Declaration of Independence from Corporate Rule

e hold these truths to be self‑evident: that all persons are of equal value and importance, that we are endowed with certain inalienable rights and shares, that among these are life, liberty, privacy, health care, unblinkered education, fairly paid work, the freedoms of speech, press, religion, assembly, association, sexual expression, and travel, due democratic and legal process, personal safety against war, domination, crime, exploitation, racism, and sexism, a decent if minimal comfort, minimal personal property up to a common limit, and a fair chance for self‑realization and personal happiness.

ecause of the course of events in our country during the last 15 years it has become necessary for we the people of the United States to declare our government dead to our interests and to reassemble as free persons in a single movement to build a new country in this one. A decent respect for the opinions of our fellow citizens who may not yet aptly understand our present condition requires that we should list the grievances which impel us now to defy and declare our independence of the giant corporations which govern, through the hollowed‑out forms of our own government, every stage and every exploitable aspect of our lives.

orporate giganticism is taking the earth and now is moving powerfully to kill both political and economic democracy.... Having started, in the main, after the Civil War, crushing down on the self‑organizing people later on in that century, then concealed for the next 80 years behind the masks of antitrust, progressivism, and regulationism -- for the past 15 years those very abuses, lies, and deceptions of the oncoming American oligarchy have been cascading down from every quarter on our heads and necks and backs -- on our jobs, our pay, our pensions, our communities, our shops and family farms and small‑town banks, our very hopes and dreams, all to the further engorgement of the giant corporations, the further enrichment of the hugely rich, and our impressment into humble work and service, earning only pittances and contempt.

hose who established our present government....ordained and established the United States of America, not the United Corporations of America. Today the divine right of kings has been replaced by the divine right of CEOs .... The very structure and logic of corporate giganticism crushes free enterprise and democracy by requiring the absorption or destruction of business competitors small and large and the spurning and violation of the public interest for the corporation's good. So it must be and so it is that when a giant corporation succeeds, democratic society fails.

e are being marched into a New World Order, as one of its buglers called it, but it is to be an order of One World Corporate Tyranny, with national democracies and their citizens absolutely subordinated to the divine right of the fewer and fewer, larger and larger survivors among these unnatural contraptions of production and destruction. Those few corporations that will be left will reign high above us and dominate our work, our health care, our shops and what's left of our farms, our co‑ops and our credit unions ‑‑ our schools, "the news" we receive and do not receive in their newspapers and on our own airways‑‑our national capital and our national credit, our public lands, our bank deposits, our mutual funds, our insurance policies ‑‑ our courts, our elections, our cities and states, our national government ‑‑ our amusements by day, our dreams at night, our very lives and deaths.

e are ruled now by a form of government in which hierarchical and authoritarian corporations and the political class they have suborned combine to rule for their own profit and power against the people's interests. The name for that is not democracy, the name for that is crypto‑fascism, still young in our case, but soon to be full‑fanged. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1938, "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their Democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism."

As the people of the town of Topsfield Massachusetts resolved in June 1776 concerning their former loyalties to the King of England so say we to these self‑crowned kings of our politics, our work, and our commerce, "The scene is now changed; our sentiments are altered."

e declare that the judiciary's audacious gift of our personal constitutional rights to the corporations we created is null and void. We instruct our government and courts to severely punish any corporation, which violates any of our constitutional rights, most pointedly those secured by the First Amendment. We give fair notice to the egregiously criminal giant corporations of the nation and the world that we will close you down. On these requirements we will not compromise nor will we be denied. And for the support of this Declaration, we mutually pledge, to each other and to the people of the world, our hope, our patience, the risks we dare, the time, the work, and money we can share, and our sacred honor.

Excerpts from ADeclaration of Independence from Corporate Rule" by Alliance for Democracy Founder Ronnie Dugger; first read in front of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia on July 4, 1997

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