Threshold by Thom Hartmann

Author:Thom Hartmann [Hartmann, Thom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101133194
Published: 2009-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

It was the “common people” and their “welfare” that most interested the members of the Constitutional Convention who ended up prevailing in the debates that summer and fall of 1787, producing the Constitution we now have.

There’s long been a debate about why James Madison promised his peers—and kept the promise—to keep his notes on the Constitutional Convention secret for fifty years, or until all were dead. That anniversary would have been 1837, and in the years of the early 1830s, Madison, then frail and elderly, struggled to write a preface to the notes to provide some context. Unfortunately, he never finished—he died in 1836—and the notes were first published “raw” in 1840.

But many historians now believe that the main reason Madison agreed to keep his notes secret was because, in their lengthy and intense detail, they showed how many of the most “aristocratic” members of the Constitutional Convention were “betraying their class” in creating a document to guide our nation that they hoped would prevent a wealthy ruling aristocracy from ever emerging.

Doing away with primogeniture—an early form of doing what Teddy Roosevelt’s later estate tax did—was an important first step, something that Thomas Jefferson had advocated from his first days in the Virginia legislature (ironically, in that as the eldest son when his father died, he inherited everything, including responsibility for his mother, and although his father was not rich, he was comfortably middle class, and this provided a basis for Jefferson’s later life).

But the corporate form was, in that day, rare and narrowly circumscribed. The word “corporation” doesn’t even appear in the Constitution. And up until the late nineteenth century, no state would allow a corporation to exist for more than forty years, so that nobody could use a corporation to avoid probate and build an everlasting empire.

When John D. Rockefeller was indicted in Ohio for antitrust and anti-monopoly violations, and offered a challenge to other states to change their laws to make legal what he had done with the Standard Oil Trust of Ohio. Thus in the late nineteenth century began a decade often referred to as the “chartermongering” era, when states began competing with each other to see which could make their corporate charter laws most “Rockefeller friendly.” Although New Jersey won (Rockefeller moved Standard there), Delaware actually ended up with the least restrictive corporate rules, which is why today more than half of the corporations listed in the Fortune 500 are chartered as Delaware corporations (including many credit card companies).

Denmark, like many of the highly developed nations of the world, did took legislative actions to stop dynastic “robber baron” families from emerging. It passed highly progressive taxation, so that after making around $3 million a year, a person found the taxes so high that it wasn’t worth the extra effort to earn more. The result is today a far more egalitarian society.

In a culture that values the “we” above the “me,” that holds every person as a sacred link in a cultural chain, even seemingly “individual” problems such as heroin addiction take on a new light.

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