[GJM] Draft #30 Thom Hartmann On The Whole Divine Law (Or TOP, The Optimum Policy)

[wesburt at juno.com]

Dear Doug Everingham and all old friends,

I know you all have long since given up on 
cognoscing TOP from my various figures, 
but I must thank Doug sincerely for a timely 
introduction of author Thom Hartmann on 
John Herman's ERA list.  Appended below 
is your forwarded message, in part, showing 
brief excerpts from the beginning , the 
keynote, and the conclusion of Thom's 
article on Corporate Personhood.  Any 
author who opens an article on corporations 
with a quotation from Thomas Paine's 1791 
The Rights Of Man, Part I, has my undivided 
attention, because Paine's vital contribution 
to good republican governance in Part II was 
largely excluded from the US Constitution, 
our Bill of Rights, and all subsequent 
legislation to date, the only exception being 
the 1942 G. I. Bill which completed my 
BS ME in 1947.         


--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Doug Everingham <dnevrghm at powerup.com.au>
To: ERANet at yahoogroups.com, GPAforum at yahoogroups.com,
         simpolicies-general at yahoogroups.com
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2007 10:33:00 +1000
Subject: [ERANet] To Restore Democracy 
First Abolish Corporate Personhood
Relayed by Doug Everingham
====

To Restore Democracy 
First Abolish Corporate Personhood 
By Thom Hartmann
thom at thomhartmann.com
http://www.thomhartmann.com/restoredemocracy.shtml
                     
   Thomas Paine said it best.

“It has been thought,” he wrote in The Rights of Man in 1791, “
that
government is a compact between those who govern and those who are
governed; but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect 
before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments
existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and
consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such 
a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals
themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a
compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only
mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle
on which they have a right to exist.”

Thus, Paine and others of the Revolutionary Era reasoned, any institution
made up by and of humans - from governments to churches to corporations -
must be subordinate to individual living people in terms of the rights
and powers held by the institution.

~~~~~ Snip introductory paragraphs ~~~~~

With the passage of the Fourteenth 
Amendment, the owners of the what 
were then America’s largest and most 
powerful corporations - the railroads - 
figured they’d finally found a way to 
reverse Paine’s logic and no longer 
have to answer to “we, the people.” 
They would claim that the corporation 
is a person. They would claim that for 
legal purposes, the certificate of 
incorporation declares the legal birth 
of a new person, who should therefore 
have the full protections the voters 
have under the Bill of Rights.

~~~~~~~~ Snip to last paragraph ~~~~~~~

But the first step, as always, is awakening 
people to the root cause of the problems 
we face - the use of corporate personhood 
by a handful of the world’s largest 
enterprises to insinuate themselves into 
governments and seize control of legislative 
and regulatory agendas. As enough voters 
learn the history and realize the 
consequences of this, the solution - ending 
corporate personhood - will become more 
and more possible, and Paine’s and 
Jefferson’s original idea of democracy 
representing “we, the people” will come 
back to life.

This article is copyright 2002 by Thom 
Hartmann, and largely excerpted from 
Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate 
Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights 
by Thom Hartmann, published by Rodale 
Books, 2002.
~~~~~ End Brief Excerpts From The Article ~~~~~

Thom Hartmann's archives at URL:
http://www.thomhartmann.com/commondreams.shtml 
are a gold mine for those of us who have 
wondered how the USA could loose the 
Moral High Ground it occupied and become 
an Empire in less than a century.  Please 
find below three excerpts from Thom's 
archives which addressed questions I have 
raised but could not answer.  If appropriate, 
I have added a comment in the format: 
[WSB comment WSB] below the excerpt.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 1st. of 3 Excerpts ~~~~~~~~~~~
March 12, 2004 by CommonDreams.org 
Democracy - Not "The Free Market" - Will Save 
America's Middle Class 
by Thom Hartmann

Here are a couple of headlines for those who haven't 
had the time to study both economics and history: 
1. There is no such thing as a "free market." 
2. The "middle class" is the creation of government 
intervention in the marketplace, and won't exist without 
it (as millions of Americans and Europeans are discovering). 
The conservative belief in "free markets" is a bit like 
the Catholic Church's insistence that the Earth was 
at the center of the Solar System in the Twelfth Century. 
It's widely believed by those in power, those who 
challenge it are branded heretics and ridiculed, 
and it is wrong. 
In actual fact, there is no such thing as a "free market." 
Markets are the creation of government." 
[WSB  I wholly agree with Thom that the USA has never 
experienced a free market since it became an industrial 
economy in the 1890s.  But the technical requirements 
of a free market in an agrarian society (USA from colonial 
times through the nineteenth century) appear to require less 
positive material feedback, from those in production to those 
in development, than is required to sustain a free market 
in industrial societies such as Japan and Western Europe 
during their post war three decade economic miracles. WSB]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 2nd. of Three Excerpts ~~~~~~~~~~~

February 1, 2005 by CommonDreams.org 
Nobles Need Not Pay Taxes 
by Thom Hartmann
 "Or, as Glenn Simpson noted in the Wall Street Journal, "General
Electric Co., for example, reported paying an effective tax rate of 19%
last year on world-wide income, compared with 26% in 2003." 
Corporations are taxed because they use public services, and are
therefore expected to help pay for them - the same as citizens." 
[WSB  Who could argue that corporations should not pay taxes to support
the public services provided by local governments?  But I would argue
that corporations should not be taxed on their net income by state or
federal governments.  State and Federal taxes should be on personal
income received under the protection of the state and federal
governments. Indirect taxes on corporate income are just a way for the
wealthy and powerful folks to evade their personal income taxes.  WSB] 


~~~~~~~~ 3rd. Of Three Excerpts ~~~~~~~~
March 3, 2005 by Common Dreams.org 
Moses Didn't Write The Constitution 
by Thom Hartmann

"After all, only two of the Ten Commandments 
have long been enshrined in our law - don't kill 
and don't steal - and those have been part of 
human society since the stone age (and are 
even today part of the rules of "stone age" 
cultures, who have never had contact with 
modern religion). These two are clearly part 
of "nature's law," as Jefferson often noted." 
[WSB  It makes no difference to me 
whether our oldest history book is the 
literal word of God or was cobbled 
together by the Jewish Remnant that 
returned from exile with Ezra under 
the decree of Artaxerxas (Ezra 7. 11-24).  
Either way, we should save as much of it 
as we can so as not to reinvent the wheel.
Too many of us preserve and defend the 
status quo by proposing overly complex 
solutions to our social disorders, when we 
should be correcting in our public sectors 
the obvious defects that have already been 
corrected in our private sectors.  WSB]
~~~~~ End Three Excerpts From Web Site ~~~~~


Thanks again Doug, for bringing Thom's 
good works to the attention of my old 
friends on nine mail lists.  The attached file 
is now thirteen years old, and my mentor Dr. 
W. Curtiss Priest is the only person on the 
web who has asked a question during those 
thirteen years about the structure of the 
Whole Divine Law.  The founding fathers 
put the first four religious Commandments on 
the back burner.  Louis Blanc provided the 
two missing poetic moral Commandments 
which add the three Mosaic tithes to the 
Decalogue.  The last six moral Commandments, 
as mentioned in the seventh of the thirty-nine 
Articles Of Religion are as universally accepted 
as "Thou shall not steal" and "Thou shall 
not kill."  Waste not want not.  Figures 8 
and 9 show the way engineers describe 
non-free markets for electric power grids 
and diversified product lines.
Kind regards,
Wes Burt

               TOP and TWP are cognoscible on
                Dr. W. Curtiss Priest's web site at:
       <http://www.epie.org/cyber-soc/default.htm>
                 TOP is GOOD --- TWP is EVIL
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