What is a corporation?

Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked?
-Edward, First Baron Thurlow 1731-1806

A ‘corp’ is a soulless body, it refers to pure matter and it is where the term ‘corpse’ comes from. When we add the second part of the word 'oration', it is assumed that we are talking about a corpse 'orating’ (speaking). But that is to say that we bring something that is inanimate into being, into life. The fiction is made animate, it is given an ‘anima’, a soul. This terminology indicates the assumption that there can exist something that has one foot in the living and the other in the dead or fictitional. The consequences of incorporating living beings or their minds are challenging, as we shall see.

The Modern Corporation has its roots in Roman Law. 

In the documentary 'The Corporation' Noam Chomsky (7:30) explains that “originally, [corporations] were associations of people chartered by the state to perform some particular function, i.e. building a bridge.” Mary Zepernick (7:52) continues by saying that “there were very few chartered corporations in early United States history, and the ones that existed had clear stipulations in their state-issued charters. How long they could operate; the amount of capitalisation; what they did or made or maintained was in their charter and they did not do anything else; they did not own or could not own another corporation; their shareholders were liable; and so on”. The documentary continues with Richard Grossman (8:22) stating that “in both law and the culture, the corporation was considered a subordinated entity that was a gift from the people in order to serve the public good”. 

However, something changed after the civil war in the United States. As Howard Zin (9:17) explains: “the 14^th Amendment was passed to give equal rights to black people and therefore it said 'no state can deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of the law'. That was intended to prevent the state from taking away life, liberty and property from black people as they had done for so much of our history. But what happened is that corporations came into court and said: you cannot deprive a person of life, liberty and property, we are a person, a corporation is a person! And the Supreme Court went along with that.”

Mary Zepernick (10:02) argues that “what was particularly grotesque about this is that the 14th amendment was passed to protect newly freed slaves, and so for instance between 1890 and 1910 there were 307 cases brought before the court under the 14^th Amendment, 288 of those cases were brought by corporations and 19 by African Americans.” At that point, Noam Chomsky (12:25) states: “corporations were given the rights of mortal persons, but they were special kinds of persons, those persons had no moral conscience. These are special kind of persons which are designed by law to be concerned only for their stockholders and not for what is commonly called stakeholders; which is the community or the workforce.”

This is the type of corporations that we see nowadays. Only the psychopathic type, which are the ones that would put their objective above anything and anyone else. These are the type of corporations that survive in a system that is structurally designed in a psychopathic manner. In legal terms, this is called 'limited liability' and it basically means to have rights and benefits without having to deal with the consequences of one's actions. This is really well explained in the scene on the 'legal person' of that documentary. 

We have been co-existing with fictions which 'have' men's rights for a long time now, but what happened in 1929 was specially relevant to our situation now. KL at Crrow777- Episode 256 explains that "following the crash of the stock market, the state only had the people to collateralise their debts but to tax natural people was slavery under the Constitutions and that would have been illegal. However, the certificate of life birth provided a system in which the incorporated people could be taxed because corporations can indeed be taxed".

Now not only corporations act as 'persons before the law', but the system altogether is treating living beings as dead entities, mere legal things to be taxed and enslaved in a extremelly more subtile manner. And as such, people started to inpersonate their characters, assume their personas and act as patriotic citizens or as dependent children of the state. The child-like roles fit perfectly the incorporated 'limited liability' state, the mere beneficiary of the trust, the one who is liable to pay and obey (duties) and receives benefits ('rights' which are really privileges for obedient behaviour) from father state. He cannot and will not understand and because of that position taken, he cannot be left in charge of the decision-making process; in fact, he needs to be alienated from it as he is not even interested in it. Voting every four years will do. That is why, even after the horrific acts of WW2 and the consequent Nuremberg Code, this attitude of 'I am just doing my job' is still permeating society, because it is inherent in the system we ourselves consent to. 

Persons can be and are corporations; governments can be and are corporations. Where does that leave us? If corporations are the 'dead speaking' purely interested in psychopathic profit, perhaps we should rethink what we are assumed and choose to 'be'.