Idaho Citizens for

Good Government

On Corporate Governance

5/10/2024

While investigating issues on our local school levy, a certain individual brought to our attention that the local school board is a private corporation.

This seemed an odd thing.  How is it that government entities are incorporated?

We know that the original 13 colonies were corporate entities from England settling the new world as agents of the royal family.  We know that local municipalities are incorporated but I fail to understand why that is necessary for an organic government.

So we looked up Dunn & Bradstreet, a global registry for all things corporate and sure enough, there was our local school board, our local city, our local county, our state, our state board of education, and our federal government all listed.  If fact, we even found a site from the Cornell University Law school that declares the United States as a “Federal Corporation”

Corporations fall into two types, public and private and what distinguishes those two types is a public IPO stock offering.  Now if our government entities all allowed public ownership, that would seem reasonable, being a public entity – or so we have been led to believe.  BUT none of these entities are public.  They are all private corporations!

Another strange thing is that corporations fall under the federal “commerce clause” of the constitution which gives our government the ability to “regulate commerce”.  If corporations are all commercial entities, who then is “regulating” them if they are the government?

For example, Microsoft is a “Deleware” corporation.  This means that they are chartered under the laws of the state of Deleware BUT… Deleware IS a corporation itself, or at least it’s Supreme Court is. (?)  Who is the Supreme Court of  “Deleware” chartered under?  Or is Deleware some strange exception to the rule?

We could not easily find out as a subscription to Dunn and Bradstreet runs about $2000/year which will tell you who chartered the corporation in quesiton.

Our collective “civics” education is insufficient for even many lawyers to answer these puzzling questions and so we will not, at this time, pretend to know what this strange situation ultimately implies nor do we currently have the bandwidth to investigatge the history and evolution of this strange form of “governance”.

Jus sayin… seems like we have a fox DBA (Doing Business As) a chicken in the henhouse.

It appears from here that all this relates to proper fiscal oversight by congress.  Maybe there is “nothing to see here” but still, this smells fishy.

I’t love to see the corporate books of the entities that govern me.