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21.24
The corporation
 
     
  Unlike other types of work association, corporations have always had a distinct set of common traits- chief amongst them their inherent purpose to undertake anti-competitive, amoral trade under the protection of immunity by law.
  
  This is because the very nature of corporations evolved from a common set of criteria in Europe, under special charters. These charters were usually granted by the sovereign authority of the state and sometimes even Popes and such charter defining and limiting those rights, privileges, and obligations and the localities in which they were to be exercised.
 
  The charter usually conferred a trading monopoly upon the company in a specific geographic area or for a specific type of trade item. And most importantly of all, some of the earliest and most profitable commodities traded were slaves, stolen precious metals and drugs such as opium.
  
21.24.1 The special privileges of corporations
  
  What made the first corporations special is the same as what makes their successors, the large multi national corporations special today- a seeming “above the law” position.
  
  There were and remain four principle privileges granted to corporations:
  
  (1) limited liability, meaning that capital suppliers are not subject to losses greater than the amount of their investment;
 
  (2) transferability of shares, whereby rights in the enterprise may be transferred readily from one investor to another without reconstituting the organization under law;
 
  (3) juridical personality, meaning that the corporation itself as a fictive "person" has legal standing and may thus sue and be sued, may make contracts, and may hold property in a common name; and
  
  (4) indefinite duration, whereby the life of the corporation may extend beyond the participation of any of its incorporators. The owners of the corporation in a legal sense are the shareholders, who purchase with their investment of capital a share in the proceeds of the enterprise and who are nominally entitled to a measure of control over the financial management of the corporation.
  
21.24.2 The misunderstanding of the purpose of corporations
  
  Many people still are under the popular misunderstanding that corporations generate beneficial growth in the communities in which they operate. This may be so in some exceptional circumstances and true to the extend that its employees are paid something.

  
  However, the primary purpose of large corporations since their invention has always been the two-fold objectives of politics and strategic funding.  
  The vast majority of wealth of corporations was and still remains in the hands of a select number of families and associations. In turn this wealth has been used to influence elections, wars, murder, enslavement, depressions and the massive growth of economies when it is deemed an advantage.
  
  Corporations were never designed to enrich the people who worked for them, nor the communities in which they operated. On the contrary, virtually all the first multi-national corporations starting with the 14th Century even up until the 19th Century were specifically about exploiting the wealth of resources of communities for its own ends.
  
21.24.3 Corporate laws and the perception of change
  
  Of course, multinational corporations no longer openly trade slaves, drugs and contraband. And new corporate laws across the world now compel corporations to provide some degree of disclosure.
  
  But the wealthiest and most powerful of corporations, the international banks remain largely untouchable from this process. Until such time that international uniform laws of corporate governance and due diligence exists, the unbroken pedigree of the very first multi-national corporations to the present day exists and thrives in certain sectors, to the disadvantage of every man, woman and child on planet Earth.
  
     
 
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