by Kevin E. Abrams

The legal fiction we call a corporation was defined as a legal “person” by the US Supreme Court in 1886. As a “person”, a corporation is deemed to have rights similar to rights of a human being or free will man or woman.

In the book Fleshing Out Skull & Bones, the authors ask, if a Corporation is a “person” owned by the shareholders, are the shareholders engaging in slavery? And, if the Corporation is indeed a “person”, does it have an innate and unique capacity for moral and ethical action of independent volition? Do legal fictions defined as “persons” have any inherent capacity for moral conscience?

Like the straw man of the Wizard of Oz, all corporate fictions are mindless. Lacking any life of their own, they “innately” serve only themselves. Neither do corporate “personas” possess an innate capacity to respond to moral concerns. Thus, when a community or government becomes corporatised, the interface through which goods and services were provided and government policies were enacted shifts from an interface of local merchants and representatives interacting with the people to corporate fictions interfacing with “customers” and so-called voters.

Does any free-will man or woman have a real vote in any provincial or federal election today? In effect, one acts on behalf of the legal voter, the straw man in the corporatised fiction. In this domain, there exists no true capacity for a response to the moral and ethical conscience of the people, because the voter is actually “owned” by the fiction.

Corporations undermine community and representative government by co-opting free-will men and women into the fiction. Free-will men and women are construed as servants and reduced to items of inventory, i.e., employees “rewarded” for service, rather than masters compensated in an equal value-for-value exchange. Corporations undermine and actually destroy independent initiative and true capitalism, where labor would by its own merit be entitled to a direct call upon the wealth, principal, or capital it produces. By this definition, potters and glassblowers are capitalists, or producers of wealth, whereas corporate fictions are collectivist usurpers of wealth. As “persons” corporate fictions are a pretense. Psychologically, they are pathological, for in time, the people begin to mirror the fiction.