These giant corporations make the rest of us bear the costs of their actions while they sit back and make their profits. Some of us have grown tired of fighting these harms one incident at a time. We are looking squarely at the source of these harms, the unaccountable, artificial, giant corporations, and we think it is time to rein them in. For the first time, really in our politics, money is taking the field as an organized power. Chief Justice Ryan of the Wisconsin Supreme Court addressing the UW Law School Class of 1873.
Corporations are artificial entities.
If corporations break the law, they cannot be imprisoned. They are allowed to dominate our social and political life through far-reaching decisions affecting products, investments, pollution, safety, and jobs, as well as through their manipulation of elections, laws, and the media. This country's founders never intended corporations to dominate our society and overwhelm our democracy. For while they limited citizenship to white males, they were very clear that corporations were not citizens and must be carefully controlled. Thus, early citizen-legislatures used state chartering laws to define what the corporation and to set limits on what it could do.