DRAFT
Target 16.6.1 Target Action Plan TAP21
Phase Out and Convert most of the Larger Corporations and Companies into Co-Operatives, and Small Businesses that Provide Quality, Affordable Products and Services
(Updated May 8, 2021)
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21.1 Introduction
This plan outlines Individual Actions required to convert most of the larger corporations and companies into co-operatives, and small businesses that provide quality, affordable products and services
It is Target Action Plan (TAP) 21 www.PeopleNow.org.
Table of Contents
21.3Objectives
21.3.1Implement Target 16.6 .1
21.5.2 Provide workers usable rights and improved access to the courts and regulatory agencies
21.5.5 Fully protect whistle blowers
21.5.6 Prevent the endless delays that corporate attorneys can inflict
21.5.7 Provide strong, updated health, safety and economic honesty standards
21.5.9 Provide funds for more regulators, law enforcement officials, investigators and prosecutors
21.5.10 “Reform and tightly regulate compensation structures of corporation executives.”
21.5.12 Restrict corporate activities to those specified in their charter
21.5.13 Prohibit these entities from depositing funds in off-shore accounts
21.6.5Laws Regarding Void or Voidable Court Judgments, Rulings and Orders
21.3.1 Implement Target 16.6 .1 Develop effective, accountable and transparent co-ops
21.3.2 Eliminate corporate executives control over public servants
21.5 Phase out and convert large corporations and companies into effective, accountable and transparent Co-Ops
21.5.1 Enact legislation that phases out and converts large corporations, companies and other entities into effective, accountable and transparent co-operatives
21.5.1.1 Require they provide quality goods, products, and/or services at the least possible price while paying their employees a living wage and enough to be able to purchase the products services and/or goods being sold to the public.
21.5.2 Provide workers usable rights and improved access to the courts and regulatory agencies for their grievances and shift power to the people who actually generate all wealth.
21.5.3 Provide powers for the workers who are the owners of co-ops.
21.5.4 Enforce antitrust laws and break up or nationalize cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, and giant multinationals that are deemed “too big to fail.”
21.5.5 Fully protect whistle blowers who expose wrongdoing to the authorities, the media or civic groups.
21.5.6 Prevent the endless delays that corporate attorneys can inflict on any agency proceedings that enforces the law against violations
21.5.7 Provide strong, updated health, safety and economic honesty standards.
21.5.8 Legislate procedures so that large corporation/companies that exhibited harmful behavior, polluted or caused environmental disasters, take appropriate measures, including:
21.5.8.1 Pay to fix problems they caused and clean up their pollution and repair severe damage to public health, natural resources and the company’s environmental behavior.
21.5.9 Provide funds for more regulators, law enforcement officials, investigators and prosecutors for smarter law enforcement and sanctions that will pay for themselves many times over in fines, restorative justice payments and disgorgement.
21.5.10 “Reform and tightly regulate compensation structures of corporation executives.”
21.5.11 “Greatly strengthen the power and political independence of regulation and white-collar criminal law enforcement.”
21.5.12 Restrict corporate activities to those specified in their charter.
21.5.13 Prohibit these entities from depositing funds in off-shore accounts
21.5.14 Limit the size of corporations and prohibit corporations from owning stock in other companies or purchasing other companies.
21.5.15 Prohibit U.S. corporations and similar entities doing business in the U.S. owning patents, copyrights and intellectual property. Section 8 of the Constitution states: The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. The U.S. pays about $300 billion a year for prescription drugs that would sell for $30 billion a year in a free market without patent protection. This means that the US wasting $270 billion on prescription drugs because of this government-imposed patent monopoly.
21.5.16 In Gangs of America, the author Nace recommends:
(1) revoke the doctrine of corporate constitutional rights;
(2) curb corporate "quasi-rights" as appropriate, e.g. requiring corporations to renew their charters every five years;
(3) ban corporations from political activity;
(4) shore up the boundaries of "non-corporate" spaces in society, e.g. prohibiting advertising aimed at children;
(5) expand the scope of worker and customer rights vis-à-vis corporations;
(6) strengthen countervailing institutions, especially unions;
(7) promote non-corporate institutions like public schools and economic forms like municipal utilities, family farms, consumer cooperatives, employee-run enterprises
All this must be done and much more including in particular a progressive property tax on the $169 trillion of net assets of the 2000 largest corporations and companies other entities.
21.5.17
21.6.1 “National charters for national corporations” were supported a century ago by presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard-Taft and Woodrow Wilson.” (These words and items 21.4.1 through 21.4.9 are derived/paraphrased from page 185 and 186 of the book Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism by Ralph Nader.)
21.6.2 Items 21.1.10 and 21.1.11 are quoted from page 326 of the book Predator Nation - Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America by Charles Ferguson.
21.6.3 Also review more information in the Ted Nace book Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy, Berrett-Koehler Publishers 2003 (especially Table 7.1 on page 88).
21.6.4
Ted Nace’s book, Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy, published in 2003, provides an outstanding history of corporations, their predecessors, origination and how they evolved and gained personhood. A pdf version of Nace’s book or can be downloaded for free or a hard copy purchased at his web site http://www.gangsofamerica.com.
Portions of the following are from articles on Nace’s web site:
Corporations are the dominant force in modern life, surpassing even church and state. The largest are richer than entire nations, and courts have given these entities more rights than people. Corporate power is out of control. According to a Business Week/Harris poll released in September 2000, 82 percent of those surveyed agreed that “business has too much power over too many aspects of our lives.”
Nace describes the origins of these powerful institution and how they got these powers The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy, author Ted Nace probes the roots of corporate power, finding answers in surprising places.
A key revelation of the book is the wariness of the Founding Fathers toward corporations. That wariness was shaped by rampant abuses on the part of British corporations such as the Virginia Company, whose ill-treatment killed thousands of women and children on forced-labor tobacco plantations, and the East India Company, whose attempt to monopolize American commodities led to the merchant-led rebellion known as the Boston Tea Party.
Because of such attitudes, the word corporation does not appear once in the United States Constitution. At the Constitutional Convention, all proposals to include corporations in that document were voted down by delegates. Corporate attorneys persisted in seeking legal protections for their clients by means of sympathetic court rulings, but until the Civil War such attempts largely failed.
After the Civil War, the tide quickly turned, as lobbyists secured key changes in corporate law and as corporate attorneys won a series of decisions from an increasingly pro-corporate Supreme Court. Nace recounts the key figures who engineered the “corporate bill of rights,” The book explores in depth the bizarre intrigues that resulted in the infamous “corporations are persons” ruling of 1886, and how that ruling affected the subsequent development of Supreme Court doctrine.
Nace charts the growth of corporate power through the Gilded Age, including the bloody repression of organized labor and the rise of social Darwinist thinking among American elites. He recounts how that expansion came to a halt under the New Deal, as organized labor gained legal protections, social Darwinism fell into disrepute, and Franklin Roosevelt asserted a vision of American society that placed democratic limits on corporate power. To many observers, it seemed that the corporate Frankenstein had finally been tamed by “countervailing power.”
According to Nace, that optimistic view was dashed in the final decades of the twentieth century, as Big Business mounted a remarkable comeback. The corporate political resurgence began with a 1971 memorandum written by Lewis Powell, Jr., shortly before Powell was appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon. In the memorandum, Powell urged corporate America to apply its full organizational and strategic resources to politics, a course of action that proved highly successful to corporation executives and a disaster for everyday Americans
Gangs of America describes the expansion of corporate empowerment onto the global stage through international agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, which boosted the powers of corporations to the level of sovereign nations. The book pays special attention to recent events, including campaign finance reform, the financial scandals of 2002, and the growing movement to redefine the corporation and limit corporate power.
Despite this movement, since Nace’s book was written in 2003, the wealth and power of Corporations have increase enormously. According to Forbes.com, between 2003 and 2013, the world's 2,000 leading companies/corporations’:
• Total assets increased from $65 trillion to $159 trillion (During this same time frame the assets of the 99% have decreased by a similar amount leaving more and more in poverty, homeless and hungry)
• Aggregate sales increased from $18 trillion to $38 trillion
• Total annual profits increase from $0.492 trillion to $2.64 trillion
In Gangs of America, Nace recommends:
(1) revoke the doctrine of corporate constitutional rights;
(2) curb corporate "quasi-rights" as appropriate, e.g. requiring corporations to renew their charters every five years;
(3) ban corporations from political activity;
(4) shore up the boundaries of "non-corporate" spaces in society, e.g. prohibiting advertising aimed at children;
(5) expand the scope of worker and customer rights vis-à-vis corporations;
(6) strengthen countervailing institutions, especially unions;
(7) promote non-corporate institutions like public schools and economic forms like municipal utilities, family farms, consumer cooperatives, employee-run enterprises
All this must be done and much more including in particular a progressive property tax on the $169 trillion of net assets of the 2000 largest corporations and companies other entities.
21.6.5 Laws Regarding Void or Voidable Court Judgments, Rulings and Orders are outlined in Set Aside, Repeal, Replace or Amend Injurious, Unjust Laws and Court Rulings
21.6.6 Descriptions of Unjust Court Rulings Based on the Unconstitutional, Wrongful and Unlawful Theory of Corporate Constitutional Rights are also outlined in Set Aside, Repeal, Replace or Amend Injurious, Unjust Laws and Court Rulings
21.6.7 Correct the Damages Caused by Citizens United & Other Rulings and Ensure Such Rulings Do Not Happen Again
__________
Bibliography
Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy by Ted Nace, 2003. A hard copy of this book can be purchased or a free PDF copy downloaded at http://www.gangsofamerica.com/read.html
Corporations Are Not People by Jeffrey D. Clements, available from http://www.powells.com
The Real History of 'Corporate Personhood': Meet the Man to Blame for Corporations Having More Rights Than You, 2012. This article is an excerpt from Jeffrey Clement's outstanding book, Corporations Are Not People. www.alternet.org/story/153345/the_real_history_of_%27corporate_personhood%27%3A_meet_the_man_to_blame_for_corporations_having_more_rights_than_you/?page=entire
The Prosecution of Judge Waite by James Allison, June 7, 2011, a new play based on scholarly legal research by Historians Jim and Tomi Allison into Supreme Court and corporate in personhood. Available for download at www.thealliancefordemocracy.org/pdf/JudgeWaite.pdf
Hijacking of the Fourteenth Amendment by Doug Hammerstrom, available at www.ReclaimDemocracy.org/personhood/fourteenth_amendment_hammerstrom.pdf
Nace, Ted, (2003). Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy, Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Clements, Jeffrey D. (2012). Corporations Are Not People, Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Available from http://www.powells.com
Clements, Jeffrey D. (2012). “The Real History of 'Corporate Personhood: Meet the Man to Blame for Corporations Having More Rights Than You”2012. Excerpt from Jeffrey Clement's book “Corporations Are Not People.” Available at: http://www.alternet.org/story/153345/the_real_history_of_%27corporate_personhood%27%3A_meet_the_man_to_blame_for_corporations_having_more_rights_than_you/?page=entire
Allison, James. (2012), The Prosecution of Judge Waite, June 7, 2011, a new play based on scholarly legal research by Historians Jim and Tomi Allison into Supreme Court and corporate in personhood. Available for download at http://www.thealliancefordemocracly.org/pdf/JudgeWaite.pdf
Hammerstrom, Doug. “Hijacking of the Fourteenth Amendment” available at www.ReclaimDemocracy.org/personhood/fourteenth_amendment_hammerstrom.pdf
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Attachment B: Table 1.1, “Three Phases in the Development of Corporate Rights” from the Book Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy by Ted Nace
