states in the 20th century. It is NOT an intellectually or practically approach to a) see a problem and b) assume that government has a god-like power to fix it. Governments are NOT gods or supermen or angels. They CANNOT just redesign the economy at will. If they could there’d be no need for private property or individual freedom. It is a complete and total furphy.

The idea that we should keep legal personhood and limited liability for corporations, and then impose a whole lot of central planning controls over the economy is crazy. Look at the United States government. It’s finances are a complete mess, and it can’t and doesn’t even comply with its own accounting standards that it imposes on corporations! If it was a corporation, all its directors would be in prison for life! What absurdity is it to *presume* that it has the knowledge, competence or goodness to direct or manage the economy?

Arjay
Maybe so, but that still doesn’t prove that currency is only fake when a Govt or private banking system produces *more than the increases in GDP*.

Please prove it.

Peter Hume,

My purpose in these posts is to stimulate a discussion to prepare submission to the High court under section 75.5 to amend corporations powers in the Australian Constitution as our references are 'fruit from a poisoned tree'.

In 1886. The US Supreme Court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, that a private corporation was a "natural person" under the US Constitution, sheltered by the 14th Amendment [(even though that amendment had been written and ratified in 1868 to protect the rights of freed slaves).

Following this ruling, huge, wealthy corporations were allowed to compete on "equal terms" with neighborhood businesses and individuals. "There was no history, logic or reason given to support that view," Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas wrote 60 years later.

Once corporations were legally defined as "natural persons", they automatically were endowed with the same "Bill of Rights" as human beings, and so came to possess and then exploit with devastating consequences, the same "rights" of the freedom of speech, and the ability to participate in elections and lobby elected officials.

To understand how corporations prior to the Civil War were legislatively defined, so we may better appreciate what we can discover and make use of today.

Up to the mid-1800s,corporations had limited duration, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years -- they were not given forever, like corporate charters are given today.

The amount of land a corporation could own was limited.

The amount of capitalisation a corporation could have was limited.

The corporation had to be chartered for a specific purpose -- not for everything, or anything.

The internal governance was very different --shareholders had a lot more rights than they have today, for major decisions such as mergers; sometimes they had to have unanimous shareholder consent.

There were no limitations protections on liability -- managers, directors, and shareholders were liable for all debts and harms and in some states, doubly or triply liable.

I say these are the conditions that both private and public enterprise should be held to.