Paul Edwards
Quo Warranto is a Latin term that means “by what authority”. It is an ancient legal device used to challenge a person’s or entity’s right to hold an elected office or exercise a specific official power.
It was used for hundreds of years under English Common Law, and in America’s colonial period, and later such suits were brought by government to challenge the acts of corporations that were thought to be in conflict with the rights of the nation.
His evil destructiveness and pathological greed are nothing to laugh about, but the man is actually a walking absurdity, a grotesque improbability, a buffoon surrounded and enabled by a gaggle of sycophantic mediocrities.
Historically, corporations were only granted State charters to operate if they could prove they existed for the public good. This was a major curb and restriction to Capitalist prospects and corporate organizers worked diligently to weaken and kill it.
Chief Justice John Marshall, in his decision in Dartmouth College vs. Woodward wrote that the corporation was “an artificial being, invisible, intangible and existing only in contemplation of law”. It should be noted he didn’t refer to corporations as “persons”.
The greatest single act to eliminate the social utility requirement, and by far the most damaging to that idea, occurred in a judicial finesse. In Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, justices of the U.S. Supreme Court who had unanimously concurred before oral arguments that corporations enjoyed, de facto, the legal status of individuals, allowed the term “persons” to be entered in the transcript and the die was cast.
Historically, corporations were only granted State charters to operate if they could prove they existed for the public good...
Tremendous outrage has been expended at the judgment in 2010 in the Citizens United case that ruled corporations are “persons”, but though understandable on the part of ordinary citizens, the issue had long ceased to matter. Corporations have been openly treated as persons before the law for over a century.
What that case did do was to render legal virtually unlimited slush-funding of politicians and causes by corporations that had been done, more or less clandestinely, for generations.
In something over a century, corporations have been transformed from entities required to serve the public interest into immensely powerful engines of its exploitation, as owners of government, and authors of the few laws that touch them, immune to control and correction, whose sole purpose is to extract the greatest profit possible from a citizenry they treat with arrogant contempt.
Americans are used to this and accept it. Most know that they have no voice in a government owned by the Capitalist cabal, but because the hardship and degradation most endure is not brutal, and because their tiny fragment of residual pride demands it, they continue to embrace the farce of their “democracy”. To be fair, men are not heroes: how else could they stand themselves?
One of the greatest betrayals of our people by our government—and they are legion—has been the cynical, systematic erasure of the constitutional laws for declaring and prosecuting war.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 gives Congress sole authority to declare war. Article II, Section 2 states that the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army, Navy and Militia of the states when called into service. No other war powers are stipulated.
In practice, Presidential war powers have been expanded far beyond the Constitution’s strict limits. Congress accepted the gradual erosion of compliance, much the way corporations became legal “persons” through a slipshod judicial consensus.
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 authorized President Johnson, ex post facto, to use military force against a supposed naval attack on U.S. ships by North Vietnam which he maintained thereafter was a full mandate to conduct that undeclared war.
The War Powers Act of 1983 was crafted to restrict a President’s power to act unilaterally by requiring notice to be given Congress within 48 hours of committing military action, and allowing 60 days for Congress to either authorize an extension or declare war. The terms of this resolution have been routinely ignored.
The weakening of Constitutional restraint on a President’s war powers is in line with elimination of the separation of powers of the three branches of government, and advances the vesting of all authority in an imperial, dictatorial mode of governance.
Americans exist under a Capitalist oligarchy ruled by a tiny cabal of billionaires with no love of, or loyalty to, their country, whose only allegiance and commitment is to monetary gain who, owning the media, train a deeply ignorant, credulous people to perform.
Their political hirelings run a system that deepens their control of society by engaging it in a form of psychic theater in which the hopes, griefs and hatreds of the masses are teased and torched to white heat to provoke violent emotion in an hysterical, vulgar electoral pageant that is irrelevant, and utterly without result. The powerful Quo Warranto of a gone age is unavailable to us now.
There is nothing new in this; it is the way of all empires. What was once new, just before their fall in all cases, was a spirit, sui generis, born from despair and desolation that, deep in a few men, infused the indomitable will to tear their empire down.
There is no forseeable future in which the massive power of the Capitalist elite miraculously devolves to the people, and their well being becomes the reason government functions. That being inarguable, how is the intelligent, decent person not captive to delusory, magical thinking to carry on? What can they do?
In the early phase of American Empire Henry David Thoreau went to jail to protest its evils, and wrote a manifesto to explain his act. Knowing government could never be perfect, he said that when the State’s villainy requires you finally to be unjust yourself, then you must “let your life be a friction to stop the machine”.
