A New Declaration of Independence from Corporate Tyranny

July 4th, 2026 Commemorative

We, the People of the United States of America, in this two hundred and fiftieth year since our Declaration of Independence, present this draft declaration as a work in progress—an open call to our fellow citizens. It is offered as a living instrument of reflection and reform. We invite thoughtful contributions, refinements, and additions from all who share a commitment to liberty, justice, and the consent of the governed. Let this document evolve through the collective wisdom and vigilance of a free people, that it may better serve as a beacon against new forms of tyranny and a reaffirmation of our founding principles.

Preamble

We reaffirm the self-evident truths of our forebears, that all human beings are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among humankind, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. All experience shows that mankind is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

The history of the present corporate oligarchies is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over the people of the United States of America. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

List of Grievances Against Corporatism, the merger between corporate and state powers.

Article I: The Concentration of Power

The Corporatocracy has concentrated wealth and influence in the hands of a few corporations, thereby rendering the people powerless to effect change through democratic means. Since the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC opened the floodgates to unlimited independent political spending, corporate money has moved through Super PACs and 501(c)(4) entities to shape legislative outcomes that the ballot box was meant to decide. A revolving door turns regulators into industry lobbyists and industry lobbyists into regulators, so that the agencies charged with oversight are staffed, in no small part, by the very interests they are meant to police. In this way the corporatocracy has enabled corporations to exert undue influence over government policies and legislation, subverting the will of the people.

Article II: The Erosion of Our Institutions

Dark money moves through the electoral process shielded from disclosure, districts are drawn by state legislatures to entrench incumbency rather than reflect the will of voters, and the machinery meant to guarantee a fair contest has been converted into an instrument for preserving whoever already holds power. Regulatory agencies built to protect consumers, workers, and markets, from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to antitrust enforcement at the Federal Trade Commission, have been starved of funding, staffed with industry allies, or simply outpaced by the scale of the corporations they were meant to check. The corporatocracy has gutted these oversight mechanisms, allowing corporations to operate with impunity and disregard for the public interest, thereby undermining the integrity of democratic elections and the institutions built to sustain them.

Article III: The Exploitation of Natural Resources

Corporations have poisoned watersheds with PFAS compounds that persist for generations, stripped mountains bare through surface mining, and routed pipelines through tribal and indigenous lands without the free, prior, and informed consent the affected communities are owed under both moral and international law. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster made the underlying calculus explicit: independent researchers had already demonstrated that oil-eating microorganisms and non-toxic biosurfactants could degrade spilled crude with far less ecological harm, yet BP and federal responders chose instead to deploy nearly two million gallons of the chemical dispersant Corexit — a product subsequently documented to increase the toxicity of the oil it was mixed with and to suppress the very microbial degradation it was marketed to assist. The dispersant's manufacturer faced lawsuits over its use that were dismissed on jurisdictional grounds rather than on the merits of the harm alleged, and the substance remains listed as an approved option in the federal government's own contingency plan for the next spill. The same logic of unaccountable experimentation has been turned on the food supply, where a handful of agrochemical corporations have patented gene-altered seed lines and pursued growers for the age-old practice of seed saving, converting the shared inheritance of agriculture into private intellectual property enforced by lawsuit. The corporatocracy has permitted this despoiling of soil, water, and life alike for private gain, without regard for the long-term consequences, the consent of the governed, or the well-being of future generations, treating what belongs to all of us, and to all life on Earth, as though it belonged to none of us.

Article IV: The Manipulation of Information

A handful of media conglomerates now own the majority of local news outlets in this country, replacing independent reporting with centrally scripted segments and homogenized coverage. Algorithms tuned to maximize engagement rather than truth amplify outrage and suppress nuance, while corporate-funded research in pharmaceutical, agricultural, and chemical science has too often been shaped, suppressed, or spun to serve the interests of its funders rather than the public it claims to inform. The corporatocracy has enabled corporations to control the flow of information, suppressing dissenting voices and promoting propaganda and disinformation, and has corrupted and subverted scientific research and journal publications to serve its interests at the expense of Truth.

Article V: The Betrayal of Public Trust

The opioid crisis stands as the starkest recent example: a family enterprise marketed addiction as medicine, and when the reckoning came, used the bankruptcy courts to shield personal fortunes while a nation buried its dead. Pharmacy benefit managers extract profit from the space between drug manufacturers and patients, driving prices upward for the sick while remaining largely invisible to the public they profit from.

The same pattern reaches beyond our borders and beyond our own generation. Defense contractors and the geopolitical interests they serve have profited from war after war, financed in substantial part through debt that will not come due in the lifetimes of those who authorized it, but in the lifetimes of children not yet born, who inherit both the balance owed and the wreckage of civilizations destroyed to secure it. This is theft compounded by horror: the treatment of human suffering as an acceptable externality of profit and power, and the routine disregard of international human rights law by the same nations that invoke it selectively against their rivals. A world held hostage to the threat of force, so that a few may profit from the fear of the many, is not the peace our founding principles envisioned. War profiteering, however it is dressed in the language of security or strategy, is the antithesis of every life-affirming principle a just civilization must stand upon.

Time and again, the corporatocracy has prioritized corporate interests over public health, safety, and well-being — sacrificing the common good for private gain, and eroding the public trust that a free people must be able to place in the institutions meant to serve them.

Article VI: The Subversion of Justice

Corporate entities have claimed the free speech rights of natural-born citizens while remaining shielded from the criminal liability a natural-born citizen would face for the same offense. Financial institutions deemed too large to fail were, in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, treated as too large to prosecute, settling for fines that amounted to a cost of doing business rather than facing the courtroom accountability an ordinary citizen would meet. Through the use of mandatory arbitration clauses, corporations have systematically denied working Americans access to courts, exploiting legal mechanisms to shield themselves from accountability and using lawfare tactics to economically exhaust those seeking redress.

More troubling still is the corruption of the machinery of justice itself. Due process — the guarantee that no citizen may be deprived of life, liberty, or property without a fair and impartial hearing — has been hollowed from within by the very interests it was designed to restrain. Corporate-funded judicial campaigns, the strategic pursuit of favorable venues, and legislation drafted in corporate boardrooms before it ever reaches a legislative floor have converted courts of law into instruments of the powerful rather than guarantors of the governed. When the law itself becomes an asset to be purchased, litigated into submission, or quietly rewritten by those it was meant to constrain, due process ceases to protect the citizen and becomes instead a mechanism of their exhaustion. This is not merely an erosion of one right among many; it is a fatal wound to the Supreme Law of the Land itself, for a constitution whose due process guarantees can be bought, delayed, or circumvented by wealth is a constitution in name only — and must be named and admonished as such.

Such unchecked and unbridled powers, not held to the same standards as natural-born citizens, must be summarily denounced and rejected, and new laws implemented and enforced to bring corporate powers under both domestic and international human rights law the same as government powers, thereby restoring justice against the human rights abuses unbridled corporatism has engaged in.

Article VII: The Commoditization of Commons and Life

The corporatocracy has commoditized our natural commons, treating soil, water, and air as resources to be exploited for profit, disregarding the health of our environment and future sustainability. Corporations have engaged in the patenting of life forms through genetic alteration, prioritizing profit over ethical considerations and the sanctity of life, thereby monopolizing biological diversity for private gain. Housing affordability has been compromised by corporate interests, with private equity firms and institutional investors buying up starter homes at scale and profit-driven development making home ownership unattainable for many hardworking Americans. Hedge funds and large corporations have engaged in the acquisition of independent businesses and hostile takeovers of franchisees, stripping away local entrepreneurship and community control over local economies. Through arbitration clauses and lawfare, corporations continue to perpetuate economic injustice against the very workers whose labor built their fortunes.

Article VIII: The Violation of Bodily Autonomy and Informed Consent

During the declared public health emergency, the federal government invoked the PREP Act of 2005 to shield vaccine manufacturers, distributors, and administering providers from liability for injury or death arising from covered countermeasures, even as those countermeasures were pressed by mandate upon the employed, the enlisted, and the enrolled. Informed consent — the foundational safeguard of medical ethics since Nuremberg — was displaced by coercion: livelihoods, military service, and access to education were conditioned upon submission to a product still under emergency authorization. Manufacturers realized extraordinary profit while relinquishing the ordinary liability that governs every other product introduced into the human body, and the government constructed, in its Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, a system of redress that functions in practice as a system of denial. More than 98 percent of adjudicated claims have been denied, with the burden of proving causation placed upon the injured rather than the manufacturer, and the rare payouts made have often been so nominal as to mock the injuries and deaths they purport to address. The corporatocracy has thus achieved, in a single stroke, obscene profit without corresponding liability, and has denied timely and adequate recompense to those it harmed in the pursuit of that profit — a moral and legal inversion no republic claiming to protect the sovereignty of the individual body can allow to stand unexamined. Profiteering from pestilence, no less than from war, is the antithesis of life-affirming practice, and a nation that permits both without accountability has confused survival with plunder.

Whereas the Corporatocracy, a system of governance by and for corporations, has usurped the rights and liberties of the people, and whereas the pursuit of profit has become the sole end of government at the behest of corporate interests at the expense of the common welfare of humankind, we, the people, do hereby declare our grievances against this tyranny. While we acknowledge the contributions of corporate enterprise in innovation, job creation, and economic growth, these must be tempered by a system of checks and balances to prevent the abuses we have endured and will continue to endure with worsening consequences if not properly addressed now.

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Our Vision and Commitment:

Whereas the historical record shows through time immemorial that absolute power corrupts absolutely, new systems of checks and balances must be girded to secure and protect the innate rights of the individual against new forms of tyranny wherever they may arise.

Fundamental human rights and the right to life must be held sacrosanct and inviolable. Those seeking to violate the most sacred rights thereby forfeit their right to their ill-begotten gains, and must be brought to justice to ensure social progress is not impeded by criminal factions of corporate enterprise prone to coercion, fraud, and all manner of malfeasant activity.

We solemnly pledge to resist and challenge any new forms of authoritarianism and tyranny, reclaiming our rights and our liberties in our Constitutional Republic.

We, therefore, the People of the United States of America, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name and by Authority of the good People of these United States, solemnly publish and declare, that these United States are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent from corporate tyranny and corporate collusion with our systems of governance; that they are absolved from all acts passed which erode or violate our Bill of Rights and the international treaties signed and ratified as part of the Supreme Law of the Land; and that all political connection between the United States and forms of corporatism which cause harm to the populace ought to be dissolved, and a new policy to establish the separation of the corporatocracy and the state be presented and passed by the majority who serve the best interests of our nation.

We strive to create a more just and equitable society, where the pursuit of profit is tempered by and in accordance with the laws of Ethics and subordinated to the well-being of all peoples of these United States, and the planet upon which we stand.

May the idealism, the vision for a better future, the peacemakers, the change agents, and the virtuous among us ever remain a guiding light in the darkness of avarice and greed, to reaffirm our virtues and reestablish our Nation as the exemplary model of progress our forebears envisioned for America two hundred fifty years ago.

Let it be seen that the resilience of the American spirit can rise to meet new challenges, to right the wrongs of the corrupted and evil, to hold humility for our nation’s failings, and to endeavor to mend what has been broken.

We, as the living body of the modern era in 2026, reaffirm our commitment to this sacred honor as one nation, indivisible, with Liberty and justice for All.

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Further Reading

This declaration is the capstone piece to a trilogy on corporate and constitutional betrayal

• An Indictment of the Oath-Breakers & Summons to the Oath-Keepers, tracing how those sworn to defend the Constitution have instead presided over its dismantling.

• Usurpations of the Separation of Powers, tracing how the constitutional mechanics of legislative, executive, and judicial power have been eroded from within.

• The International Monetary Treason and the Global Corporate Enslavement of Nations, tracing how the same domestic betrayal has metastasized globally through debt, usury, and the financialization of housing.

Together the articles argue that the capture of institutions and the capture of the economy are the same betrayal, viewed from two different rooms.

For the remedy this declaration points toward:

• Healing the Collective Body, which extends the diagnosis into a holistic framework for restoring balance to a society captured by corporate power.

• Policy to Establish the Separation of the Corporatocracy and the State: Addressing Corporate Personhood, the formal policy proposal this declaration exists to support.

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Sources for Cited Claims

Article III — The Exploitation of Natural Resources

• Government Accountability Project, Deadly Dispersants in the Gulf (2013) and 2015 Addendum — whistleblower investigation into Corexit's toxicity and deployment

• U.S. District Court (E.D. La.), In re Deepwater Horizon, Dec. 2012 ruling dismissing claims against Nalco (Corexit's manufacturer) on jurisdictional grounds

• Studies on Corexit's toxicity and its inhibition of natural microbial oil degradation, published in Environmental Science & Technology and reported via the University of Miami and University of Georgia research cited in contemporaneous coverage

• EPA National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan (NCP) — Corexit's continued listed status

Article VIII — The Violation of Bodily Autonomy and Informed Consent

• Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act of 2005, 42 U.S.C. § 247d-6d — liability shield for covered countermeasures

• U.S. Government Accountability Office, COVID-19: Information on HHS's Medical Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, GAO-25-107368 (Dec. 2024)

• Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) claims data, as of June 2026