 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 some created corporate being than it provides to its own sovereign citizens. Corporations are legal persons. They are entities created by people under authority of laws that support incorporation. Corporations are not citizens, nor do they have citizen rights and privileges. Corporations are not entitled to a voice in government. Like 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 things together for a corporate or shared purpose. It is very much a human concept. A family is a corporate unit. A church congregation is a corporate unit. A village or town is a corporate unit. A nation is one too. 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. 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, it exists to perform the purpose of commerce. It is given existence to convert the time and effort committed by citizen employees into goods and services that are valued by citizen customers and earn income through this process for its citizen owners and investors. Commercial corporations have existed since early times, as in a number of families getting a living fishing from the same boat. What American law has done is to provide a way for these gathered people to act as a legal unit. It is a legal privilege granted through legislation. And it is the privilege of existing as a legal person. Our extension of this has been through investment, a very limited ownership by citizens, for the purpose of sharing in the earnings of the corporate entity, giving it substantial resources through selling interest in itself and its productivity. This came with a couple of significant drawbacks from the standpoint of serving we the people. The first is the source of purpose. The traditional commercial purpose was to gain sufficient personal and family resources to be prosperous and to support freedoms. The new commercial purpose was to gain a return on investment. It was no longer personal or family support. It was a general economic support for a group of largely faceless and unknown investors. The other was family replacement. Our management system has been established for the family business run by family members. Family authority has been replaced by senior management which no longer has family purpose. The downside of this is that new leadership had access to other people's resources without being their effective agents. It allowed the corporation to take actions against the interest of its investors, claiming that this was for a corporate purpose in operating the business. The value of corporation was in performance that it brought large numbers of people and substantial resources together for effective performance of a commercial effort. Part of the challenge of modern corporation is that we now have multiple purposes. That corporation has become internally divided into performance areas that do productive process and management which runs the corporation for many other purposes. Corporate stocks and bonds are treated like money, like negative value markers. The stocks and bonds are like money equivalents to dollars. Unlike dollars, these values are highly variable and depend on the opinion of those who might buy or sell them. In transfer of stocks and bonds, there is no transfer of what people would both receive and value. These have value only in redemption or resale and the value is not fixed for stocks. Bonds value are limited by the ability of the corporation to redeem and satisfy them, not necessarily by full satisfaction. Other business corporations may be wholly owned by a family or a stable set of investors who have stock only to record their divided interests. These function more like family businesses as they have a corporate body that can come together, much like a family, to see to their own interests. The challenge is in huge stock corporations which have massive resources shared among hundreds or thousands of citizens and other corporate ownerships. These impersonal giants answer to themselves much as if the hired senior leadership was the family. The rule from management applies to law as well. If you grant authority without responsibility for exercising that authority, it will soon lead to abuse. We have corporations using their resources for political donations. They are not parties in interest. They are created beings. Any interference is political corruption and allowing corporate benefit to political leadership is bribery. A felony crime for all engaged in either giving benefit to or receiving benefit from non-citizens. As far as the owners go, giving political donations from corporate resources is also taking it out of their ownership as investors for the purpose of giving political representation to corporate leadership, which is a violation of the purpose for which investments were made. The legal term for receiving value from one for one purpose and using it for another is embezzlement. There is a potential for citizens to come together to protect the valuable purposes of the we the people where agreed, we can mandate any appropriate changes to laws of incorporation. Citizens who own our legal system through their representative bodies and a Republican form of government can mandate prosecution of those who engage in bribery or embezzlement. All it takes is citizens coming to agreement on what needs to be done and mandating such actions as are required to their representatives. Citizens who own our corporate units of government are able to empower citizens as corporate business owners. If leadership is doing something other than serving the owner and investor's purpose, then it is a tort against the owners and investors. They can be empowered to act personally against corporate leaders. All it takes is the citizens coming to agreement on what is to be written into our laws of incorporation and to mandate the appropriate changes to their representatives. Jerry and Lisa decide to incorporate their business to limit their personal liability. You know something is wrong when our laws give privilege to the entities it creates that are greater than the privileges of the citizens that government is supposed to support. There is just no way that any corporate entity should be less accountable to those it deals with than a sovereign citizen. There are different approaches to addressing this. The challenge is not finding a way to correct it, but finding the way on which people can agree. A first direction would be to change the laws of incorporation with specific denial of any rights and privileges that are greater than the rights and privileges of citizens. The other side of this purpose is to demand accountability to citizens for violations. A second direction, one more encompassing, is to set up a separate law to affect all corporate ventures, setting hard limits on what can be granted to any non-citizen. A third approach would be to criminalize the most egregious of violations. What is important for the citizen who would manage government is that there is a direction on which people agree. This is the basis for public mandate to leadership. Type two waste is in terms of corporations delivering value to non-customers, which always means that less goes to paying customers to earn business income. In investment, we have a lot of people earning a living through buying and selling stocks. They harvest on the return of investment that would otherwise go to those who invest to earn the benefits of ownership of corporate businesses. We have so many buy and sell investors that they do such a good job of harvesting wealth that simply owning a piece of successful corporate effort does not guarantee reasonable return on investment. Security traders are the ones who earn an acceptable return on other people's investments, not those who invest to gain from ownership. One approach to improvement would be removing the profitability of trading stocks and bonds so that the value of ownership goes to those who invest to gain benefits of ownership. Our business of trading securities does nothing for regular investors, but takes so much value from their ownership that they have to continue working on investment manipulation to gain any reasonable value in return. This is work required of investors that earns no operating income for the business. It is type two waste. Improvement comes from eliminating waste. We have a government tool that has proven effective, tax the behavior you want to go away. A heavy taxed on short term trading will effectively eliminate the wasteful practices and promote a much greater return on investment for those who invest to own a part of our economy. You tax the people who add nothing to the economy for the benefit of those who do. This may be a matter for agreement, though I see it as difficult to sell in our today's environment. And then we have business of politics. Should there even be a business of politics? We have corporations that exist to gather the resources of some citizens in support of a candidate or cause. We have people who are the public and are also the only ones entitled to a voice in government Our representatives are to represent citizens not to receive from corporations. As a partial answer, the only way a corporation can represent any citizen is under an agency agreement signed by that citizen. This is unlikely with the agency comes accountability to the ones who are to be represented and clients who take responsibility for any authorized misconduct or damages and take it in their name. And the greatest challenge of all is the corporate entities we call political parties. They are not simply unauthorized by those who own them. They only exist to interfere with representation of the whole people. We the people have challenges in dealing with corporate entities as they are granted privileges that are treated as greater than citizen rights. Our challenges will be in finding agreement on what to do about it. We also face some economic traditions as in the stock market trading efforts that have become wasteful limiting the ability of our economy to support our prosperity. We have allowed corporations to exist for the purpose of political representation without the legal basis required for establishing that representation. These are all potentials for citizen action with the challenge of what can gather agreement among citizens so that it can be passed to our leaders for action as mandate.