Tuesday, March 3, 2009, 2:39pm
Corporations could engage only in activities necessary to fulfill their chartered purpose.
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Corporations could not own property that was not essential to the fulfilling of their chartered purpose.
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The personal assets of corporate shareholders were not protected from the consequences of corpoate behavior. If still upheld today, this rule would have meant that anyone who owned stock in any of the companies that needed a bailout would have had to have paid for those bailouts out of their own pockets. Owning part of a corporation meant truly being responsible for that corporation.
Were they around today, the Founding Fathers would look at our corporate climate and our economic situation, and they would say, "We tried to warn you!" But Amercia has not heeded their wisdom. Almost as soon as the country was born, big business interests began to chip away at these constraints on corporate power.