The seeds of Revolution

[formercia]

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporations/Hx_Corporations_US.html

--snip--

We tend to think of corporations as fairly recent phenomena, the legacy of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. In fact, the corporate presence in prerevolutionary America was almost as conspicuous as it is today. There were far fewer corporations then, but they were enormously powerful: the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the British East India Company. Colonials feared these chartered entities. They recognized the way British kings and their cronies used them as robotic arms to control the affairs of the colonies, to pinch staples from remote breadbaskets and bring them home to the motherland.
The colonials resisted. When the British East India Company imposed duties on its incoming tea (telling the locals they could buy the tea or lump it, because the company had a virtual monopoly on tea distribution in the colonies), radical patriots demonstrated. Colonial merchants agreed not to sell East India Company tea. Many East India Company ships were turned back at port. And, on one fateful day in Boston, 342 chests of tea ended up in the salt chuck.
The Boston Tea Party was one of young America's finest hours. It sparked enormous revolutionary excitement. The people were beginning to understand their own strength, and to see their own self-determination not just as possible but inevitable.
The Declaration of Independence, in 1776, freed Americans not only from Britain but also from the tyranny of British corporations, and for a hundred years after the document's signing, Americans remained deeply suspicious of corporate power. They were careful about the way they granted corporate charters, and about the powers granted therein.

--snip--

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. big difference.

as the article states, they were CHARTERED - translation, given a monopoly power by the government. British merchantilism resulted in their building warships and protecting harbors they stole and enlarged around the globe. Also led to the Colonial revolution, the endless Indian-Pakistan disputes, Hong Kong, Korean disputes, African wars and strife, and great profits for the charter holders. No competition was permitted.

IN today's world, corporations are treated as "individuals" under the law. While there is competition and except for Haliburton, nothing close to a charter system still exists.

Today's revolution would have two enemies, and our protest would have to put both on notice. Multinational corporations and our Patriot Acting government.

[formercia]

2. The no-bid contract is changing that

in effect, it acts as a Charter.

[LiberalEsto]

3. We need a WalMart/China Crap tea party

Time to round up all that cheap, toxic made-in-China crap manufactured by child labor and slave labor, and dump it in the Potomac River or someplace!

[Totally Committed]

4. Thomas Jefferson said this:

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." - Thomas Jefferson (1816)

TC