When the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy first launched its historically groundbreaking work in the early 1990’s to help US’ians to try to understand why our citizen activism was so incredibly ineffective, and what were the structural causes that made it that way, one of the very first things they published and widely distributed was this pamphlet – Taking Care of Business: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation – which was designed to have a similar feel to Tom Paine’s famous Common Sense pamphlet, which helped to spread the ideas necessary for the American Revolution to succeed.

Taking Care of Business has been out of print for years now, but is readable in its entirety online HERE. It was written by Richard Grossman and Frank T Adams, and published in 1993. Here’s how it begins…

Corporations cause harm every day. Why do their harms go unchecked? How can they dictate what we produce, how we work, what we eat, drink and breathe? How did a self-governing people let this come to pass?

Corporations were not supposed to reign in the United States.

When we look at the history of our states, we learn that citizens intentionally defined corporations through charters — the certificates of incorporation.

In exchange for the charter, a corporation was obligated to obey all laws, to serve the common good, and to cause no harm. Early state legislators wrote charter laws and actual charters to limit corporate authority, and to ensure that when a corporation caused harm, they could revoke its charter.

During the late 19th century, corporations subverted state governments, taking our power to put charters of incorporation to the uses originally intended.

Corporations may have taken our political power but they have not taken our Constitutional sovereignty. Citizens are guaranteed sovereign authority over government officeholders. Every state still has legal authority to grant and to revoke corporate charters. Corporations, large or small, still must obey all laws, serve the common good, and cause no harm.

To exercise our sovereign authority over corporations, we must take back our political authority over our state governments. MORE…