The Michigan Militia Corps'

WEEKLY UPDATE **Internet Edition**

Volume 4 Issue 20

Week of June 9, 1997





"Rebel, Revolt, Resist"



        The following article was taken from a newsletter called The

Resistance, put out by the National Smokers Alliance. Although this article

concerns smoking laws in particular, this course of action is probably the

most effective approach to dealing with bad laws, and I can guarantee that

when you announce such intentions, in advance, to those who pass such laws,

they are absolutely dumb-founded. Since our legislators, local, state and

federal, no longer seem to listen to the people or abide by constitutional

limitations, this may be our last resort.



Does Resistance Work?



        Just ask the people of Toronto who successfully defeated one of the

most severe smoking laws in North America.

        "Bad laws should not be obeyed," advised Toronto Star columnist Rosie

Dimanno of the bylaw that banned smoking in almost all restaurants and bars

citywide as of March 3 of this year, "Rebel, revolt, resist." And that's just

what the citizens of this Canadian city did.

        Faced with revenue losses of up to 30 percent, restaurant owners

openly defied the law. Some refused to enforce the ban even in the face of

hefty fines that ranged from $205 to $5,000.

        "What am I going to do when the inspectors come around?' said the

proprietor of one Toronto cafe. "I'm going to say [that] I'm not complying

with this law and you do whatever you have to do." "I've talked to a lot of

restaurateurs in town ... and nobody's respecting it (the bylaw)," said the

owner of a popular restaurant. "I've visited seven of my friends in their

restaurants and everybody smokes. There's ashtrays everywhere. Nobody cares."

"Waiters are playing a little game," commented a pub owner. "They tell

people they are sorry there is no smoking and then get them a menu and an

ashtray." Some restaurateurs, fed up with the law, put their establishments

up for sale, while others closed their doors in protest. Individual smokers

also resisted the law. Left with nowhere to go, many wound up smoking in

sections that had once been reserved for non-smokers.

        "We used to be able to accommodate non-smokers, now people smoke

wherever they feel like," said a saloon owner. "A lot of peoples' attitude

is, 'Come and give me a ticker,' " said another. Ontario Restaurant

Association President Paul Oliver noted that "I had a call from a 70-year-old

woman who said she went out today and broke the law for the first time in her

life, and she'd do it again." "It's like the wild west out there," Oliver

concluded.

        The resistance of citizens and business owners surprised city

officials, who had been advised by anti-smoking activists in the United

States that things would settle down within six months. "It didn't work the

way we had hoped it would," commented Toronto Mayor Barbara Hall in The Globe

and Mail.

        The issue was resolved within six weeks. After restaurant workers

showed up at an April 14 city council meeting in T-shirts that said, "Save

our jobs" and "Let the consumer decide" -- and began chanting, "We won't

comply" -- the Toronto City Council backed down and voted to allow

restaurants and bars to have smoking sections.

        "Elected officials in the United States should learn a lesson from

our neighbors to the North," said NSA President Thomas Humber. "When they go

too far, the people will resist." Ending Corporate Governance







We the People: Revoking Our Plutocracy



     Nowadays, although more and more of us understand the fact that we live,

not in a democracy (as we were taught in school), but under a plutocracy,

most still suffer from what Richard Grossman and Ward Morehouse call the

"colonization of our minds", the corollary of which is the "TINA" (There Is

No Alternative) phenomenon. The fact is, there are alternatives to this ever

more disintegrative "way of life". But in order to change this society so the

seventh generation yet unborn may, once more, have the opportunity to live

their lives to the fullest, each one of us must transform our own conditioned

thinking from that of programmed consumer into liberated citizen.

     Today, people forget that U.S. corporations, or "corpses",  were

extremely limited in their powers and influence prior to the Civil War. We

have much to re-learn regarding the facts of how citizens, at the time of the

revolution of 1776 and afterwards, gave state legislatures the power to

control the "crown corporations" they had had painful, personal experience of

and suffered under, from the likes of the original American "Crown Colonies"

-- which were companies -- of the King of England, as well as the Hudson's

Bay Company and the East India Trading companies of Europe.

     In the detailed and highly recommendable 32-page booklet, Taking Care of

Business, Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation, the authors lay out

how citizens, in the early days of this system of governance,

constitutionalized the legal standing of "We The People" as a fundamental

mechanism for controlling and limiting the destructive influence created by

unbridled and unlimited concentrations of wealth:

      When we look at the history of our states, we learn that citizens

intentionally defined corporations through charters--the certificates of

incorporation.

      In exchange for the charter, a corporation was obligated to obey all

laws, to serve the common good, and to cause no harm. Early state legislators

wrote charter laws and actual charters to limit corporate authority, and to

ensure that when a corporation caused harm, they could revoke its charter.

     Our right to charter corporations is as crucial to self-government as

our right to vote. Both are basic franchises, essential tools of liberty.

     The colonists did not make a revolution over a tax on tea. They fought

for many reasons, but chiefly to create a nation where citizens were the

government and ruled corporations. 

     They knew that English kings chartered the East India Company, the

Hudson's Bay Company and many American colonies in order to control property

and commerce. Kings appointed governors and judges, dispatched soldiers,

dictated taxes, investments, production, labor and markets.

     Having thrown off English rule, the revolutionaries did not give

governors, judges or generals the authority to charter corporations. Citizens

made certain that legislators issued charters, one at a time and for a

limited number of years. They kept a tight hold on corporations by spelling

out rules each business had to follow, by holding business owners liable for

harms or injuries, and by revoking charters.

     But throughout the 1800s, especially after the Civil War, "under

pressure from industrialists and bankers, a handful of 19th century judges

gave corporations more rights in property than human beings enjoyed in their

persons."(Ibid):

      The biggest blow to citizen constitutional authority came in 1886. The

US Supreme Court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad,

that a private corporation was a "natural person" under the US Constitution,

sheltered by the 14th Amendment (even though that amendment had been written

and ratified in 1868 to protect the rights of freed slaves), which requires

due process in the criminal prosecution of "persons." Following this ruling,

huge, wealthy corporations were allowed to compete on "equal terms" with

neighborhood businesses and individuals. "There was no history, logic or

reason given to support that view," Supreme Court Justice William Douglas

wrote 60 years later.

     Once corporations were legally defined as "natural persons", they

automatically were endowed with the same "Bill of Rights" as human beings,

and so came to possess and then exploit with devastating consequences, the

same "rights" of the freedom of speech, and the ability to participate in

elections and lobby elected officials.

     It is essential to understand how corporations prior to the Civil War

were legislatively defined, so we may better appreciate what we can discover

and make use of today, using the sections still present in our state

constitutions -- as well as reinstating and strengthening in favor of nature,

citizens, and communities, many sections that have been repealed by corporate

groups seeking to make incorporation laws more "corporate friendly" -- to

overthrow corporate authority, and reinstate the authority of we the

sovereign people. Up to the mid-1800s, Corporations had limited duration, 10

years, 20 years, 30 years -- they were not given forever, like corporate

charters are given today.



The amount of land a corporation could own was limited.

The amount of capitalization a corporation could have was limited. 

The corporation had to be chartered for a specific purpose -- not for

        everything, or anything.

The internal governance was very different -- shareholders had a lot more

        rights than they have today, for major decisions such as mergers;

        sometimes they had to have unanimous shareholder consent.

There were no limitations protections on liability -- managers, directors,

        and shareholders were liable for all debts and harms and in some

        states, doubly or triply liable.

The states reserved the right to amend the charters, or to revoke them --

        even for no reason at all.



     Today, is it critical for all of us to "examine the fundamental

difference over what is a decision for the civil society that needs to be

conducted in an open way, through the constitutionalized process, and what

are decisions that are the private domain of the corporation?"

     Ward Morehouse, speaking in Palo Alto this past January 29th, spoke of

"The Seven Challenges" we face in order to get out of the mess we are

currently in: I think the first challenge we have to come to grips with is

how to overcome this colonization of our minds and to recognize that there

are alternatives to a society dominated by giant corporations.

     Our second challenge involves taking a lesson from the play book of the

corporations who ... have spent the last century or more consolidating their

power and insulating themselves from meaningful democratic control. And we

need therefore to try to change a body of legal doctrine rather than fight

case after case after case of corporate transgression.

     Our third challenge is to resist the temptation for co-optation and

accommodation and not to accept as "victories" those which leave corporate

power unchallenged and intact.

     Our fourth challenge is to recognize the myth of American democracy and

to overcome the plutocracy with which we live. All societies have myths about

themselves. Ours is no exception.

     The fifth is to understand that we will never win in this struggle if we

play by their rules because they wrote the rules.

     Our sixth is to determine how we know when we really have won in the

struggle against corporate power, and I would submit to you that we only

really win when there is a fundamental shift in power from corporations back

to the people where it was in the first place, and should be again.

     The seventh challenge is to take to heart the big lessons of 20th

century history, and not to be discouraged by the challenges that indeed do

confront us. It was said nowhere better or more eloquently than by Howard

Zinn in one of his recent books, when he wrote that, "the struggle for

justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power

of those who have the guns and the money, and who seem invincible in their

determination to hold onto it. That apparent power has again and again proved

vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral

fervor, ingenuity, courage, patience. Whether by blacks in Alabama and South

Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Viet Nam, or workers and

intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union itself. No cold

calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that

their cause is just."

     He then went on to discuss, one of Clinton's throwaway lines in his

speech [when he said] "The era of big government is over". . . And you will

recall that there was a round of applause on both sides of the isle. I would

submit to you that the era of the Giant Corporation is over and that it is

time for us to take the offensive in the struggle to establish democratic

control over corporations.  Here is an eleven-point program for doing just

that: We can start by revoking the charters of especially harmful

corporations who have inflicted mass harm on innocent people. As Richard

indicated, there are provisions for the revocation of charters in 49 of the

50 states. They have some provisions similar to that in the New York Business

Corporation Law, Section 1101, which specifies that corporations that act

contrary to the public policy of the state are subject to dissolution.

     We can recharter corporations to limit their powers and make them

entities subordinate to the sovereign people. For example by granting

charters (as used to be the case) for limited time periods, requiring that

there be a conscious, deliberate act of approval by communities and workers

for corporations to continue beyond the initial time in which they have been

chartered. For making corporate managers and directors liable for the harms

done by corporations.

     We can address what I think is a fundamental obstacle to democratic

control over corporations, which is their sheer size. I think many of you are

well aware that the largest corporations today are larger than most nation-

states. General Motors has gross income greater than the gross domestic

product of Denmark. So we need to reduce the size of corporations by breaking

them into smaller units with less power to undermine democratic institutions.

     For those of you who think this is a wild flight-of-fancy, I would

remind you that as an issue in public policy, this has historical precedence

in the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 which did just that: it

said certain public utility companies will divest themselves because they may

not be larger than a given set of criteria determined through a democratic

process.

     We need to establish effective worker and community control over

production units in order to protect the "reliance interest," an important,

if not fully developed, legal doctrine which workers and communities acquire

over time in the actions, the activities, and indeed the assets of

corporations. This could be done in a variety of ways including prohibitions

in the charter of the corporation in the future, prohibitions for the hiring

of replacement workers, requiring independent health and safety audits by

experts chosen by workers in the affected communities, and so on.

     We can initiate referendum campaigns, or take action through state

legislatures and the courts, to end constitutional protections for corporate

persons. As Richard indicated, we are, in a certain sense, in the belly of

the beast here in Santa Clara County, because that is where all this terrible

mischief of corporations being persons before the law, began.

     We can prohibit corporations from making campaign contributions to

candidates in any elections, and from lobbying any local, state, and federal

government bodies. And if you think this is off-the-wall, you should be aware

that in the state of Wisconsin, up until a couple of decades ago, it was a

felony for corporations to make political contributions.

     We can stop subsidy abuse and extortion by corporations through which

large corporations rake off billions of dollars from the public treasury.

Please let us not call it "corporate welfare." Welfare should be a positive

concept. This is extortion and subsidy abuse and we need to stop it.

     We need to launch campaigns to cap salaries of corporate executives, and

tie them to a ratio of average compensation for production workers (say, five

or ten to one). I'll return to this subject in a moment, as the reality is

much different today as all of you know.

     We can encourage worker and community-owned and -controlled cooperatives

and other alternatives to conventional limited liability profit-making

corporations. They need not be the only game in town, in fact they are not

the only game in town. But we need to work hard to expand alternative types

of enterprises that will subject themselves to genuine democratic control.

     We can prepare model state corporation codes based on the principle of

citizen sovereignty, and begin the campaign for their adoption, state-by-

state.

     We can invigorate, from the grassroots up, a national debate on the

relationship between public property and private property -- including future

value -- and the rights of natural persons, communities, and other species

when they are in conflict with those corporations. This whole subject of how

we define property rights is at the heart of much of the accumulation and

codification of corporate power.

     Under the form of ownership, known to us today as "the corporation," the

legal act of incorporation creates a `person' or `corpus'. For over the past

100 years these legal entities have been exercising more and more of their

powers to recreate the circumstances of their own existence. This is exactly

what the first citizens of this country feared the most, and attempted to

prevent the occurrence of by defining the subordinate nature of such legal

fictitious entities to that of flesh-and-blood human beings. They implemented

this through the legal mechanism of charters -- the certificates of

incorporation.

     Richard Grossman drove home this point in Palo Alto when he said,  "In

most states a lot of the language from the early days, that reflected the

subordinate nature of corporations is still on the books (including

California). Some of that language is gone. But we still have the authority,

in California, and other states, to define the corporations through their

charters; we still have the authority to amend the charters; we still have

the authority to revoke the charters -- the language is there. We still have

the authority to rewrite the state corporation codes in order to order

corporate executives to do what the sovereign people want to do. "

     A sovereign people do not negotiate with subordinate legal fictions. We

instruct them. We define them. We don't regulate them about the edges so they

can poison here and poison there, but not more than the acceptable amount. We

say, You can't operate if you poison. That is what a sovereign people should

do. And you may say, given the power of corporations, this could not be

possible.

     I happened to look up the Constitution of California of 1879, which was

the constitution that Californians had when they joined the Union. Article

12, which runs several pages, is called "Corporations." There are 24 sections

in Article 12 defining the corporation. 20 of them have been repealed, the

last set in 1972.

     As you read these I urge you to think about how, in those years, there

were people who came together who had concerns about the banking corporations

and the railroad corporations and the insurance corporations -- many of whom

had come from other states, and other territories -- and when they said, as

we are going to form our own constitution and our own state, we have to

preserve our political authority over this fiction. They were strong enough

and mobilized enough and educated enough to force these articles to be put

into their constitution despite the power of the railroad magnates and the

other magnates here who are honored all over San Francisco and California.

     I'll close by suggesting that just those sections alone -- and there is

more in California's constitution of 1879 -- reinforce the concept that

people of other eras, over 100 years ago, understood the vital importance

that the fiction of the corporation was the subordinate entity to the

sovereign people. If we are going to have pretense to a democracy, we cannot

give political rights and powers to a private entity. We cannot let that

private entity get so strong that it rewrites the laws, that it shapes the

culture, that it shapes the education.

     As people are looking into the histories of their states they are

finding very similar histories. Although it may be difficult to imagine a

country that's not dominated by giant corporations, other people before us

have imagined that, and they've taken big steps toward that, and there is no

reason why we can't continue that struggle. Because they also left us many

important mechanisms that we can use.

     The reason we use the term "corpses," is to convey the idea that

although these entities are in fact seen by people today as being like and

having the same qualities as that of human persons (the language people use

is a "dead" giveaway: corporate "arms" reaching into our lives, `cutting off

corporations at their "knees"', etc.), they are NOT LIVING PERSONS -- they

are, more accurately, like dead bodies that have not been given a proper

burial.

     May we all be inspired, with gobs of creativity and enthusiasm, to carry

us forward in our collective endeavor to re-establish a form of self-

governance, and a manifestation of we the sovereign people, that was begun on

this continent over 200 years ago when those people were inspired by the

democratic forms of participatory governance that had been conducted by the

HAU DE NO SAU NEE People, since before Columbus bumped into the Bahama

Islands and mistook the Arawak people for "Indians".



[ This article was reprinted from: www.ratical.com/corporations/index.html

This is an interesting web site and contains a plethora of links for the

purpose of investigating corporations and reigning in their excesses.]







Brits outlaw ALL handguns



      LONDON (AP) - Lawmakers voted overwhelmingly Wednesday night to pass a

bill outlawing all handguns, apparently signaling the end of pistol ownership

in Britain.

      The Firearms (Amendment) Bill, drawn up after a lone gunman massacred

16 schoolchildren and their teacher in the Scottish town of Dunblane in March

1996, passed the key second stage in the House of Commons by a vote of 384-

181.

      Thanks to the new Labor government's solid 179-seat majority, the

bill's passage through two more stages in the House of Commons appears

assured.

      ``It will in general no longer be possible to practice handgun sports

in the mainland of Britain,'' although the country will occasionally play

host to international shooting events, Home Secretary Jack Straw said.

      Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led the Labor Party to victory in May 1

national elections, has thrown his support behind the bill.

      ``I think we do owe a moral responsibility to the victims of Dunblane

and their families. That is the reason why we have sought to bring forward

this legislation,'' Blair told Parliament in answer to a lawmaker's question

earlier Wednesday.

      Once through the House of Commons, the bill will be debated by the

House of Lords, Parliament's unelected upper chamber. If approved there, the

legislation will be presented to Queen Elizabeth II to be signed into law.

      The bill extends the more modest ban that the Conservative government

of former Prime Minister John Major passed through Parliament in November.

That bill did not outlaw .22-caliber weapons.

      Members of the main opposition Conservative Party and some Labor

lawmakers attacked the proposed law.

      ``The proposals in this bill are unnecessary, unfair and expensive,''

said Conservative home affairs spokesman Michael Howard.

      Labor lawmaker Austin Mitchell said the bill ``doesn't do anything

about illegal weapons, which are a major problem.''

      Anne McGuire, lawmaker for the Dunblane district, said she regretted

that the rights of shooters ``will be infringed, but not as much as I regret

that those 16 children and their teacher were killed.''

      Two days ago, lawmakers approved compensation for the owners of large-

caliber handguns, which under the previous legislation will be banned

starting July 1.







Grand Jury Probe Ordered In Oklahoma Bomb Case 



        OKLAHOMA CITY, June 11 - An Oklahoma judge Wednesday ordered a grand

jury investigation into an alleged cover-up by federal agents in the Oklahoma

City bombing case.

        The grand jury probe was forced by Republican state Rep. Charles Key,

who collected about 10,600 signatures -- more than twice the number needed --

on a petition to investigate the bombing and the way it was handled by

federal agents.



'Extreme Bias'



        District Judge Charles Owens ruled that Key had met all the

requirements and ordered that a state grand jury be selected from a pool of

100 potential jurors on June 30.

        Key has been highly critical of the FBI and meets regularly with

anti-government groups who share his theory that federal agents were aware of

a bombing plot but either deliberately did nothing or bungled their bid to

stop it.

        He said he was pleased with the judge's order, but it was not clear

who would present evidence to the grand jury because state Attorney General

Drew Edmondson and Oklahoma County District Attorney Bob Macy have both said

they believed Key's allegations were unfounded.

        Key called on both Edmondson and Macy to remove themselves from the

probe "because they themselves have been so extremely biased".

        "Over and over again, he (Macy) has done everything that he could do

to try to stop us. Rhetoric is one thing and actions are another, and that's

what really counts -- action," Key said.

        Key's conspiracy theory centered on information he claimed showed

federal agents knew there was going to be a bomb attack on the Alfred P.

Murrah federal building in downtown Oklahoma City before it happened on the

morning of April 19, 1995. The bomb blew the building apart and killed 168

people.



Political Grandstanding?



        A federal jury in Denver last week found Gulf War veteran Timothy

McVeigh guilty of planting the bomb, and was expected to decide this week

whether he should be sentenced to death by lethal injection or life in

prison.

        Alleged co-conspirator Terry Nichols was scheduled to go on trial

later this year but Key and other government critics claimed others were

involved in or knew about the bombing plot.

        "We want to find the truth and hold everyone accountable who had any

participation or knowledge in this," Key said when he presented his petition

for a grand jury investigation last week.

        Many relatives of the 168 people killed in the bombing have accused

Key of trying to take political advantage of the tragedy. Officials said the

grand jury probe will be presided by District Judge William Burkett.





***



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