person

1769 King George III grants a charter to Dartmouth College.

1776 In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith suggestes shareholders who do not run their own business' but delegate that task to professional managers were making an economic mistake.

Adam Smith felt professional managers could not be trusted to apply the same "anxious vigilance" to manage "other people's money" as they would their own and "negligence and profusion therefore must prevail, more or less, in the management of such an incorporation."

1816 Legislature of New Hampshire alters Dartmouth College charter placing appointment positions in the hands of the governor, adding new members to the board of trustees, and creating a state board of visitors with veto power over trustee decisions.

1819 Supreme Court rules in favor of the Dartmouth College charter and invalidates the act of the New Hampshire Legislature, which in turn allows Dartmouth to continue as a private institution and take back its buildings, seal, and charter.

The majority opinion, written by John Marshall, reaffirms the sanctity of a contract.

In the words of Chief Justice Marshall in the famous Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward case, corporations are "artifcial being[s], invisible, intangible, and existing only at the intention of the law."

A corporation is a "creature of the law" that does not possess inalienable human rights, but rather "only those properties which the charter of creation confer on it."

Corporations could be extensively regulated to ensure that they did not abuse the special privileges and protections governments conferred on them not shared by individuals.

The Supreme Court rules that the corporate charter of Dartmoth College qualifies as a contract between private parties, the King and the trustees, with which the legislature could not interfere.

The contract is valid because the US Constitution said that a state could not pass laws to impair a contract.

Chief Justice Marshall's opinion emphasized that the term "contract" referred to transactions involving individual property rights, not to "the political relations between the government and its citizens."

This was the settled understanding both prior to and after the Civil War when the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution, requiring states to respect the fundamental rights of all Americans.

1844 In Louisville, C. & C.R. Co. v. Letson, 2 How. 497, 558, 11 L.Ed. 353, the US Supreme Court holds that for the purposes of the case at hand, a corporation is "capable of being treated as a citizen of [the State which created it], as much as a natural person."

1854 Reaffirmed the result of Letson, though on the somewhat different theory that "those who use the corporate name, and exercise the faculties conferred by it," should be presumed conclusively to be citizens of the corporation's State of incorporation. Marshall v. Baltimore & Ohio R. Co., 16 How. 314, 329, 14 L.Ed. 953

1886 Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co

Supreme Court never reaches an opinion in the case and it dies.

The court reporter, a former railroad man, inserts the opinion notes of the oral argument of Chief Justice Waite into his published notes.

This appears to be an announcement that corporations are "persons" within the meaning of Fourteenth Amendment.

1911 "Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility." - Ambrose Bierce Devil's Dictionary

September 11, 2001

SEC offices are destroyed in the World Trade Center.

"The SEC has not quantified the number of active cases in which substantial files were destroyed.

Reuters and the Los Angeles Times published reports estimating them at 3,000 to 4,000.

They include the agency's major inquiry into the manner in which investment banks divvied up hot shares of initial public offerings during the high-tech boom." - Margaret Cronin Fisk

2002 to 2007

US Justice Department wins 1,236 convictions in corporate fraud cases.

2004 The wealthiest 1% of American citizens own 36.9% of all stock. 30% of stock is enough to fully control most corporations.

2007 Warren Buffet states he feels no imperative to invest in socially responsible corporations or to press those corporations in which he invested to be socially responsible.

January 21, 2010 Quest for corporate personhood completed.

Corporations can now make unlimited, direct political contributions.

"The decision of the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission paves the way for unlimited corporate and union spending in elections, thus drowning out of the average citizen's voice in our public policy debates." - Bob Edgar 01/22/10

corporate marketing advertisement

Corporate social responsibility is illegal.

Corporate social responsibility is an oxymoron.

A corporation, by definition of corporate law, is singularly self-interested.

The "best interests of the corporation" priciple, a fixture of corporate law, compels corporate decision makers always to act in the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders.

The law forbids any other motivation for actions, whether to assist workers, improve the environment, or help consumers save money.

Corporate officers can give away their own money, as private citizens but as corporate officials, however, stewards of other people's money, they have no legal authority to pursue such goals as ends in themselves - only as means to serve the corporate interests - to maximize the wealth of shareholders.

"The corporate design contained in hundreds of corporate laws across the face of the Earth is nearly identical.

The people who run corporations have a legal duty to shareholders, and that duty is to make money.

Failing this duty can leave directors and officers open to being sued by shareholders (non-voting shares may have an arbitration clause).

The law dictates to the corporation to pursue of its own self-interest - and equates corporate self-interest with shareholder self-interest.

No mention is made of responsibility to the public interest.

Corporate law thus casts ethical and social concerns as irrelevant, or as stumbling blocks to the corporation's fundamental mandate." - Robert Hinkley, corporate lawyer

This web site is not a commercial web site and is presented for educational purposes only.

This website defines a new perspective with which to engage reality to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification of reality outside personal experience has forged a populace unable to discern propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due to their religious ideology. This web site marks the founding of a system of philosophy named The Truth of the Way of the Lumière Infinie - a rational gnostic mystery religion based on reason which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to develop a personal relation with the Creator and Sustainer through the pursuit of the knowledge of reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of the Lumière Infinie are spelled out in detail on this web site by the author. Violent acts against individuals due to their religious beliefs in America is considered a "hate crime."

This web site in no way condones violence. To the contrary the intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the international corporate cartels desire to control the human race. The international corporate cartel already controls the world economic system, corporate media worldwide, the global industrial military entertainment complex and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of self-centered behavior and the destruction of global ecosystems. Civilization is based on coöperation. Coöperation does not occur at the point of a gun.

American social mores and values have declined precipitously over the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general through corporate media by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed into the population through prior mass media psychological operations. The results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of social structures that do not adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a perfect world. Through distraction and coercion the direction of thought of the bulk of the population has been directed toward solutions proposed by the corrupt international elite that further consolidates their power and which further their purposes.

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