 On attorney advice, Jerry and Lisa decide to incorporate their family business. The purpose is to protect their private ownership of home and other property if someone claims to have been injured, trying to enter or leave their little store. The question for you is why our government would provide greater legal protection to leaders in some created corporate being than to provide for its own citizens. Corporations are legal persons. They are entities created by people under authority of law that supports incorporation. Corporations are not citizens, nor do they have citizen rights and privileges. Citizens get to vote. Corporations are not entitled to a voice in government. Like all other businesses, corporations are owned by people. They do not own themselves. Corporations are property. So what is a corporation? The act of incorporation is bringing resources together for a corporate or shared purpose. It is very much a human concept. Nations are corporate entities. States, cities, towns and villages are corporate entities. Public schools are corporate entities. All these are owned by people, by citizens. Marriage creates a corporate family unit. A family is a corporate unit. A church congregation is a corporate unit. Even all humanity can be viewed as a corporate unit for the purpose of living in the presence of other people. The very purpose of our constitutional agreement was for we the people to come together for the purpose of ordaining a corporate government. Congress is set to operate as a corporate body with a set of rules and procedures to keep it functioning as a unit. The Supreme Court is a corporate body of justices and acts as a unit in its own business operation. Bureaus and departments are corporate entities created by legislation. A class of students is a corporate unit with the purpose of benefiting the students. In this course the class is to be an intentional corporate unit operating for the purpose of empowering students to effectively own and operate their government. When we speak of modern commercial corporations they exist to perform the purposes of commerce. Each corporation is given existence to convert the time and effort committed by citizen employees into the goods and services that are valued by citizen customers and to earn income through this process for it citizen owners and investors. Governments are always corporate units. The very concept of a feud or kingdom was a collection of people based on the use of feudal resources. By nature of the feud the purpose was the wealth and privilege of the feudal baron and his family. Feuds were commercial corporate units. The American colonies were not feudal corporations as there were no feuds. They were still commercial entities created by British government as a source of wealth but not as part of the nation. The official landowners were in England and did not intimately share purpose with the colonials as they did with the common citizens upon other feudal lands. Revolution rejected absent land ownership, the heart of English interests. No more were profits going to be harvest by English aristocracy. In a sense the revolution stole the American colonies from England and applied their own concept of corporate ownership in the colonial citizenry. This was the American dream. It was citizen ownership of corporate governments. The assumption of sovereignty in government was another theft. This time it was stealing the American dream from the sovereign citizens. It was assumption of rule over the nation by a new political aristocracy. People who harvested the wealth earned by the productive efforts of the people. Growth of industry required larger corporate efforts, too large for any traditional business entity accepting the business of governance. The available patterns were other governments and military organizations. The American government units used these to establish the modern business corporation, giving the new corporate leadership potency like that given to an army leadership in the field. Common soldiers do not get to challenge leadership, nor are generals accountable even for the death of soldiers under their orders. They are a military aristocracy who treat the common soldiers as operating resources that can be expended to gain military objectives. Generals do not answer to common citizens. Business leaders do not answer to common investors. They see to corporate mission. They pursue corporate objectives. The challenge is that a family business has a family purpose and these new leaders created their own corporate objectives. They had their own self-assigned goals and objectives that they set to gain through corporate operation. Feudal rule became the norm for larger corporate endeavors. The aristocracy separated themselves from commoners. The phenomenon known as the glass wall. Those above the wall had privilege. Those below the wall paid for it with their productive efforts. Feuds get their privilege from rulers and rulers get their wealth from the activities of their barons. The barons of industry had to support the rule of political leaders. And so we have a new feudal system based on corporate territory. It is the barons of industry who are granted access to leadership, giving voice to their goals and objectives with the weight of productivity of their employees as corporate resources. The commoners, the investors, get to tag along for the ride. Performance orientation easily measures the performance of management. It is a measure of how much it costs to gain performance through those who are doing performance. Small business management generally operates with each hour of internal management and support, servicing four to six hours of productive efforts. Large corporate businesses now have each internal hour supporting only two to three hours of productive efforts and often a challenge to productive efforts instead of supporting them. Large corporate management systems are about half as effective at getting performance. The expertise of modern barons of industry is running organizations, not getting them to perform. Performance is based on cost and result, not on doing the right things and doing them effectively. The direction of improvement is not improving what these leaders do. It is eliminating waste. It is eliminating things that do not contribute effectively to performance. The performance we seek is promoting the public purpose of the wealth and prosperity of the people. That is also what the constitutional duty is that was placed on our political leaders. There is only one party in interest and it is us. There is no us and them public purpose for incorporation. The economic purpose is citizen prosperity. The corporate operation that generates economic benefit is converting resources, time and effort into goods and services of people value. Improvement will come from focus on performance, on serving we the people. Donations to political causes is waste. It earns no income for the corporation. It is also criminal as corporations are created beings. They are not entitled to any voice in government. Applying corporate resources, personal or hired to political purposes should be subject to investor challenge whenever they are not the political purposes of the investors. We elect public officers to be our political agents and union leaders do not represent citizens without legal contracts appointing them to that responsibility. The members of the union should be able to enforce this upon union leadership. The public purpose to be served by a corporation includes employment for citizens. The very concept of economic gain from foreign operations is openly challenging to the reason for the existence of the corporate entity. The corporate charter of a business that runs foreign facilities should be challenged. A denial of one of the basic purposes for allowing these legal constructs to exist. Business charity earns nothing. While investments at least those in accord with public purpose can have value giving charity with the resources ultimately owned by other people is waste and should be eliminated. Corporations are not citizens redirecting investor resources to non-business purposes is embezzlement. It is criminal behavior and should be prosecuted not honored. This waste is currently supported by laws of incorporation. The otherwise criminal actions are authorized for business aristocracy through legislation. It is most unlikely that any of this waste will be significantly reduced without citizen action demanding changes. Aristocratic government has also contributed materially to corporate waste through promoting it and indeed taking their own cut out of the waste in the name of proper regulation. Incorporation laws protect leaders from responsibility to investor owners. They give owner privileges to hired leadership granting authority without responsibility which is a known bad management practice. Regulating what people choose to do is always poor government. The purpose is supporting personal commerce and traders add nothing to our economy's productive processes. They get wealth from non-productive efforts and harvest potential earnings from those who invest to own a part of our economy with investment as a productive effort supporting business operations. The public purpose is supporting productive efforts not those who harvest from productive efforts of others. We need to tax what we want to eliminate not what we want to promote. All taxation comes out in the pockets of citizens who are owners, customers, and employees in corporate America. Taxing productive business is economic insanity. Being a leader in a business is not a reason to protect one citizen more than another. That is an aristocratic purpose, wholly a discord with the concept of the common law. Public claim of expertise is, if anything, a reason to hold a person more strictly accountable for what they do. All these challenges are promoted by our modern handling of business corporations. If there is to be a change, it will be up to us. If there is to be a change, it will be based on our agreement as we the people issuing change mandates to our government leaders. There is a potential for citizens to come together to protect valuable purpose of investment and to cut off the criminal behavior that works to defeat basic purpose of we the people where agreed we can mandate any appropriate changes to laws of incorporation. Whenever and wherever we find agreement on what government is to do for us, we can mandate the actions to our leaders. We are the public and the purpose for agreement is our public purpose. Where we are agreed there is no competing purpose, no alternative direction for our leaders to pursue. As citizens, we own our legal system through our Republican form of government and we can mandate the prosecution of those who engage in bribery or embezzlement.