UC Berkeley Political Scientist Wendy Brown's  book Undoing the Demos, and lecture (MP3) is literally the best discussion of how and why human rights are being taken away from humans and given to corporations. Brown looks at the human rights enumerated in the US Bill of Rights, and how they have been interpreted in successive Supreme Court rulings like Hobby Lobby (corporations are people whose religious freedom entitles them to deny contraception to their workers) and Citizens United (corporations are people and have the free speech right to buy politicians). She suggests that these have been misread as merely conservative/business-oriented thinking gaining influence, and that rather, they are best understood as an ongoing project that grants personhood to companies at the expense of real people.

Neoliberal rationality — ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture — remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In vivid detail, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice cede to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either.

In an original and compelling theoretical argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. 

What Words Mean in a Court of Law

Law of the Land vs. Law of Water which is the Law Of Money (Maritime Admiralty)

Maritime Admiralty Law - your red pill

 

The people first sent to America represented English Royalty and England's financial interests.
These same people were also here for their own personal financial gain.

Europeans first settled New Bedford in 1652. Plymouth Colony settlers purchased the land from chief Massasoit of the Wampanoag tribe. Whether the transfer of the land was legitimately done has been the subject of intense controversy. Like other native tribes, the Wampanoags did not share the settlers' concepts of private property. The tribe believed they were granting usage rights to the land, not giving it up permanently.

The settlers used the land to build the colonial town of Old Dartmouth (which encompassed not only present-day Dartmouth, but also present-day New Bedford, Acushnet, Fairhaven, and Westport). A section of Old Dartmouth near the west bank of the Acushnet River, originally called Bedford Village, was officially incorporated as the town of New Bedford in 1787. The name was suggested by the Russell family who were prominent citizens of the community. It comes from the fact that the Dukes of Bedford, a leading English aristocratic house, also bore the surname Russell. (Bedford, Massachusetts had already been incorporated by 1787; hence "New" Bedford.)

You may think what's happening across this country - like Scott Walker's efforts in Wisconsin - to strip rights from working people and give multi-billion dollar tax breaks to corporations is something new. It's not.

1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery
Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections
In payment of a debt to Penn's father, Penn had received from King Charles II of England a large land grant west of New Jersey which King Charles II of England named Pennsylvania after William's father, Admiral Penn.Germantown was thus founded along a Lenni Lenape trail four miles (6 km) north of Philadelphia, between the Wissahickon and Wingohocking creeks. The king allowed Penn to establish a proprietary colony where Penn appointed the governor and judges but established an otherwise democratic system of government with freedom of religion, fair trials, elected representatives, and separation of church and state.
Penn had converted to Quakerism. In the 1670 "Hay-market case", William Penn was accused of the crime of 'preaching Quakerism to an unlawful assembly' and while he freely admitted his guilt, he challenged the righteousness of such a law. He had been imprisoned several times for his beliefs.

 

COMMON LAW JURY NULLIFICATION HTTP://EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG/WIKI/JURY_NULLIFICATION

IS A DE FACTO POWER OF JURIES. JUDGES RARELY INFORM JURIES OF THEIR NULLIFICATION POWER. JURY NULLIFICATION OCCURS IN A TRIAL WHEN A JURY REACHES A VERDICT CONTRARY TO THE JUDGE'S INSTRUCTIONS AS TO THE LAW. A JURY VERDICT CONTRARY TO THE LETTER OF THE LAW PERTAINS ONLY TO THE PARTICULAR CASE BEFORE IT; HOWEVER, IF A PATTERN OF ACQUITTALS DEVELOPS IN RESPONSE TO REPEATED ATTEMPTS TO PROSECUTE A STATUTORY OFFENSE, IT CAN HAVE THE DE FACTO EFFECT OF INVALIDATING THE STATUTE. A PATTERN OF JURY NULLIFICATION MAY INDICATE PUBLIC OPPOSITION TO AN UNWANTED LEGISLATIVE ENACTMENT. SOME COMMONLY CITED HISTORICAL EXAMPLES OF JURY NULLIFICATION INVOLVE THE REFUSAL OF AMERICAN COLONIAL JURIES TO CONVICT A DEFENDANT UNDER ENGLISH LAW.
[2] JURIES HAVE ALSO REFUSED TO CONVICT DUE TO THE PERCEIVED INJUSTICE OF A LAW IN GENERAL,
[3] OR THE PERCEIVED INJUSTICE OF THE WAY THE LAW IS APPLIED IN PARTICULAR CASES.
[4] THE GENERAL POWER OF JURIES TO DECIDE ON VERDICTS WAS RECOGNISED IN THE ENGLISH MAGNA CARTA [14]

 

AMERICAN ROYALTY

 

Examples of Royalty from the Virginia Historical Society

• Culpeper, Cathrine See: Fairfax, Cathrine (Culpeper), baroness, 1670-1719
• Culpeper, Frances See: Berkeley, Lady Frances (Culpeper), 1634?-1690
• Culpeper, Margaretta (Van Hesse) Lady, 1635-1710
• Culpeper, Thomas 1635-1689 Lord, second baron
• Cumberland, Margaret Russell 1560-1616 Countess, named in third Virginia charter, 4-7-60 Caldwell 3/16
• Cumberland, William Augustus 1721-1765 Duke of
• Cunningham, Elizabeth (McGuire) See: Glencairn, Elizabeth (McGuire) Cunningham, countess, 1724-1801
• Campbell, John 1678-1743 See: Argyle, John 2nd duke of,
• Campbell, John 1705-1782 See: Loudon,John Campbell 4th earl of
• Cavendish, William 1720-1764 See: Devonshire, William Cavendish , 4th duke.

 

Berkeley County West Virginia

 

Berkeley County was created by an act of the House of Burgesses in February 1772 from the northern third of Frederick County (Virginia). At the time of the county's formation it also consisted of the areas that make up the present day Jefferson and Morgan counties. Berkeley County is the state's second oldest county.
Most historians believe that the county was named for Norborne Berkeley, Baron de Botetourt (1718-1770), Colonial Governor of Virginia from 1768 to 1770. In 1769, he dissolved the Virginia General Assembly after it adopted two resolutions that he felt bordered on treason (the Assembly declared that Virginia should no longer submit to taxation by England and that Virginia would no longer send its criminals to England for trial). Despite his differences with the General Assembly, Norborne Berkeley was well respected by the colonists. He was referred to as the "good governor of Virginia." There is a monument to his memory in Williamsburg, and two counties were named in his honor, Berkeley (in present day West Virginia) and Botetourt in Virginia.
Other historians claim that the county may have been named in honor of Sir William Berkeley (1610-1677). He was born near London, graduated from Oxford University in 1629, and was appointed Governor of Virginia in 1642. He served as Governor until 1652 and was later reappointed Governor in 1660. He continued to serve as Virginia's Governor until 1677 when he was called back to England. He died later that year, on July 9, 1677. Advocates of Norborne Berkeley note that the other Governor Berkeley (William) was known by some as the "Tyrannical Governor of Virginia" because he ordered the hanging of Nathaniel Bacon's followers for resisting his authority.

Senator Warren ~ “If you're caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you're gonna go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life. But evidently if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your bed at night -- every single individual associated with this. And I think that's fundamentally wrong." So it seems to this scribe that banks are not only “Too Big To Fail;” they are also “Too Big To Jail.”

7/7/14 Corporations, 'artificial people' and the unintended risks of Hobby Lobby
The supreme court decision on corporations' religious rights could open the door for the outsize influence of business across American life.
[... In a 1933 decision, supreme court justice Louis Brandeis cautioned that corporations, granted too many of the rights normally reserved for human beings, can end up dominating the state.   Some were sounding the alarm even before the Citizens United case (in which the supreme court ruled that campaign contribution restrictions limited the free speech rights of these corporate citizens) in 2010. The SUNY Buffalo Law School convened a daylong panel in 2005 revolving around the theme of “Planet of the APs”, making a play on the shorthand for artificial persons. The subtitle: “Are corporations and other artificial persons taking over the legal system?” --- ]

[... Then, too, what punishment can be levied against a company? There’s no perp walk for corporate citizens. Yes, there’s reputational harm, but compared to what happens to an individual who has been accused of, say, downloading child pornography, or even drunk driving, it’s chicken feed. Artificial persons don’t have emotions and don’t feel shame. If their name loses its power, they can re-incorporate under another one.   That leads to another pesky question: what to do with corporate malefactors? Credit Suisse just pled guilty to criminal charges of tax evasion and agreed to pay a record $2.6bn fine. But the bank hasn’t been marched off to jail. BNP Paribas pled guilty to conspiracy charges and will pay a $8.8bn fine that equals one and a half years of its profits. That’s not a terribly effective solution anyway, as it leaves thousands of innocent bystanders – employees not involved in the wrongdoing – unemployed, as we saw in the case of Enron....]

 

7/7/14 On Wall Street, the Corleone family fits right in​ ~ Richard Cohen

<snip> 

Michael: “The Godfather is dead. So is his way of doing business. Hyman Roth showed me what we should do. We turn the Corleone family into Corleone Enterprises Ltd. We list it on the stock exchange along with the other criminals. We do what we have always done, but if we get caught, nobody goes to jail. We pay a fine and say we’re sorry.”

Al Pacino in The Godfather: part II. Part of The Godfather: 
“Michael, Michael,” Luca Brasi says. “It is not possible. You do the crime, you do the time.”

Michael is patient. “The French bank BNP Paribas admitted it broke the law. It copped a plea. It said it helped Iran avoid sanctions. Iran is our mortal enemy and a country the Corleone family has no sympathy for. The bank helped our enemy and he who helps our enemy is also our enemy. So what happened? Tell ’em, Hyman.”

Hyman says, “They paid a fine, nearly $9 billion. A piffle for them. But it was treated like the corporation acted on its own. Nobody was in charge. Nobody benefited. A corporation is the perfect crime family.”

Michael says, “Tell ’em about Credit Suisse.”

“It pleaded guilty to tax evasion,” Hyman says. “Tax evasion! But no one went to jail. It paid Uncle Sam almost $2.6 billion and went on its way. Al Capone of blessed memory got 11 years for tax evasion. Why? Because even though he controlled all the rackets in Chicago and had politicians and judges in his pocket, he was not incorporated.”

</snip>