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Colbert on Billionaire-Funded Super PACs

And, of course, the trend will forever and ever and ever get worse until we collectively say "Enough" and demand an end to money being treated as "free speech" in our elections via a Constitutional Amendment.

After Cuyahoga council kills campaign finance reform, what’s next?

I provide several reflections in this piece...


After Cuyahoga council kills campaign finance reform, what’s next?

http://clevelandmagazinepolitics.blogspot.com/2013/07/after-cuyahoga-council-kills-campaign.html

Small Business Owners and Corporate "Free Speech"

A whopping 66% of small business owners think Citizens United is bad for small business by giving large corporations  too much freedom to spend money to influence elections. Only 9% felt the reverse.

Small business owners get it: giving mammoth corpses greater "free speech rights" amplifies their voices while drowning out the voice of small business owners -- not to mention the rest of us.

http://mainstreetalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/CitizensUnitedpollreport-Jan-2012.pdf

Reversing Citizens United, and ending never-intended constitutional rights for corporations and the doctrine that money equals speech is one way to expand self governance.

NE Ohioans join movement against idea that the Bill of Rights applies to corporations

Plain Dealer (Cleveland) / July 9, 2013

Letter to the Editor

http://blog.cleveland.com/letters/2013/07/ne_ohioans_join_movement_again.html

While many Northeast Ohioans celebrated the Fourth of July holiday week with picnics and parades, citizens in Mentor, Lakewood and Cleveland Heights celebrated by launching or completing citizen initiative petition campaigns declaring their independence from corporate rule and big money in politics.

The three citizen initiatives are part of the Move to Amend campaign (movetoamend.org), a national coalition that's coordinated the passage of 400 resolutions and citizen initiatives asserting that only human beings, not corporations, possess constitutional rights and that money is not speech. Brecksville and Newburgh Heights voters passed similar ballot measures last November, while city councils in Athens, Oberlin, Fremont and Barberton have enacted similar resolutions.

Ohioans are doing our part to support this growing movement to end the bizarre legal doctrines that the Bill of Rights apply to corporations and that political money is equivalent to political speech. Many of the political and economic problems we face are at their root problems of corporations and/or the wealthy few having greater power and rights than the vast majority of We the People.

While parades and picnics are fine ways to celebrate our independence, (re)claiming the authority to govern ourselves free from the wealthy few and corporations is even better.

Greg Coleridge, Cleveland Heights

Coleridge is director of the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee and coordinator for Ohio Move to Amend.

Seeking open discussion

From the Akron Beacon Journal
July 4, 2013
http://www.ohio.com/news/seeking-open-discussion-1.410657


Social change
a group effort

Name: Greg Coleridge.
Age: 53.
Hometown: Cleveland Heights.

Role: Director of the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in Cuyahoga Falls, which often arranges public hearings, protests and educational events on political issues such as the federal budget and campaign finance reform.

“I have been inspired by a lot of people who have come before me. ... They are committed to bringing about change from the bottom up. Significant social change in this country has always occurred via social movements.”

“With the Fourth of July, independence wasn’t gathered from the top. It was struggling for improvements for liberty, for sovereignty, the wider notion of ‘We the people’ to be sovereign. If it really means something, we have to make sure that our people in office, our Constitution, allow it to happen. The only way that is assured is people at the grass roots making sure demo­cracy is a verb and not a noun.”

The System Isn't Broken, It's Fixed

by Greg Coleridge
University of Toledo Law Review, Spring 2013

A description of the problems connected to the existence of corporate rights and large political contributions from a wealthy few and why an amendment to the U.S. Constitution declaring that only human beings, not corporations, possess constitutional rights and that money is not speech would expand democracy.

http://www.afsc.org/document/system-isnt-broken-its-fixed

ACTION ALERT: Tell Ohio Legislators to Cut Increased Corporate Access Provision in Budget Bill

AMENDMENT TO STATE BUDGET BILL WOULD PERMIT UNLIMITED CONTRIBUTIONS FROM CORPORATIONS AND WEALTHY TO CAUCUS COMMITTEES
Tell your State Senator and Representative to Oppose this Amendment
Find your Ohio Senator at http://www.ohiosenate.gov/index
Find your Ohio Representative at http://www.ohiohouse.gov/index

-------

An 11th hour amendment to the Ohio biennial budget bill would exempt business corporations and wealthy individuals from existing campaign finance laws (ORC Section 3517).

Specifically, the amendment allows direct contributions (or investments) by corporations and wealthy individuals to legislative campaign funds or caucuses for expenses not directly related to elections —  for office rent, equipment, supplies, and operating costs. Such contributions would be redefined as "gifts" and, thus, would be exempt from existing state campaign finance laws — which are already among the highest levels in the nation.

The legislative campaign funds or caucuses that the exemptions would apply to are the House Democratic Caucus Fund, Ohio House Republican Organizational Committee, the Ohio Senate Democrats and the Republican Senate Campaign Committee.

Though the amendment applies to all artificial legal entities (which includes unions and non-profit corporations), the reality is that business corporations already spend more on elections that other artificial entities under current state campaign laws. Providing exemptions simply permits those with the most money (both corporations and wealthy individuals) to contribute/invest even more money in our political system — further corrupting the political system.

Contact your State Senator and Representative. Ask them:
Why was this amendment added to the budget bill and not a stand alone piece of legislation?
What does this amendment have to do with the state budget?
And why was the amendment added just days before the entire 2 year budget is to come to a final vote?

Tell them to remove this amendment.

Thank you.

Support Democracy by Opposing the TPP

Thoughts after reading the piece (at bottom) in Sunday's New York Times…

--------

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), like NAFTA, WTO and other so-called trade agreements, isn't really about trade at all, be it free (touted by conservatives) or fair (promoted by liberals). Like all others, it's at root about corporate governance — shifting decision making away and beyond citizen control and definition. Just as our oil and gas friends in Ohio and elsewhere ran to the state government to escape municipal authority over fracking, multinational and transnational corporations run to the international level to escape what semblance of public control that exists at the nation-state level — all in the name of "harmonizing" laws (short for race to the bottom).

Historically, corporations have escaped democratic control for more than a century in one of three ways. Corpses have sought to shift decision-making…

• From one level of government to another (more to less accountable): local to state, state to nation. TPP is simply the latest effort to shift decision-making from the nation-state to the global level where there are even fewer pressure points given the rigged pro-corporate decision making process.

• From the legislative to judicial arena. Judges are often appointed and, thus, easier to influence by the corporate crowd. There are fewer judges to influence and legislators. Legislators are the closest elected officials (at least on paper) to the public.

• From the legislative to regulatory arena. Regulatory bodies shield public officials and corpses between the public and themselves, providing a wonderful foil where the public receives their obligatory 3 minutes to testify. Regulatory bodies are often about the business of "regulating" vs prohibiting harms — prohibitions are what legislators do. Regulatory decisions, when they do go against the public, can still be appealed to courts. Historically, regulatory agencies were used to counter widespread calls for publicly owned enterprises. They still are. [For an enlightened view of this dimension, read "Gaveling Down the Rabble: How Free Trade is Stealing our Democracy", by Jane Anne Morris. Her shorter article, "Help I've Been Colonized and I Can't Get Up: Take a Lawyer and an Expert to a Hearing and Call Me in a Decade." also lays out the charade that is often the regulatory process].

My understanding is that the difference with the TPP is that the agreement permits corpses to bring a challenge directly against a country over trade "barriers" (what we know of as environmental, law and consumer protections) without needing a nation-state to do their bidding. The conflict goes through a "dispute resolution" process that of course bypasses any courts or juries of any nation — stacked with no doubt corporate friendly panelists.

We might be best served, given that only 5 of 29 of the proposal's chapters deal with actual trade, to reference it as a Corporate Governance Proposal or Corporate Power Proposal. For me, it's much more accurate.

[Note: Another element of the TPP would either ban or severely limit the ability to set up public banks, all the craze these days in many states…and some municipalities as an alternative to the Too Big to Fail banks that are pushing for its inclusion].

We need to oppose TPP hard. Who's at the table during the negotiations…and who's not…is basically all one needs to know about how much it promotes justice. It's an opportunity to unify people of many issues across the political spectrum on issues of protecting/expanding self-governance.

OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS
Obama’s Covert Trade Deal
By LORI WALLACH and BEN BEACHY  -- NYT
Published: June 2, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/opinion/obamas-covert-trade-deal.html?_r=0
                             

Banking Political Influence

Greg Coleridge

Sunday, May 12 / Fixing Our Monetary System sponsored by the American Monetary Institute

Cooper Union Foundation, New York City

Permitting banking corporations to create our nation's money supply not only increases their financial wealth, but also their political influence over lawmakers. This has resulted in the avoidance of criminal prosecution and regulatory controls and the continuation, if not expansion, of too-big-to-fail protections, financial speculation, consolidation, and the license to create our nation's money supply. 

Today just isn’t Mother’s Day.

It’s also the one-year anniversary of the discovery of a missing piece of the Mayan calendar -- proving the Mayans didn't believe 2012 would be the end of the world.

The current power and influence of banking corporations over our monetary system is for many complicated, if not mysterious. Many believe it’s always been this way. That it’s inevitable. That it’s "TINA" – There Is No Alternative. That to mess with our monetary system would be the end of the financial world.

But the rules and laws governing our monetary system are not due to physical or natural causes – shifting of tides, gravity, Halley's comet, or the annual return of swallows to Capistrano. Nor to mystical reasons –ouija boards, ghosts, or even “invisible hands.”

The laws and rules of our monetary system are conscious, deliberate, intentional, and strategic. They are designed to consolidate and expand power – both political and economic.

There is a symbiotic or interdependent relationship between the economic and political power of banking corporations.

Banking corporations need the economic resources generated from their money creation and factional reserve lending to shape political laws and rules favorable to them and banks need political laws and rules favorable to them to perpetuate their license to create and distribute money and for fractional reserve lending.

Lobbying and Campaign Contributions/Investments

“Pay to play,”  “what you get is what you pay for,” and “legalized bribery” are different ways to describe how the spoils of government work. “The best return on assets is always a political contribution," says economist William Black. On the later point, the trillions in dollars handed over to banking corporations for bailouts and subsequent purchasing of smaller competitors and lack of a vigorous Congressional investigation and indictments by the Obama administration of the banking industry following the 2007-8 financial implosion simply affirms Senator Dick Durbin’s observation: “And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created - - are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”

The FIRE (Finance, Insurance & Real Estate) sector spends huge sums lobbying Congress and federal agencies. The sector spent (or better term, “invested”) $4.7 billion on federal lobbying between 1998 and 2011, employing several thousands of lobbyists. This was larger than any other sector except health, which spent just $3 million more during the 13-year period. Political campaign “investments” to federal candidates since 1990 from the FIRE sector total $2.8 billion.

What did all this lobbying and contributions/investments buy over the last two decades? The money industry’s leveraged buyout of our political system resulted in passage of certain laws and blockage of others – all of which contributed to the 2008 Wall Street crash and global economic recession.

These included:

Passage of the Financial Services Modernization Act in 1999 which repealed the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act prohibiting commercial banks from providing investment banking and insurance services.

Rejection of regulation of financial derivatives advocated by the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and its head Brookley Born.

Blockage of a law forcing banks to disclose money-losing or “toxic” assets to their investors.

Passage of the Commodities Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) in 2000 which exempted financial derivatives, including credit default swaps, from any regulation.

Enactment of a rule by the Securities and Exchange Commission permitting investment banks to set their own debt to capital ratio. It had been no more than 12:1. Afterwards, some banks went as high as 40:1.

Failure to prevent predatory lending.

Federal preemption of state consumer protection laws.

Making it easier for banks to purchase, bundle and sell subprime loans without fear of liability.

Forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to divert from purchase prime housing loans to risky subprime loans from financial institutions.

Massive mergers and concentration in the financial sector.

Passage of the Credit Rating Agencies Reform Act of 2006 reducing the ability of the SEC to oversee credit rating agencies that were giving high marks to financial entities engaged in risky investments.

Bank bailouts in the trillions. 

And, of course, continuing to permit banking corporations to create and circulate money rather than We the People as authorized in the Constitution – freely without a revolution or coup.

Banks and other financial institutions, which caused the 2008 financial and housing crisis, were first in line to receive billions in federal bailout assistance. US commercial banking corporations with political ties were more likely to receive federal bailout money under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). Among the largest recipients were Bank of America ($45 billion), Citigroup ($45 billion), JP Morgan Chase ($25 billion), and Wells Fargo ($25 billion).

Banks that spent more money on political lobbying were more likely to receive TARP bailout funds.

Wall Street pulled out all stops to neuter the Dodd-Frank Restoring American Financial Stability Act, the so-called financial “reform” bill passed in 2010.  What started out as a legitimate effort to “rein in $600 trillion in derivatives, create a giant new federal agency to protect financial consumers, open up the books of the Federal Reserve for the first time in history and perhaps even break up the so-called ‘Too Big to Fail’ giants on Wall Street” achieved little permanent change as the nation’s biggest banks unleashed over 2000 paid lobbyists and showered key Congressmen and Senators will campaign contributions/investments. Wall Street spent $251 million on lobbying connected to the bill during the first half of 2010.

Nineteen of the twenty-two members of the Senate Banking Committee, which dealt with the proposal, receive donations from Wall St in 2009. Each of those up for reelection in 2010 received at least $180,000. Former Senate Banking Committee chair Chris Dodd received over $12 million in his career in political contributions from the FIRE sector. Barney Frank, former Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, raised about $1 out of every $3 over his career from the FIRE sector. The FIRE sector invested $42 million in the Obama campaign in 2008. John McCain raised, by comparison, $31 million. Obama received far less than Mitt Romney in 2012, but the FIRE nevertheless hedged their bets.

Sen. Sherrod Brown co-authored the Brown-Kauffman amendment that would have broken up the big banks, but failed to pass during Dodd-Frank. Bank lobbyists killed the bill. The FIRE industry spent $658 million in political investments in 2011-12 – far and away the largest amount of any interest group sector. Brown is currently working with Senator David Vitter (R-La.) on a new bill to help combat the Too Big To Fail banks. Public education and organizing is the only chance it has for passage given the avalanche of political campaign investments.

Political lobbying is particularly effective for the banking and other sectors during the rule making process following passage of any legislation for several reasons. The public, for one, is usually not actively engaged lobbying for their interests, as most citizens believe nothing more can be done once a bill is passed. For another, lobbyists engage with bureaucrats or congressional staffers instead of elected officials at this stage in closed door meetings – bureaucrats and staffers who are often enticed with employment as a lobbyist, consultant or strategist if they play ball. Bank funds are used to hire former government employees.

The money industry’s political investments also bought freedom for those responsible for the financial and housing crisis. Despite evidence of fraud at the major banks, no major bank executive has gone to jail. "If you go back to the savings and loan debacle, we got more than a thousand felony convictions of the elite...” according to William Black who was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. No one of note has been indicted for the 2008 financial implosion.

So what do we do? How to we “fix” (as in repair) this “fixed” (as in rigged) system?

We educate and organize…strategically.

Since “corporations are persons” and “money is speech” in our current constitutional system, banking corporations (like all corporations) can use their corporate revenue exercising their political “free speech” on behalf of and in opposition to issues, ballot measures and political candidates. The combination of these constitutional “rights” and virtually unlimited corporate resources thanks to money creation and fractional reserve banking means the political voices of banking corporations drown out the political voices of people who aren’t corporate CEOs or otherwise personally wealthy. This profoundly threatens what remains of our democracy.

The solution, thus, must be two tracks: real monetary reform AND real political reform. Democratizing our money system… along with ending corporate personhood and money as speech as called for by the We the People Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

It’s symbiotic. Interdependent.

There is no missing piece like the Mayan calendar of the social change puzzle. The overall blueprint is clear.  We must acquire, refine and apply organizing skills to create institutions, campaigns, coalitions and movements.

But also required from us are smarts, commitment, dedication, organizing and love of people and justice…a love almost as much as we love our Mothers. 

127th Anniversary of Corporate Constitutional Rights

127 Reasons Why Reversing Citizens United is NOT Enough

Greg Coleridge

OpEd News / May 9, 2013

http://www.opednews.com/articles/127-Reasons-Why-Reversing-by-Greg-Coleridge-130509-202.html

Democracy Convention

The first of these was 2 years ago, also in Madison. It was outstanding. 


August 7-11, 2013 ~ Madison, Wisconsin

If you want to strengthen democracy where it matters most — in our communities, our schools, our workplaces and local economies, military, government, media, constitution — you will find something inspiring in Madison in August, 2013. Democracy is coming . . . to the U.S.A..

THE DEMOCRACY CONVENTION: Nine conferences. One movement.

https://democracyconvention.org/democracy-convention-nine-conferences-one-movement

2013 TAX INFORMATION: How and Where Federal and Political Dollars are Spent - By the Numbers

Proposed 2014 military budget by the Obama administration: $640 billion (1)

Number of US military bases and installations world-wide: over 1000
Number of US military bases in Germany alone: 268
In Japan: 124
In Iraq: 100 (2)

Cost of the F-35 airplane program (the most expensive weapons program in U.S. history):  $1.5 trillion
Cost of providing every unemployed person in the U.S. a $50,000 job for the next 4 years: $1.5 trillion
Total cost of 1 F-35 plane: $610 million
Total cost of providing 8,000 university scholarships, 1,300 elementary school teachers, 1,100 police jobs, 14,000 Head Start slots, 18,000 Pell Grants, and 12,000 health care slots for veterans: $610 million (3)

Political campaign contributions from military corporations and employees of military corporations in 2010 and 2012 election cycles:  $51 million (4)

Proposed cuts to Social Security by Obama administration: $130 billion (5)
Proposed cuts to Medicare by Obama administration over the next 10 years: nearly $400 billion (6)

Amount of taxes corporations are not paying yearly because of loopholes in the US tax code: $90 billion
Amount the average US tax filer would need to pay to make up for this lost revenue: $615 (7)

Amount US big banks receive annually in US government subsidies (bailouts, guaranteed loans, deposit insurance, paid interest): very conservative estimate of $220 billion (8)

Political campaign contributions from U.S. banking, insurance and real estate sector in 2010 and 2012 election cycles: $979 million (9)

Amount of taxes unavailable following Fiscal Cliff decision to make 82% of Bush tax cuts (mostly to the very rich) permanent: $2.77 trillion (10)

2010 political donations and % of all donations by the top 1% of the richest 1%: $774 million / 24 (11)

Call the President (202-456-1111), Ohio Senators Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman and your Congressman. (US Capitol Switchboard (202) 224-3121). Tell them your tax and spending priorities. The only way to counter organized money (campaign contributions/investments from the very rich and corporations) is organized people.
Join Move to Amend (www.movetoamend.org) -- a national coalition working for a constitutional amendment to declare that corporations are not people (and therefore can be regulated) and money is not speech (and therefore can be regulated).

More information/get active: Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee
330-928-2301 or http://afsc.org/akron

SOURCES
(1) http://www.cato.org/blog/obamas-2014-military-spending-request
(2)http://www.ccun.org/Opinion%20Editorials/2010/July/27%20o/1,000%20US%20Military%20Bases%20Around%20the%20World%20The%20Arrogance%20of%20American%20Power%20%20By%20Paul%20J.htm
(3) http://afsc.org/resource/stop-f-35
(4) http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/totals.php?cycle=2012&ind=D
(5) http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/reality-check-obama-cuts-social-security-and-medicare-by-much-more-than-the-gop/274919/
(6) http://www.medpagetoday.com/Washington-Watch/Washington-Watch/38433
(7) http://www.uspirg.org/reports/usp/picking-tab-2013
(8) http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/03/top-banking-analyst-subsidies-to-giant-banks-exceed-780-billion-year.html
(9) http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/totals.php?cycle=2012&ind=F
(10) http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3880
(11) http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/12/13/the-political-one-percent-of-the-one-percent/

Taking stock of our taxation and spending priorities

Letter to the editor

Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

http://blog.cleveland.com/letters/2013/04/taking_stock_of_our_taxation_a.html

April 15 isn't simply a day to grumble about our private income being taxed for public purposes. It's also an annual opportunity to take stock of who pays taxes and what they are used for.

While virtually no one likes paying taxes, the reality is that it's one of the prices that must be paid to create the essential physical and human "infrastructures" needed for civilizations.

Grumbles are transformed to outrage, however, when taxes are imposed unfairly and wasted or spent on programs that simply don't work or appear to benefit only a few.

Permanent George W. Bush-era tax breaks (most benefiting the very rich) totaling $2.77 trillion, a proposed 2014 Pentagon budget of $526 billion and corporate tax loopholes amounting to $150 billion, according to U.S. PIRG, are examples of unequal, ineffective and inefficient tax and spending priorities. Overarching all of this is the fact that the entire political system is rigged via political campaign contributions (or investments) favoring the very rich and huge corporations.

More sane and humane taxation and spending priorities can occur only when people committed to such priorities amass more political power and rights than corporations and the wealthy few.

Greg Coleridge, Cuyahoga Falls

Coleridge is director of the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee.

April Fool's

It's April 1. Guess that must mean corporations ARE people and money IS speech.

Rush to limit direct democracy

Letter to the Editor
Akron Beacon Journal
March 22, 2013
http://www.ohio.com/editorial/vop/letters-to-the-editor-march-22-1.383359

Why was Senate Bill 47 fast-tracked through the Ohio legislature? Under the guise of “fairness” and “uniformity,” the bill would reduce the number of days citizens could collect signatures during initiative and referendum campaigns. This reduces direct democracy.

A simple alternative to eliminating the ability of citizens to collect signatures during the period when their initial signatures are being validated, which may take varied amounts of days, is simply to set a uniform number of days at a high end for signatures to be verified. Problem solved.

The larger question is why S.B. 47 proponents believe the current rules regarding petitions require such immediate and urgent attention.

Where are their fast-track proposals addressing the enormous and growing unfairness and inequality of access to our public officials by the very wealthy and corporations?
It’s clear that the current political system in Ohio and nation isn’t broken but fixed — rigged to benefit the very wealthy and corporate interests.

Whether massive political campaign contributions by a wealthy few and cash-flush corporations, lobbyists representing these same special interests with unlimited access to policymakers or appointed corporate agents overseeing agencies charged with regulating the very corporations these agents come from, the political system is truly rigged against people without money having their voices heard and their communities helped.

Where is the legislative urgency to address this growing crisis of democracy and, relatively speaking, infinitely greater problem of political fairness and access?
Instead, S.B. 47 seeks to weaken the few remaining democratic avenues citizens possess.

Greg Coleridge

More Than About Fracking - About Corporate Rights

The March 20 court decision in Pennsylvania, Hallowich v. Range Resources, ordering documents unsealed in a case involving contaminated water from fracking was much more than simply about health or the environment. 

It was about whether corporations possess constitutional rights. 

Common Please Court Judge Debbie O'Dell-Seneca stated in her ruling that Range Resources Corporation and other natural gas drilling corporations failed to make the case that unsealing records would cause harm to their trade secrets or reputation.

Stephanie and Chris Hallowich, whose water was polluted and who suffered physical harm when gas was released into the air, brought the suit against Range Resources Corporation, the first natural gas driller and one of the most active in the Pennsylvania. Unsealed records were also requested by the media and health groups.

In her decision, O'Dell focused on the core issue -- do corporations have privacy "rights," a main pillar in the argument of the defense. 

O'Dell said under the Pennsylvania Constitution (the case was heard in a county court), they do not. 

She said: "There are no men or women defendants in the instant case; they are various business entities. ... These are all legal fictions, existing not by natural birth by operations of state statutes. ... Such business entities cannot have been 'born equally free and independent,' because they were not born at all."

This thinking is consistent with the views of Ohio courts over many decades --  before the bizarre notion that corporations possess inalienable constitutional rights became embedded in federal court decisions. 

As Ohio courts affirmed, corporations do not possess rights. Only people can grant corporations powers, privileges and protections. 

Here are a few examples. 

Corporations have such powers, and such only, as the act creating them confers; and are confined to the exercise of those expressly granted, and such incidental powers as are necessary for the purpose of carrying into effect powers specfically conferred. In no state of the Union have these principles been adhered to with more unyielding tenacity than in this.

Elias Straus and Brother v. The Eagle Insurance Company of Cincinnait, 5 OS 60 (1855)

Corporate existence, and the right to exercise the power of eminent domain, can only be derived from legislative enactment.
Atkinson v. Marietta & C.R. Co., 15 OS 21 (1864)

In granting corporate franchises, a state has reserved to itself the right to enact police laws necessary to secure the lives and property of its citizens. These corporations owe their existence and the right to exercise their franchises and privileges to the principle that the state may employ such agencies as it may deem proper to promote the public welfare.
Lake Shore & M.S.R. Co. v. Cincinnati, S. & C.R. Co., 30 OS 604 (1876)

The corporation has received vitality from the state; it continues during its existence to be the creature of the state; must live subservient to its laws, and has such powers and franchises as those laws have bestowed upon it, and none others. As the state was not bound to create it in the first place, it is not bound to maintain it, after having done so, if it violates the laws or public policy of the state, or misuses its franchises to oppress the citizens thereof.
The State ex rel. v. The C.N.O. & T.P. Ry. Co., The State ex rel. v. The C.W. & B. Ry. Co., 47 OS 130 (1890)

The only absolutely essential attribute of a corporation is the capacity to exist and act within the powers granted, as a legal entity, apart from the individual or individuals who constitute its members.Andrews Bros. Co. v. Coke Co., 10 Ohio F. Dec. 306 (1898)

When a corporation asserts that it is clothed with a given power, the burden rests upoin it to show whence such power and rights are derived.

Mannington v. Hocking Valley Ry. Co., 183 F. 133 (1910)