As 300spartansgym noted today, Colorado Governor (and Democrat) Bill Ritter signed HB 1355. The law will now prevent "insurance companies from penalizing small businesses if employees or their families have been sick."
It's almost pathetic the public must affirm such things, and highlights yet again the unbelievable inequity of power between us little guys and them corporations.
But we all most bow down to "judicial precedence". All hail (among others) the 1886 Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad declaring corporations are entitled to the same rights as actual human beings in the Fourteenth Amendment.
But it wasn't always this way.
For example, in my home state of Ohio's original 1803 Constitution, they explicitly defined the powers of corporations, including such provisions that:
- limited duration of charter or certificate of incorporation,
- limited amount of land ownership,
- limitation of amount of capitalization, or total investment of owners,
- limitations of charter or specific purpose (to amend its charter, a new corporation had to be formed),
- the state reserving the right to amend the charter or to revoke them.
That comes from a summary of Corporate Power (pdf) produced by the Northeast Ohio Office of the American Friends Service Committee, an organization of Quakers dedicated to peace.
And though I cannot cross-verify this anywhere, they claim the following is text from an Ohio Supreme Court decision during the mid-19th century:
The corporation has received vitality from the state; it continues during its existence to be the creature of the state; must live subservient to its laws, and has such powers and franchises as those laws have bestowed upon it, and none others. As the state was not bound to create it in the first place, it is not bound to maintain it after having done so, if it violates the laws or public policy of the state, or misuses its franchises to oppress the citizens thereof.
I'm not just some corporate-hater, I'm a corporation owner myself. But I don't think it radical to imagine a world where corporations must ultimately answer to the people, not their shareholders.
I'll let the words of another Ohio Democrat speak for me, since they ring as true now as when originally spoken:
The first thing to understand is the difference between the natural person and the fictitious person called a corporation. They differ in the purpose for which they are created, in the strength which they possess, and in the restraints under which they act.
Man is the handiwork of God and was placed upon earth to carry out a Divine purpose; the corporation is the handiwork of man and created to carry out a money-making policy.
There is comparatively little difference in the strength of men; a corporation may be one hundred, one thousand, or even one million times stronger than the average man. Man acts under the restraints of conscience, and is influenced also by a belief in a future life. A corporation has no soul and cares nothing about the hereafter. ...
A corporation has no rights except those given it by law. It can exercise no power except that conferred upon it by the people through legislation, and the people should be as free to withhold as to give, public interest and not private advantage being the end in view.
-- William Jennings Bryan
address to the Ohio 1912 Constitutional Convention
Someone once told me you're not supposed to end your writings with a quote, so now I haven't.
x-posted at Square State