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Chapter 6: The First Corporate War - by Thom Hartmann
Chapter 6: The First Corporate War
Every American schoolchild learns about the Boston Tea Party, and most also learn it was about “taxation without representation.”
That’s true, but hugely incomplete.
The Boston Tea Party was, in reality, fundamentally a rebellion against raw corporate power. The tea being dumped belonged to the British East India Company, then the world’s largest corporate monopoly. The tyranny being resisted was a new form of corporate tyranny corruptly backed by Company stockholder King George III’s government force.
The Founders of this nation, then, fought a revolution every bit as much against a corporation as against the British military. Understanding this history explains why they would’ve been horrified by the idea of corporate constitutional rights.
The Company That Ruled the World
The British East India Company was not like modern corporations: it was also, essentially, a private army with a corporate charter—a state unto itself.
It had its own military, its own courts, its own laws. It conquered nations, ruled hundreds of millions of people via its own appointed governors, and extracted wealth on a scale that dwarfed the British government itself.
By the 1770s, the Company controlled most of India, ran the opium trade into China, and dominated global commerce, including North America. It was more powerful than most governments. It could—and did—wage wars, negotiate treaties, and legally execute prisoners. It answered to stockholders, the King, and his Parliament, not average citizens or voters.
The Company’s stockholders included members of Parliament, British aristocrats, and the King himself. These conflicts of interest meant Company interests heavily shaped eighteenth-century British policy. When the Company wanted something, Parliament often gave it.
The Company was the original too-big-to-fail corporation. When it faced bankruptcy in 1773, Parliament bailed it out by granting it a monopoly on tea sales in the American colonies, thus outlawing the now-illegal importation of tea by independent merchants and traders.
That was the Tea Act of 1773, which American colonists correctly understood as corporate tyranny enforced by government power.
A Voice from the Revolution
I searched for years to find a firsthand account of what actually happened in Boston Harbor that cold December night in 1773. The participants in the Tea Party were sworn to secrecy for fifty years, by which time most were dead, so most of what they thought and felt was lost to history.
Then, in an antique bookstore in London, I found a treasure. It was sitting on a shelf with a bunch of old books from the early nineteenth century, a part of the store that smelled of dust, wax, and aging paper. When I saw it, I was astonished: I’d been looking for something like it for decades.
I immediately purchased an original copy of Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party with a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbour in 1773, published in New York by S.S. Bliss in 1834.
The book’s author, James Hawkes, interviewed George Robert Twelve-trees Hewes, who was a shoemaker and a patriot. He knew Samuel Adams and John Hancock personally. He was present at the Boston Massacre. And on the night of December 16, 1773, he was one of the men who boarded the Company’s ships.
Hawkes’s interview of Hewes, published sixty-one years after the event, is the only actual first-person account in existence of the Boston Tea Party by a participant.
Most significantly, what Hewes described to Hawkes in this little book wasn’t just a tax revolt: it was an explicit rebellion against corporate power.
The Corporate Monopoly
Many people today think the Tea Act of 1773 simply raised taxes on tea. It did not: it was actually a massive tax cut.
The purpose of the Tea Act was to give the East India Company full and unlimited access to the American tea trade so it could sell the surplus tea it had built up in its warehouses over the previous three years during a pretty severe recession.
It exempted the Company from having to pay taxes to Britain on that tea exported to the colonies, and even gave the Company a tax refund on the millions of pounds of tea it was holding in inventory.
Because the Company no longer had to pay high taxes to England and held a monopoly on colonial tea sales, it could lower its prices to un dercut local importers and the mom-and-pop tea merchants in every town in America. Additionally, it allowed the British navy to intercept tea “smugglers” to the colonies, seize their ships and cargo, and imprison their crews.
It wasn’t “taxation without representation”: it was “tax breaks for giant corporations without representation” and a government-granted monopoly.
This was what specifically infuriated the colonists. They resented their colonies being used as a profit center for a multinational corporation and their small businesses no longer being able to buy tea from “pirates” (private ships bringing tea to the colonies) because the Company had an exclusive, monopolistic right of sale in North America.
“Taxation without representation” meant something specific to that generation: hitting the average person and small business with taxes while giving the most powerful corporation in the world one of the most massive tax breaks in history. It was government sponsorship of one corporation over all competitors, plain and simple.
According to Hewes, colonists were either boycotting Company tea or buying smuggled tea to avoid supporting the Company’s profits. This resistance, he said, had “greatly diminished the importation into the colonies of this commodity.”
Meanwhile, he noted, “an immense quantity of it was accumulated in the warehouses of the East India Company in England. This company petitioned the King to suppress the duty of three pence per pound upon its introduction into America.”
The King granted the petition with the Tea Act, and the Company’s ships set sail for America with their monopoly tea.
The Alarm Goes Out
A newsletter called The Alarm circulated through the colonies. One issue, signed by the enigmatic “Rusticus,” made clear the feelings of colonial Americans about England’s largest corporation:
Are we in like Manner to be given up to the Disposal of the East India Company, who have now the Assurance, to step forth in Aid of the Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America? Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. They have levied War, excited Rebellions, dethroned lawful Princes, and sacrificed Millions for the Sake of Gain.
The Revenues of Mighty Kingdoms have centered in their Coffers. And these not being sufficient to glut their Avarice, they have, by the most unparalleled Barbarities, Extortions, and Monopolies, stripped the miserable Inhabitants of their Property, and reduced whole Provinces to Indigence and Ruin. Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but because this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Rate that the poor could not purchase them.
One and a half million people died, Rusticus wrote, in a single year, not from natural disasters but from corporate greed.
The colonists knew exactly what kind of monster they were facing. They’d seen what the East India Company did to India and were determined it wouldn’t happen to their America.
Another pamphlet, signed “Hampden,” declared: “It hath now been proved to you that the East India Company obtained the monopoly of that trade by bribery and corruption. That the power thus obtained they have prostituted to extortion, and other the most cruel and horrible purposes, the sun ever beheld.”
Philadelphia and New York Resist
The battle began in Philadelphia.
According to Hewes, “those to whom the teas of the Company were intended to be consigned, were induced by persuasion, or constrained by menaces, to promise, on no terms, to accept the proffered consignment.”
In New York, Captains Sears and McDougal, “daring and enterprising men, effected a concert of will between the smugglers, the merchants, and the sons of liberty.” The small businessmen, the entrepreneurs, and the patriots had joined forces. In many cases, like Paul Revere and Sam Adams, they were the same people.
“Pamphlets suited to the conjecture, were daily distributed,” Hewes affirmed, “and nothing was left unattempted by popular leaders, to obtain their purpose.”
The Company’s ships were turned back from Philadelphia and New York. The colonists had drawn a line.
Then the ships arrived in Boston.
The Decisive Moment
“On the twenty-eighth of November, 1773,” Hewes told Hawkes, “the ship Dartmouth with 112 chests arrived; and the next morning after, the following notice was widely circulated: ‘Friends, Brethren, Countrymen! That worst of plagues, the detested TEA, has arrived in this harbor. The hour of destruction, a manly opposition to the machinations of tyranny, stares you in the face. Every friend to his country, to himself, and to posterity, is now called upon to meet in Faneuil Hall, at nine o’clock, this day, at which time the bells will ring, to make a united and successful resistance to this last, worst, and most destructive measure of administration.’”
The colonists gathered. The Company’s local agents were urged to renounce their positions, but they refused and instead took refuge in a nearby British fortress.
A guard was placed on Griffin’s Wharf, near where the tea ships were moored. Messengers stood ready to ride to neighboring towns if the Company made any moves.
Hewes recalls the voices of the Bostonians during a hastily convened meeting in a local pub:
“Why do we wait? Soon or late we must engage in conflict with England. The opposition is formed; it is general; it remains for us to seize the occasion. The more we delay the more strength is acquired by the [British] ministers. Now is the time to prove our courage.”
A local tea seller named Rotch was asked to demand that the Governor permit the ships to return to England. The Governor refused, citing the honor of the laws and duty toward the King.
The meeting erupted. A man disguised as an Indian shouted from the gallery. The crowd dissolved in an instant and rushed to Griffin’s Wharf.
The Tea Party had begun.
That Night in the Harbor
Hewes was there. His account is vivid:
“It was now evening, and I immediately dressed myself in the costume of an Indian, equipped with a small hatchet, which I and my associates denominated the tomahawk, with which, and a club, after having painted my face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith, I repaired to Griffin’s wharf, where the ships lay that contained the tea.
“When I first appeared in the street after being thus disguised, I fell in with many who were dressed, equipped and painted as I was, and who fell in with me and marched in order to the place of our destination.”
Between one hundred and one hundred and fifty men gathered at the wharf. They were divided into three parties, one for each ship, and Hewes was appointed boatswain of his group and sent to demand the keys to the hatches from the ship’s captain.
“I made the demand accordingly,” he said, “and the captain promptly replied, and delivered the articles; but requested me at the same time to do no damage to the ship or rigging.”
The captain of a Company ship stood by and watched as the colonists destroyed the Company’s property. He asked only that they not damage the ship itself. He knew which way the wind was blowing. Hewes continued:
“We then were ordered by our commander to open the hatches and take out all the chests of tea and throw them overboard, and we immediately proceeded to execute his orders, first cutting and splitting the chests with our tomahawks, so as thoroughly to expose them to the effects of the water. In about three hours from the time we went on board, we had thus broken and thrown overboard every tea chest to be found in the ship, while those in the other ships were disposing of the tea in the same way, at the same time. We were surrounded by British armed ships, but no attempt was made to resist us.”
Three hundred forty-two chests. Over ninety thousand pounds of tea. Enough to make twenty-four million cups. Worth over two million dollars in today’s money.
All of it destroyed to make a point about corporate power.
No Tea Shall Survive
The participants were absolutely committed that none of the East India Company’s tea would ever be consumed on American shores. Hewes describes what happened to those who tried to pocket some for themselves:
“During the time we were throwing the tea overboard, there were several attempts made by some of the citizens of Boston and its vicinity to carry off small quantities of it for their family use. To effect that object, they would watch their opportunity to snatch up a handful from the deck, where it became plentifully scattered, and put it into their pockets.
“One Captain O’Conner, whom I well knew, came on board for that purpose, and when he supposed he was not noticed, filled his pockets, and also the lining of his coat. But I had detected him and gave information to the captain of what he was doing. We were ordered to take him into custody, and just as he was stepping from the vessel, I seized him by the skirt of his coat, and in attempting to pull him back, I tore it off; but, springing forward, by a rapid effort he made his escape. He had, however, to run a gauntlet through the crowd upon the wharf; each one, as he passed, giving him a kick or a stroke.”
An old man with a large cocked hat and white wig slipped some tea into his pocket. They caught him, threw his hat and wig into the harbor along with the tea, and let him escape with “now and then a slight kick.”
The next morning, considerable quantities of tea were found floating on the water. Small boats rowed out and beat it with oars and paddles until it was thoroughly destroyed.
“We then quietly retired to our several places of residence,” Hewes concludes, “without having any conversation with each other, or taking any measures to discover who were our associates. . . . There appeared to be an understanding that each individual should volunteer his services, keep his own secret, and risk the consequence for himself. No disorder took place during that transaction, and it was observed at that time that the stillest night ensued that Boston had enjoyed for many months.”
The War Begins
The British Parliament responded immediately.
The Boston Port Act closed the port of Boston until the citizens reimbursed the East India Company for the tea they’d destroyed.
The colonists refused.
A year and a half later, on April 19, 1775, the colonists would again defy the Company and Great Britain, this time taking on British troops in armed conflict at Lexington and Concord, the “shots heard ’round the world.”
That war, triggered by a transnational corporation and its government’s patrons trying to deny American colonists a fair and competitive marketplace, would last until 1783.
The Declaration of Independence, written in 1776, lists the colonies’ grievances against King George III and specifically mentions taxes, troops, judges, and governors.
It never mentions the East India Company by name, but it didn’t have to. Everyone understood. The King’s tyranny and the Company’s tyranny were the same tyranny. The Company had bought the government, so fighting the King meant fighting corporate power.
The Lesson the Founders Learned
The men who wrote the Constitution had fought a corporation. They’d seen what unchecked corporate power could do. They’d watched the East India Company starve millions in India, corrupt Parliament, and try to monopolize American commerce.
And they were determined it would never happen here again.
The US Constitution contains about 4,400 words. It establishes the structure of government, enumerates powers, and limits authority.
But it never mentions corporations. Not once.
This was not an oversight. The Founders knew about corporations. They had fought one. They deliberately chose not to give corporations constitutional status or protection.
Corporations were creatures of state law, to be kept on a short leash by state legislatures close to the people. They could be chartered, regulated, and dissolved by the states and, at our country’s founding, had no rights whatsoever under the federal Constitution.
The American antipathy toward the East India Company continued even after the Revolution. When the Company tried to resume postwar trading with America, offering clothing, silks, coffee, and spices, the Americans refused. The trade war continued to and through the War of 1812.
The Founders had not forgotten. And they made sure corporate power would never gain the same foothold in America that it had held in the colonies.
Or so they thought.
A century later, a court reporter and a corrupt justice would undo much of their work with a few strokes of a pen.
Chapter 7: What the Founders Knew - by Thom Hartmann
Chapter 7: What the Founders Knew
The colonists who fought the American Revolution and wrote our Constitution knew well who and what were the most dangerous enemies of democracy. It wasn’t just King George III; it was his British East India Company, the most powerful corporation in the world.
This is why the Constitution never mentions corporations and why our nation’s Founders would have been horrified by corporate constitutional rights. Instead of a nation ruled by oligarchs and their businesses, the Founders and Framers of the Constitution envisioned a nation of independent citizens, small farmers, entrepreneurs, and journeymen who owned the fruit of their labor and enjoyed a continually improving standard of living.
Although Hamilton’s vision was more industrial and Jefferson’s more agrarian, both saw a future for our nation, in their own ways, that we today call the American Dream.
The Supreme Court–created doctrine of corporate constitutional rights, however, is the opposite of our Founders’ vision. It now dominates America through economic, political, and legal mechanisms that allow a small, wealthy group of oligarchs to dominate the rest of us. Our Founders fought a revolution to stop—and, moving forward, prevent—exactly that.
The Founders’ Vision of Economic Freedom
The Founders didn’t just fight the Revolutionary War to seize political freedom from the British Crown as it says in most of the history books our kids read; they also wanted economic freedom from the East India Company. They wanted a nation where We the People made the decisions, rather than having them imposed on us by billionaire tech bros and giant corporations.
Thomas Jefferson explicitly wanted a nation of independent yeoman farmers, each owning enough land to support a family, with only a very few dependent on wages from a wealthy employer. This vision was small-d democratic to its core: citizens who owned their own means of livelihood couldn’t be controlled by employers or landlords. With the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, they could vote their consciences, speak their minds, and participate in self-governance as political equals.
Benjamin Franklin, who rose from a penniless apprentice to become one of the most successful businessmen in the colonies, embodied the promise that hard work and talent could lift anyone to prosperity, even in the early republic. His story was the original American Dream, long before that phrase even existed.
This vision of a new, free America required government to limit corporate power. If, like the East India Company, corporations could grow without limit, accumulate mind-boggling levels of wealth, and use that financial power to buy influence with politicians and thus government, they’d essentially recreate the very tyranny the Founders fought the Revolution to overthrow.
Franklin himself warned about what we today call oligarchy (aka rule by the morbidly rich). “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” he wrote. “As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
Two centuries later, Franklin Roosevelt would echo his namesake Ben Franklin’s insight when he famously declared in 1936 that “necessitous men are not free men.” Both of these two men who transformed America understood that economic security was the necessary foundation of political freedom. And they both knew corporate and oligarchic control of our economy and our politics threatened to destroy both.
The Declaration’s Missing Word
The Founders weren’t just starry-eyed believers in democracy; they were also strategic. They framed the American Revolution as a fight for “natural rights” against monarchical tyranny, using a message that played very well in Enlightenment-era Europe (particularly in pre-revolutionary France), where they needed support.
Explicitly calling out the world’s most powerful corporation in the Declaration might have complicated things, so the Founders tried to make sure corporate power would never gain the same foothold in America as it had in Britain, India, and other places across the world that were groaning under the Company’s yoke.
The Constitution’s Silence
In addition to establishing the structure of our government, our Constitution also (following Montesquieu’s advice) divides power among three branches, and limits the authority of each branch.
But even with all that, the Constitution never mentions corporations. Not even once.
This was not an oversight. The Founders knew all about corporations; after all, they’d fought one to establish this nation. Which is why they deliberately chose not to give corporations constitutional status or any sorts of protection whatsoever.
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and others understood that corporations were useful tools for specific purposes: building a canal, establishing a bank, constructing roads and other essential infrastructure. But they were only tools to be regulated by We the People through our elected representatives, not autonomous entities with their own rights.
The Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate commerce. It gives states responsibility for chartering corporations. But it doesn’t grant corporations any rights whatsoever.
James Madison wrote to his mentor, Thomas Jefferson, on October 24, 1787 (just weeks after they’d finished writing the Constitution), about his concern for possible future corruption by “the representatives of Counties and Corporations in the Legislatures of the States much more disposed to sacrifice the aggregate interest, and even authority . . . over the interests of the nation.”
But, because the power to bring corporations into existence and regulate their behavior was left by the Constitution entirely to the states, he didn’t believe America would ever again have to confront a giant monopoly like the East India Company.
“Many illustrations might be given of this impossibility,” he wrote. “How long has it taken to fix, and how imperfectly is yet fixed, the legislative power of corporations, though that power is subordinate in the most compleat manner? The line of distinction between the power of regulating trade and that of drawing revenue from it, which was once considered the barrier of our liberties [by the King and the Company], was found on fair discussion, to be absolutely undefinable.”
When the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution in 1791, it explicitly protected human rights: speech, religion, assembly, due process, and trial by jury. These were what the Founders considered “natural rights” given to us by what the Declaration of Independence calls “Nature’s God” to human beings, not artificial privileges for legal fictions called corporations.
The Founders would have ridiculed—or been horrified by—the idea that a corporation, a piece of paper, a legal abstraction, could ever achieve the same rights as human beings.
Jefferson’s Warning
Thomas Jefferson never stopped worrying about corporate power. In letter after letter, he warned about the danger of “moneyed corporations” becoming a new aristocracy.
In 1816, Jefferson wrote: “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
Jefferson saw it coming, though, during the 1820s, after his presidency, as the country experienced explosive growth and the first steam-powered railroads emerged. Banks, manufacturing corporations, southern plantations, and the New York trading companies were accumulating dangerous levels of power. They were buying politicians, manipulating markets, and acting as if they were above democratic control.
Jefferson’s solution was strict regulation and charter revocation for corporations that violated the public interest. Like every other one of the Founders, he never once suggested corporations should have the constitutional rights he and his peers had put their lives on the line for; that would have seemed insane to him.
Jefferson and his peers understood something that over a century of corporate constitutional rights has caused us to forget: corporations exist solely at the pleasure of the people acting through state governments. We create them. We can constrain them. We can destroy them. They have no inherent right to exist, just the privileges that we grant them.
Madison’s Insights
James Madison, who drafted much of the Constitution, also understood the danger of concentrated economic power, particularly when it was combined with political influence.
In Federalist No. 10, Madison warned about “factions,” groups he defined as having interests “adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” He and his colleagues in the Convention of 1787 designed the Constitution’s checks and balances explicitly to prevent any single faction from dominating our government.
But Madison could barely have imagined corporations as large as modern multinationals. The biggest corporations in 1788 America were tiny compared to the British East India Company, which Madison and the others had seen as a dangerous aberration worth fighting a war against, not a model for the future of their new republic.
Madison’s design of the Constitution assumed that economic power would be relatively dispersed and that governments would control corporations, not the other way around.
Corporate constitutional rights, established in the late 1880s, however, reversed this. Instead of government controlling corporations, a corrupt Supreme Court justice and his court reporter henchman gave corporations the constitutional weapons they’d eventually use to fight virtually any semblance of government control.
The Early State Experience
The first American states took seriously their power to control corporations. In the early republic, state legislatures granted corporate charters sparingly and with extraordinarily strict conditions. Corporate charters were required to specify the purpose of the corporation, and it couldn’t do anything else. They specified how long the corporation could exist, typically twenty to thirty years (none were established in perpetuity). They defined how much capital a company could control, where it could operate, what it could own, who could serve as directors, and what reports it had to file.
Throughout the nineteenth century, state legislatures regularly revoked charters of corporations that violated their terms or acted against the public interest. The corporate death sentence was a real possibility and was frequently invoked.
In the minds of these early politicians, this wasn’t anti-business: it was a new American democracy controlling its own artificial-person creations.
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other states revoked dozens of corporate charters in the 1800s for various offenses: failure to serve the public interest, corruption, violation of charter terms, or simply because the legislature decided the corporation was no longer needed.
Corporations were simply viewed as tools of commerce, and when a tool broke or became dangerous, you threw it away.
What Changed
Two things destroyed this system of state-level democratic corporate control.
First, after the Civil War, states began competing for the revenue that could be had from corporate charter fees, employment, and taxes on business activities. In response to a challenge to Ohio’s corporate antitrust laws by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust, New Jersey pioneered “charter mongering,” offering weak regulations and low taxes to attract corporate charters. Other states followed (including Delaware, where more than half of American corporations are today chartered), and a race to the bottom began during what’s today referred to as the “Chartermongering Era.”
Second, the adoption of the Santa Clara headnote by the Supreme Court in the 1890s gave corporations constitutional rights that made state control much harder. Once corporations could claim due process, equal protection, privacy, free speech, and other constitutional rights, revoking charters became legally complex and, with the largest corporations, extraordinarily expensive.
The combination proved deadly to democracy. Weak state regulations plus corporate constitutional rights brought late nineteenth-century America corporate power and the rise of dynastic wealth, all without democratic accountability.
The Founders had designed a system to prevent exactly this outcome, but Davis’s and Field’s corporate constitutional rights destroyed it.
From the Founders to FDR
The Founders’ vision of economic freedom, of citizens owning their own labor and controlling their own destinies, didn’t die with corporate constitutional rights in the 1890s. It went underground, waiting for the right moment to reemerge.
That moment came in 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in the depths of the Republican Great Depression.
FDR understood what the Founders both knew and proclaimed: that economic security is the foundation of political freedom. “Necessitous men are not free men,” he repeatedly declared. People who are hungry, out of a job, or who can’t afford a doctor or a home, are not truly free, he said, no matter what rights the Constitution guarantees them on paper.
Roosevelt built on the Founders’ vision to create the American Dream in its modern form with a massive collection of nation-changing laws and government agencies he called The New Deal. They included the right to a job that paid a living wage, the right to organize and bargain collectively, the right to a secure retirement, and the right to access a basic social safety net that kept job losses or natural disasters from destroying families.
By 1981, that vision had become reality for two-thirds of American families. A single income could support a family, and you could buy a house for three times your annual salary. College was affordable, even with a part-time job (as I experienced). Healthcare didn’t bankrupt people, and, with Social Security and Medicare, retirement was finally secure.
Most of the Founders would have lauded this new America that FDR brought about and LBJ fine-tuned. Over loud Republican objections to the right to unionize, the minimum wage, Social Security, and pretty much every other New Deal and Great Society program, we finally became the nation of independent, economically secure citizens they’d envisioned, updated for the industrial age.
But corporate constitutional rights remained embedded in the law, a time bomb planted in 1886. Thus, when Ronald Reagan activated it in 1981, the American Dream began to die.
Recovering the Founders’ Vision
The Founders got it right: Corporations can be useful tools, but they must be controlled by democratic governance for the benefit of society as well as their wealthy owners. They’d have no inherent rights, only granted privileges. And when they abused those privileges, they’d be constrained or even destroyed.
The doctrine of corporate constitutional rights Davis and Field kicked off in 1886 turned this vision upside down, giving corporations constitutional weapons first designed exclusively for humans that they could use to fight back efforts at democratic control. It transformed them from servants of the public into our modern-day masters.
Undoing corporate constitutional rights means recovering the Founders’ vision, returning corporations to their proper place as tools of society, not rulers of society. It means restoring the economic freedom and affordability that makes political freedom possible.
It means, in short, rebuilding the American Dream.
But before we can rebuild our nation and our middle class, we first must understand how completely corporate constitutional rights have corrupted our democracy. The story of that corruption reached its climax in 2010, with the Supreme Court’s unscrupulous decision by five on-the-take Republicans on the Court in Citizens United. That decision, more than any others, shows us what happens when the fraud of 1886 is taken to its logical conclusion.
https://www.amazon.com/Merchant-Kings-Companies-Ruled-1600-1900/dp/0312616112
KPFA Special – The Corporate Origins of Colonialism: The East India Company
https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-02-22-24/
vid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHGPS2bAGOY&t=7s
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02.22.24 - 10:00AM Guest: William Dalrymple is the author of The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire. The Anti-Colonial Pack $475 Includes: A History of Modern Palestine by Ilan Pappe The Rebel’s Clinic by Adam Shatz The Wretched of the Earth (60th Anniversary Edition) by Frantz Fanon The Anarchy by William Dalrymple … Continued
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BTB https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-most-evil-company-29798452/
Sharpe's Triumph is the second historical novel in the Richard Sharpe series by Bernard Cornwell, first published in 1998. ... Whilst Sharpe and his men rest, a company of East India
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Adam Hochschild
June 8, 2012
In the great reach for colonies that Europe began hundreds of years ago, at center stage were several curious entities that wielded more power than many governments. The United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies (commonly known as the East India Company) and its counterpart, the Dutch East India Company, fielded their own warships and armies, coined money and ruled territory eventually taken over by Britain and the Netherlands. Later, the seizure of land by Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company also preceded the spread of British pink across the map.
Centuries from now, historians sweltering away on an overheated planet and looking back to our own times will surely see multinational oil companies as similar players. The way they’re reshaping today’s world, however, is not by carving out future colonies, but by searching for the oil and gas we’re so hungry for in ever more risky places: beneath oceans, in Canadian tar sands, in underground rock formations that require “fracking” and in the environmentally fragile Arctic waters newly accessible as the polar ice cap shrinks — thanks, of course, to our addiction to fossil fuels. That addiction is likely to change the very level of the seas the East India Company’s ships sailed in their hunt for cloth and spices, and the floods and droughts ahead may set in motion desperate migrations dwarfing those of colonial times.
Steve Coll’s mammoth portrait of Exxon Mobil, “Private Empire,” abounds in empire-size figures. In the first half of last year alone, the company’s profits were $21.3 billion. When the chief executive Lee Raymond stepped down a few years ago, his retirement package was worth $398 million. If revenue were counted as gross domestic product, the corporation would rank among the top 30 countries. Unsurprisingly, Exxon Mobil runs one of Washington’s biggest lobbying operations, with not only a well-staffed office on K Street (where a Democratic director was smoothly brought in to replace a Republican after the 2008 elections) but some 20 additional former senators, representatives, legislative aides and others under contract.
Yet this book isn’t so much a story of Exxon Mobil’s influence over the American government. Rather, it’s a picture of a corporation so large and powerful — operating in some 200 nations and territories — that it really has its own foreign policy.
Coll quotes a 1999 cable from the United States Embassy in Chad noting that Exxon was ignoring American diplomats there. He then asks: “And why should it be otherwise? Exxon Mobil’s investments in the Chad-Cameroon oil project would amount to $4.2 billion. Annual aid to Chad from the United States was only about $3 million.”
Exxon Mobil’s foreign policy, orchestrated by a political division including National Security Council and State Department alumni, sometimes coincides with that of the United States, and sometimes diverges. For example, the corporation had no enthusiasm for invading Iraq. Yes, Iraq has all that oil, but with most remaining reserves ever harder to get at, oil executives knew that whoever ran Iraq would ultimately depend on the technology and capital of the Exxon Mobils of the world. And yes, it might have been nice to own Iraqi oil wells outright, but long-term stability and security mattered more.
Today, although the company has billions invested in tearing up wetlands and forests to extract oil from Alberta’s tar sands, it doesn’t much care whether an expanded pipeline system that would stretch from Canada to the Gulf Coast gets the go-ahead from the Obama administration. If Exxon Mobil can’t send that oil to the United States, it can easily sell it to Japan or China.
Just like the British South Africa Company, which pioneered the use of Hiram Maxim’s machine gun during the Matabele War, Exxon Mobil has its own armies— and, in these days of outsourcing, also hires those of others. In Chad, its 2,500 security men patrolled the countryside in white radio-equipped S.U.V.’s, watching for guerrillas as the company set up an intelligence operation bigger and better than the local C.I.A. station. In the war-racked Niger Delta, it gave boats to the Nigerian Navy, deployed its own vessels at sea to scout for pirates and “recruited, paid, supplied and managed sections of the Nigerian military and police.”On their uniforms, the Nigerian police sported Mobil’s familiar red flying horse. In Aceh, Indonesia, Mobil paid the salaries of Indonesian counterinsurgency forces who tortured and murdered prisoners on company property. Payments kept flowing even after the American government cut off aid to the Indonesian military because of such abuses
omg
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/steve-bannon-war-afghanistan
So according to Donald Trump Jr.’s own emails it looks like he, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort knowingly met with a woman said to be representing the Russian government who was peddling derogatory information about Hillary Clinton. Whether that constitutes a crime is still unknown, but it proves that the Trump campaign was at best dumb as rocks, and at worst willing to collude with a foreign government to win an election in return for God knows what.
That story has sent an electric shock through Washington with tales of a White House in chaos and a Shakespearean family drama unfolding before our eyes. The president has uncharacteristically withdrawn from public sight as his son and son-in-law become the central players in the scandal with speculation running rampant about who is leaking the information and why.
Ever since President Trump’s inauguration there has been a tremendous amount of palace intrigue with factions loyal to Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon fighting for influence alongside whichever policy advisers and cabinet officials happen to be relevant that particular week. The Russia scandal has implicated Kushner in ways that make him especially vulnerable, however, and Bannon appears to be filling the vacuum.
According New York Magazine’s Joshua Green, who has been following Bannon for years and has a new book coming out on the subject called “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency,” Bannon is fully back in the fold after a few shaky months and he’s advising Trump to fight and win by any means necessary. Green reports that the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the recent moves on immigration and Trump’s Warsaw speech are all signs that Bannon’s influence is once again on the rise. He notes that Bannon, so far, is personally untouched by the Russia scandal:
Bannon’s feud with Kushner has quieted down. And so far, while at least ten White House officials and former aides, including Kushner, have retained lawyers in the special counsel’s probe, distancing themselves from Trump, Bannon is not among them.
Instead, he’s back in the bunker alongside a boss who is often angry, always under fire, and, on the matter of Russia, increasingly isolated from all but a handful of advisers and family members.
Green calls Bannon “Trump’s indispensable henchman, the man he turns to when everything’s going to hell,” and says he is in charge of Trump’s “war room.” That has largely been concentrated on assassinating the character of Robert Mueller, which Bannon evidently sees as the fight’s most important priority.
In a startling story that got overlooked this week amid all the Don Jr. email excitement, the New York Times reported that Bannon and Kushner have been dabbling in real war planning as well:
Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen A. Feinberg, a billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, have developed proposals to rely on contractors instead of American troops in Afghanistan at the behest of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law,according to people briefed on the conversations. On Saturday morning, Mr. Bannon sought out Defense Secretary Jim Mattis at the Pentagon to try to get a hearing for their ideas, an American official said.
I wrote about Prince’s relationship with Trump a few months ago. They’re close enough that Prince was with Trump and the family on election night. Prince has also been implicated in the Russian scandal, according to the Washington Post, having arranged a secret meeting in the Seychelles Islands with an emissary from Vladimir Putin to set up a back channel between the two presidents. Prince is also currently under investigation by the Justice Department and other federal agencies for money laundering and attempts to broker military services to foreign governments. His history of running a criminal operation in Iraq is well known, but he seems to have landed on his feet. It’s easy to see why Trump has such a high regard for him. He’s almost like family.
Prince wrote about his plan in the Wall Street Journal in May, suggesting that the president appoint a “viceroy” for Afghanistan, using the colonial model of the East India Company to illustrate his idea. Salon’s Matthew Pulver explained how Prince planned to bring this idea up to date:
The British East India Company was not simply a mercenary army like his Blackwater but an armed corporation that colonized like a state power. It was not merely a government contractor like Blackwater but an autonomous military and administrative entity sharing the worst aspects of both the corporation and the imperial state. So, Prince’s first innovation is to do away with civilian-military control administered by the Department of Defense and overseen by civilian, elected leadership, as is currently in place, and replace that apparatus with an armed corporation.
The second innovation will be to use cheap local labor paid for by resource extraction. Pulver wrote:
“There’s a trillion dollars in value in the ground: mining, minerals, and another trillion in oil and gas,” Prince says of Afghanistan. This would provide the revenue stream to replace government contracts. Prince’s firm would be self-funded, self-reliant, and thus autonomous to a degree more similar to a nation-state than a military contractor like Blackwater serving under a defense department.
I have long believed that the notion Trump is an isolationist is a grave misunderstanding.
, who believes we should “take the oil” because “to the victors belong the spoils.” Lately, it’s become less clear that Bannon’s “nationalism” is aligned with America rather than some vague (and racist) notion of “the West.” It looks more and more as if Trump’s loyalties lie wherever the Trump Organization has a real estate or licensing deal. Prince’s plan sounds like it’s a perfect fit for both of them.
Thankfully, according to the New York Times, Secretary Mattis “listened politely” but told Bannon that he had no intention of including this daft idea into the review of Afghanistan policy that he and national security adviser H.R. McMaster are leading. Let’s just hope that Bannon and Trump are now so immersed in their Russia scandal “war” plans that they lose interest in privatizing a real one.
digby
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ref http://www.salon.com/2017/06/03/erik-princes-dark-plan-for-afghanistan-military-occupation-for-profit-not-security/
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Robins, Nick. 2006. The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company
Shaped the Modern Multinational. London: Pluto Press.
uber1
https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-601
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Rose Monckton co
The origin of the diamond is not known . Most historians however believe it was mined in the Kollur Mine in the Guntur District, of Andhra Pradesh in India during the reign of the Kakatiya dynasty,[3][6] which had installed it in a temple of a Hindu goddess as her eye.[3] In the early 14th century, the army of Turkic Khilji dynasty began raiding kingdoms of southern India for loot (war spoils).[7][8] Malik Kafur, Alauddin Khilji's general, made a successful raid on Warangal in 1310[9] where he might have acquired the Koh-i-noor diamond.[10][11] The diamond remained with Khilji dynasty, and later passed on to the succeeding dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate, until it came into the possession of Babur, a Turco-Mongol war lord, who invaded India and established theMughal Empire in 1526. He called the stone 'the Diamond of Bābur' at the time, although it had been called by other names before it came into his possession. Both Babur and his son and successor, Humayun mention in their memoirs the origins of 'the Diamond of Bābur'.
The valuation of the Koh-i-Noor is given in the legend that one of Nader Shah's consorts supposedly said, "If a strong man should take five stones, and throw one north, one south, one east, and one west, and the last straight up into the air, and the space between filled with gold and gems, that would equal the value of the Koh-i-Noor."Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor. Shah Jahan, famous for building the Taj Mahal in Agra, had the stone placed into his ornate Peacock Throne. His son, Aurangazeb, imprisoned his ailing father at nearby Agra Fort. While in the possession of Aurangazeb, it was cut by Hortenso Borgia, a Venetian lapidary, who was so clumsy that he reduced the weight of the stone to 186 carats.[12]Legend has it that he had the Koh-i-Noor positioned near a window so that Shāh Jahān could see the Tāj Mahal only by looking at its reflection in the stone. Following the invasion of Nadir Shah, the Turkic ruler of Afsharid Persia in 1739 and the sacking of Agra and Delhi. Along with the Peacock Throne, he also carried off the Koh-i-Noor to Persia in 1739. It was allegedly Nādir Shāh who exclaimed Koh-i-Noor! when he finally managed to obtain the famous stone,[4] and this is how the stone gained its present name. There is no reference to this name before 1739.
After the assassination of Nādir Shāh in 1747, the stone came into the hands of his general, Ahmad Shāh Durrānī, who later became the Emir of Afghanistan. In 1830, Shujāh Shāh Durrānī, the deposed Emir of Afghanistan and a descendant of Ahmad Shah Durrani, managed to flee with the diamond. He went to Lahore where the Sikh Maharaja Ranjit Singh forced him to surrender the stone and took its possession.[13]
Appropriation by the British[
Maharaja Ranjit Singh was the founder and ruler of the Sikh Empire based in the Punjab region of India. However, after his death in 1839 the British administrators did not execute his will.[14] On 29 March 1849, the British raised their flag on the citadel of Lahore and the Punjab was formally proclaimed part of the British Company rule in India. One of the terms of the Treaty of Lahore, the legal agreement formalising this occupation, was as follows:
The gem called the Koh-i-Noor which was surrenderd by Shah Shuja-ul-Mulk to Maharajah Ranjit Singh and then surrendered by the Maharajah of Lahore to the Queen of England.
:{
The Court [of the East India Company]you say, are ruffled by my having caused the Maharajah to cede to the Queen the Koh-i-noor; while the 'Daily News' and my Lord Ellenborough [Governor-General of India, 1841-44] are indignant because I did not confiscate everything to her Majesty... [My] motive was simply this: that it was more for the honour of the Queen that the Koh-i-noor should be surrendered directly from the hand of the conquered prince into the hands of the sovereign who was his conqueror, than it should be presented to her as a gift—which is always a favour—by any joint-stock company among her subjects. So the Court ought to feel.[15]}:The Governor-General^ in charge of the ratification for this treaty was Lord Dalhousie. He, more than anyone, was responsible for the British ownership of the Koh-i-Noor as a token of British rule, in which he continued to show great interest for the rest of his life. Dalhousie's work in India was primarily aimed at development of Indian assets by the British East India Company. His confiscation of the diamond, amongst many other things, was criticized even by some of his contemporaries in Britain. Although some suggested that the diamond should have been presented as a gift to the Queen, it is clear that Dalhousie felt strongly that the stone was a spoil of war, and treated it accordingly. Writing to his friend Sir George Cooper in August 1849, he stated:
Dalhousie arranged that the diamond be presented by Maharaja Ranjīt Singh's young successor,Dulīp Singh, to Queen Victoria in 1850. Dulīp Singh was the youngest son of Ranjīt Singh and his fifth wife Maharani Jind Kaur. Dulīp, aged 13, travelled to the United Kingdom to present the jewel. The presentation of the Koh-i-Noor and the Timur ruby to Queen Victoria was the latest in the long history of transfers of the stones as a spoil of war. Dulīp Singh had been placed in the guardianship of Dr Login, a surgeon in the British Army serving in West Bengal, East India. Dr Login, his wife Lena and the young Dulīp Singh travelled to England for the ceremony.