The legal form of the contemporary for-profit, limited-liability corporation of global reach is an invention of imperial kings who contracted out to private entities the work of colonizing and exploiting the resources, labor, and markets of distant peoples beyond the reach and oversight of parliaments. The design, by intent, allowed the virtually unlimited concentration of financial power accountable solely to the monarch and a group of favored private investors. Generations of corporate lawyers have worked diligently since to preserve and expand the legal privileges of for-profit corporations, narrow their purpose to the single goal of profit making, and shield them from liability for the harms they cause.


The notorious British East India Company chartered in 1600 by the British Crown was the original model. It conducted a thriving drug trade in China that precipitated the Opium War of 1839 and ruled India for many years as if a private estate. The Dutch crown chartered the United East India Company in 1602 and vested it with sovereign powers to conclude treaties and alliances, maintain armed forces, conquer territory, and build forts to establish and enforce a monopoly over Dutch trade in the lands and waters eastward from the southern tip of Africa to the southern tip of South America. These corporations were essentially criminal syndicates officially sanctioned by their home jurisdiction to engage in activities in foreign jurisdictions that would be subject to severe criminal penalties if carried out in their own country. 



Through a serious distortion of legal reasoning, a corporate-friendly U.S. Supreme Court has over more than a century issued a series of legally and morally flawed decisions that interpret the rights guaranteed to natural born persons by the Constitution as applying equally to corporations. These decisions belie the reality that corporations are artificial legal entities created when a government issues a charter. The idea that corporations should have the same Constitutional rights as natural born persons, yet enjoy special exemptions from the responsibilities of citizenship and morality expected of natural born persons turns logical, legal, and moral reasoning on its head. To achieve true democracy this legal travesty must be eliminated.