Published on Wednesday, December 11, 2002 by CommonDreams.org

The Railroad Barons Are Back - And This Time They'll Finish the Job
by Thom Hartmann

The railroad barons first tried to infiltrate the halls of government in the early years after the Civil War.

The efforts of these men, particularly Jay Gould, brought the Ulysses Grant administration into such disrepute, as a result of what were then called "the railroad bribery scandals," that Grant's own Republican party refused to renominate him for the third term he wanted and ran Rutherford B. Hayes instead. As the whitehouse.gov website says of Grant, "Looking to Congress for direction, he seemed bewildered. One visitor to the White House noted 'a puzzled pathos, as of a man with a problem before him of which he does not understand the terms.'"

Although their misbehaviors with the administration and Congress were exposed, the railroad barons of the era were successful in a coup against the Supreme Court. One of their own was the Reporter for the Supreme Court, and they courted Justice Stephen Field with, among other things, the possibility of support for a presidential run. In the National Archives, we also recently found letters from the railroads offering free trips and other benefits to the 1886 Court's Chief Justice, Morrison R. Waite.

Waite, however, didn't give in: he refused to rule the railroad corporations were persons in the same category as humans. Thus, the railroad barons resorted to plan B: they got human rights for corporations inserted in the Court Reporter's headnotes in the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case, even though the court itself (over Field's strong objections) had chosen not to rule on the constitutionality of the railroad's corporate claims to human rights.

And, based on the Reporter's headnotes (and ignoring the actual ruling), subsequent Courts have expanded those human rights for corporations. These now include the First Amendment human right of free speech (including corporate "speech" to influence politics - something that was a felony in most states prior to 1886), the Fourth Amendment human right to privacy (so a chemical company has successfully sued to prevent the EPA from performing surprise inspections - while retaining the right to perform surprise inspections of its own employees' bodily fluids and phone conversations), and the 14th Amendment right to live free of discrimination (using the free-the-slaves 14th Amendment, corporations have claimed discrimination to block local community efforts to pass "bad boy laws" or keep out predatory retailers).

Interestingly, unions don't have these human rights. Neither do churches, or smaller, unincorporated businesses. Nor do partnerships or civic groups. Nor, even, do governments, be they local, state, or federal.

And, from the founding of the United States, neither did corporations. Rights were the sole province of humans.

As the father of the Constitution, President James Madison, wrote, "There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by... corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses." It's one of the reasons why the word "corporation" doesn't exist in the constitution - they were to be chartered only by states, so local people could keep a close eye on them.

Early state laws (and, later, federal anti-trust laws) forbade corporations from owning other corporations, particularly in the media. In 1806, President Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." He was so strongly opposed to corporations owning other corporations or gaining monopolies of the media that, when the Constitution was submitted for ratification, he and Madison proposed an 11th Amendment to the Constitution that would "ban commercial monopolies." The Convention shot it down as unnecessary because state laws against corporate monopolies already existed.

But corporations grew, and began to flex their muscle. Politicians who believed in republican democracy were alarmed by the possibility of a new feudalism, a state run by and to the benefit of powerful private interests.

President Andrew Jackson, in a speech to Congress, said, "In this point of the case the question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages [votes] or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions."

And the president who followed him, Martin Van Buren, added in his annual address to Congress: "I am more than ever convinced of the dangers to which the free and unbiased exercise of political opinion - the only sure foundation and safeguard of republican government - would be exposed by any further increase of the already overgrown influence of corporate authorities."

Even Abraham Lincoln weighed in, writing, "We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. The best blood of the flower of American youth has been freely offered upon our country's altar that the nation might live. It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.

"As a result of the war," Lincoln continued, "corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless." Lincoln held the largest corporations - the railroads - at bay until his assassination.

But then came the railroad barons, vastly enriched by the Civil War.

They began brining case after case before the Supreme Court, asserting that the 14th Amendment - passed after the war to free the slaves - should also free them.

For example, in 1873, one of the first Supreme Court rulings on the Fourteenth Amendment, which had passed only five years earlier, involved not slaves but the railroads. Justice Samuel F. Miller minced no words in chastising corporations for trying to claim the rights of human beings.

The fourteenth amendment's "one pervading purpose," he wrote in the majority opinion, "was the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppression of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him."

But the railroad barons represented the most powerful corporations in America, and they were incredibly tenacious. They mounted challenge after challenge before the Court, claiming the 14th Amendment should grant them human rights under the Bill of Rights (but not grant such rights to unions, churches, small companies, or governments). Finally, in 1886, the Court's reporter defied his own Chief Justice and improperly wrote a headnote that moved corporations out of the privileges category and gave them rights - an equal status with humans. (Last year we found the correspondence between the two in the National Archives and put it on the web. By the time the Reporter's headnotes were published, the Chief Justice was dead.)

On December 3, 1888, President Grover Cleveland delivered his annual address to Congress. Apparently Cleveland had taken notice of the Santa Clara County Supreme Court headnote, its politics, and its consequences, for he said in his speech to the nation, delivered before a joint session of Congress: "As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."

The Founders of America were clear when they wrote the Bill of Rights that humans had rights, and when humans got together to form any sort of group - including corporations, churches, unions, fraternal organizations, and even governments themselves - that those forms of human association had only privileges which were determined and granted by the very human "We, The People."

But, as if by magic, even though in the Santa Clara case the Supreme Court did not rule on any constitutional issues (read the case!), the Court's reporter rewrote the American Constitution at the behest of the railroad barons and moved a single form of human association - corporations - from the privileges category into the rights category. All others, to this day, still only have privileges. But individual citizen voters must now politically compete with corporations on an equal footing - even though a corporation can live forever, doesn't need to breathe clean air, doesn't fear jail, can change its citizenship in an hour, and can own others of its own kind.

Theodore Roosevelt looked at this situation and bluntly said, in April of 1906, "Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."

And so now, corporate-friendly Michael Powell's FCC is moving toward lifting the last tattered restrictions on media ownership, allowing absolute concentration of the voices we hear into a tiny number of corporate hands.

Any day now a case involving a multinational corporation claiming the right to deceive people in its PR - its 1st Amendment right of free speech - may be coming before the Supreme Court. (The New York Times corporation editorialized on December 10th that corporations must have free speech rights: the lines are being drawn.)

As much as half the federal workforce is slated to be replaced by corporate workers under a new Bush edict. Government (which doesn't have constitutional human rights of privacy, and so is answerable to We, The People) will then be able to use corporate-4th-Amendment-human-rights of privacy to hide what those workers do and how they do it from the prying eyes of citizens and voters. In a similar fashion, corporate-owned and thus unaccountable-to-the-people voting machines are being installed nationwide; in the last election these machines often produced vote results so different from the polls that pollsters who have been successfully calling elections for over 50 years threw up their hands and closed shop.

This administration is set to complete what the railroad barons pushed the Grant administration to start: to take democracy and its institutions of governance from the hands of the human citizen/voters the Founders fought and died for, and give it to the very types of monopolistic corporations the Founders fought against when they led the Tea Party revolt against the East India Company in Boston Harbor in 1773.

And, in the ultimate irony, the new man in charge of economic policy as Secretary of the Treasury will be a multi-millionaire Bush campaign contributor, chairman of The Business Roundtable (an elite corps of 100 of the nation's most powerful corporate CEOs), and, himself, a railroad baron.

Thom Hartmann is the author of "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights" - www.unequalprotection.com and www.thomhartmann.com. Permission is granted to reprint this article in print or web media, so long as this credit is attached.

Kennedy knew of our fate and wanted to warn us, and he was eliminated just 10 days after making mention of this fact. This was decades ago, fast forward and what we now witness, is the fruit of their evil seeds. Believe it or not, it is "The Fourth Reich and New World Order" that now has control of what we fondly called "The Land Of The Free". Free to take from us all they possibly can, regardless of the colateral damage. By the time this "adminsitration" leaves office, there will be no middle class, and that will be the minor damage! Handmaidens tale coming up...

WE THE PEOPLE SHOULD DEMAND THE IMPEACHMENT OF BUSH and (his fathers) ADMINSTRATION AND BOOT OUT, THE LAW BREAKING SUPREME COURT!!!!

This is a must-listen interview of Mr. Hartmann, talking about his book, "Unequal Protection." The interview is only 30 minutes long and it gives you a feel for what this guy is about -- and the story behind the book. I highly recommend it, to provide context and a qualitative addition to simple text, per the above. You can find it here:

http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=5598

I've got a problem with this Kennedy quote. Now, understand, I'm not some David Corn Nation Magazine dupe. I know there are conspiracies. I also know that there are sloppy thinkers that like to make the real researchers marginalized by jumping on any bit of info without investigation.

I wrote the below at another website. The segment and the original article that I'm responding to can be found at the URL below. I would very much like to find someone that can comment more and provide substance. The fact that the person that posted the original article I'm commenting on below slipped in the Kennedy quote in the work of someone else is just one example of shit journalism and stupidity -- if you're going to present your ideas in a public forum, my rule is that one should take care to do it in a way that removes any opportunity for others to discredit, while at the same time, makes every effort to present the information in a way that can help people find documented attribution of statements, and the attribution of where certain theories have been developed. I know it's not possible to hold up to that ideal perfect because it takes much work, and I'm not picking on you for posting the above. I'm just saying that you and we all must be aware that we can strive for certain ideals, even if we don't hit that target at all times.

Now, my article and the original article I'm commenting on:

----------------




http://www.memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1357




Re: Re: A Brief (But Creepy) History of America's Creeping Fascism (Score: 0)
by Anonymeme on Dec 10, 2002 - 08:08 AM
A little conspiracy with one's coffee is a good thing. Conspiracies exist. But fluffy fat-ass brain cells and rambling disinformation isn't cool.

What the heck is the deal with this Kennedy quote? I've heard it before. I just decided to do about ten minutes of internet searching and see the following:

In a "Conspiracy Theory Literature FAQ" that presumably was originally a Usenet FAQ (I didn't bother to check) and now is found at

http://www9.pair.com/xpoez/faq/ctl.html

and copied at scores of other sites, including New World Order lizards are your problem David Icke (who takes some reality, mixes it with total shit, and does a disservice to true info warriors), I find that the citation for this quote appears in a book titled

"Extra-Terrestrials Among Us (Llewellyn's Psi-Tech Series)", by George C. Andrews

(you can see the footnote at the URL above -- just search for the Kennedy quote and you'll see the citation)

The book info ala Amazon is at:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/087542001X/tgsthegoodstew/102-3076574-4960109

...........

So, does someone out here have a more substantial citation for this quote? Can someone steer us towards something a bit more solid?

I think I'll take my coffee without lizards please