Random thought: Would our founding Fathers ever have let themselves

[rurallib]

or their country get so beholden and subservient to corporations? Especially oil?
The reason I ask is that the baggers are always invoking the founders as backing their views. I can not imagine any of them allowing any group or other country having such a grip on them.
And I can imagine that the oil spill, the mine cave in, the dependence on the Arab oil etc, etc would bring forth some truly fiery rhetoric.

[Speck Tater]

1. You talk as if "Our Founding Fathers" were of a single mind on ANYTHING.

It took them almost a year to even agree to declare independence, and even then it wasn't unanimous until some delegates just didn't show up to vote against it. After that it was the Tory's and the Republicans, and all manner of other independents not just disagreeing and failing to find consensus, but breaking into outright fist fights over every issue that was brought up. In fact, John Hancock would have liked to give MORE control to the corporations.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

2. You mean the ones that owned slaves, or the ones that didn't?

[LanternWaste]

3. Probably both...

Probably both... as I doubt either group would want to have "any group or other country having such a grip on them."

[PoiBoy]

4. Here's a good read on the subject, IMO...

A Thom Hartmann interview from way back in 2005...

http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/01/int05004.html


<snip>
The extraordinary experiment that was the basis of American democracy in a constitutionally limited republic was to flip this pyramid upside down. The Founders of this republic said in the Declaration of Independence, and the Framers of the Constitution proclaimed in the preamble to the Constitution, that humans -- "all men" to quote the Declaration, "We the People" to quote the Constitution -- were the sole holders of rights from that point forward.

This was firmly nailed into the Constitution by the addition of the Bill of Rights, which gave humans a huge club they could use to beat back government if it ever were to become oppressive.

Thus, with the founding of America, for the first time, only humans could hold rights. Institutions -- churches, civic groups, corporations, clubs, even government itself -- held only privileges. Of course, you'd want government -- that is, We the People through our elected representatives -- to control the privileges of institutions like corporations. And that's what we did. For example, to prevent kingdom-like accumulations of wealth that could, as Jefferson noted, "threaten the state" itself, corporations in the first hundred or so years of this nation couldn't exist longer than 40 years, and then had to be dissolved. Their first purpose had to be to serve the public, and their second purpose to make money. Their books and all their activities had to be fully open and available to inspection by We the People. Their officers and directors could be held personally liable for crimes committed by the corporation.

This held as a legal doctrine until the end of the 1800s, and even after that largely held until the Reagan Revolution, when corporations began reaching back to an obscure headnote written by a corrupt Supreme Court clerk in an otherwise obscure railroad tax case in 1886.
<end>

Hartmann's book, "Unequal Protection" is an excellent and well researched book.

Also, read on in the interview... Thom describes an interesting segment on the Boston Tea Party and it's origins...

GREAT stuff for any who are interested...



:hi:

[AuntPatsy]

6. Your post deserves its own thread...

[cbdo2007]

5. Unfortunately, probably so.

They were all of the wealthy elite, even back in their day, so I could definitely see them going where the money is.

Some of them probably not but most of them will just follow the money. That's what's happened in all civilizations since the beginning of humanity and will probably be what always does happen.

[RainDog]

7. no. they thought the free exchange of information (a form of "goods")

was so important to the health of democracy that they created a copyright law that existed for a short amount of time - to allow the author to benefit from his/her work, allow publishers to recover their costs and have some cash to publish new work...

and then things were available for the public good.

What has been lost since the Reagan revulsionlution is the concept of the public good as a source of STRENGTH for this nation.

I am hoping that this new generation realizes the damage this has done to this nation - from things like keeping public infrastructure intact to policy designed to favor local energy generation over big oil.