This is the article the drafters called the reason this document exists. When one company owns the infrastructure you use to work, speak, and get care, it wields power governments used to wield — with none of the accountability. When private equity strip-mines a nursing home until it can no longer keep people alive, that is power over life and death answering to no one. This statute takes that power apart. It is not about punishing success. It is about ending private government.
A handful of firms came to own the infrastructure people need to work, speak, get news, get care — exercising the kind of power governments exercise, accountable to no voter.Check it
Private equity bought hospitals and nursing homes, loaded them with debt, stripped the assets, and walked away richer while the facilities failed the people who depended on them.Check it
Regulators arrived from the industry they policed and returned to it afterward — turning the regulatory state into a service desk for the regulated.Check it
Companies made things you couldn’t repair, killed them with software updates, and buried the terms in fine print. When the giants failed, the public rescued them and got nothing back.Check it
Corporations picked the state that asked the least of them — most incorporate in one small state whose law travels with them everywhere they operate — and used that choice to duck stronger rules in every state where they actually did business.Check it
Essential markets get designated on rigorous public criteria, and firms controlling them carry democratic accountability obligations. Structural remedies escalate automatically — break-ups are real, not theoretical.
Private equity is prohibited from acquiring essential service providers, with hard operational limits on what it holds. No more strip-mining the places people go to survive.
The revolving door closes. Shareholder primacy is abolished — companies owe duties to workers and communities, not just shareholders.
Right to repair. No engineered obsolescence. Plain-language terms. Public rescue comes with mandatory conditions — and personal liability reaches the executives who sign the books.
Antitrust was toothless. Dominant firms bought or crushed rivals, and "break-up" was a word nobody expected to see enforced.Check it
Essential markets get designated through a rigorous, transparent process built not to fail. Structural remedies run on a proportionality ladder with automatic escalation — so a firm that refuses to change gets taken apart, on a schedule, by operation of law.
Firms bought hospitals, nursing homes, and emergency services, loaded them with debt, extracted the value, and left the wreckage to the community.Check it
Prohibited acquisitions of essential service providers, plus operational restrictions on holdings they already have. Places that keep people alive are no longer available as extraction targets.
Regulators came from the industry and went back to it, and everyone understood what that meant for enforcement.Check it
A regulatory capture prohibition with real revolving-door enforcement and an OGE registry. The referee no longer auditions for a job with the team.
Shareholder primacy made maximizing shareholder return the only legally cognizable duty — workers and communities were externalities.Check it
Shareholder primacy is abolished outright, with federal preemption of inconsistent state law, a mandatory dismissal standard for suits attacking stakeholder governance, and an anti-coercion private right of action. A company may lawfully consider the people it affects.
You couldn’t fix what you bought, updates bricked working devices, and "ownership" was defined away in terms nobody could read.Check it
Right to repair with aftermarket anti-monopolization; software-induced obsolescence prohibited with mandatory support disclosure; end-of-support transition rights; plain-language digital terms; and liability for falsely describing a digital good.
The public rescued failing giants, and the same executives kept their bonuses while nothing structural changed.Check it
Public rescue carries mandatory accountability conditions, overseen by a Federal Rescue Oversight Board. If the public saves you, the public sets the terms.
Credit discrimination persisted, and errors in your file could wreck your life while you fought to correct them.Check it
Credit discrimination is prohibited, fair credit reporting rights are enforceable, and the Financial Consumer Protection Agency gets independence and protection from being defunded into uselessness.
Penalties were a cost of doing business, executives faced no personal consequence, and enforcement depended on a regulator choosing to act.Check it
Civil penalties scaled to matter, personal liability for executives (who must certify financial statements), a private right of action, whistleblower protections, and a dedicated Anti-Oligarchy Enforcement Fund. Natural monopolies can be publicly acquired — and the infrastructure everyone depends on can come home.
Banks grew until their collapse could take the whole economy down — so when they gambled and lost, the public had no choice but to pay. Your deposits funded their speculation. In 2008 millions lost homes and savings to machinery they never saw and never agreed to.Check it
No institution may grow so large its failure holds the economy hostage — and if it does, it gets broken up. A wall separates the bank holding your paycheck from the trading desk gambling with it. And the money system itself is walled off from capture: no President or politician can lean on a rate decision, no bank can capture its own regulator, and the system can’t become a power unto itself — it doesn’t get to write its own mandate, and it answers to the public through full disclosure.
Agencies handed certification to the companies they were meant to check — the manufacturer’s own employees signed off on the aircraft, the plant, the pipeline. Engineers who raised objections were overruled and the objection vanished. When the agency lacked staff to do the job, that shortage became the argument for delegating further. People found out something was wrong when it killed them.Check it
Nobody certifies their own safety. If federal approval is required before a thing can endanger the public, the applicant cannot perform that certification, choose who does, or pay, supervise, or discipline them — because a certifier who can be fired by the party it certifies isn’t independent, whatever it’s called. Starving an agency and then citing the shortage as grounds to delegate is presumptively unconstitutional. Overruled safety objections get published alongside the approval, so the record exists before the disaster. And approval obtained this way is void — it’s no defense in court.
The agency, short on staff and budget, handed certification to the company— so the manufacturer’s own employees signed off that the manufacturer’s product was safe. Engineers who objected were overruled and nobody outside ever knew. Then the plane went down, and the hearings began. The shortfall that justified the delegation had been created by the same people who benefited from it.Check it
Nobody certifies their own safety. If federal approval stands between a product and the public, the company can run tests and submit data — but the judgment belongs to the government or to a certifier it cannot hire, pay, fire, or pressure. A certifier who can be fired by the party it certifies isn’t independent, whatever it’s called. Agencies can’t be starved into delegating, and “we lacked capacity” is no defense when the government created the shortfall. Every overruled safety objection gets published alongside the approval — before the crash, not after.
Manufacturers locked you out of your own devices, tractors, and appliances — no parts, no manuals, no diagnostic tools — so the only “repair” was paying them or buying new.Check it
If you bought it, you can fix it. Makers of electronics, appliances, farm equipment, and industrial machinery must sell parts, tools, and documentation to owners and independent shops on fair terms. Using control of a product to monopolize its repair is an antitrust violation.
Congress quietly handed the government's own powers to private contractors — companies running prisons and deciding punishments, corporations writing the rules for their own industries, firms grading their own safety, contractors making the calls that only an accountable public official should make. You paid for a government; you got a set of vendors answerable to shareholders, not to you.Check it
The power of government can't be sold, leased, or contracted away. The public may buy goods and services — build the road, write the code — but never the exercise of its own authority: no private entity may make or enforce law, jail people, decide who gets a benefit, or write the rules that govern itself. Hand a governmental power to a contractor and the deal is void — the power comes back to public control, and no contract clause can stop it. Public money comes with the public's right to look at the books. The government works for you again, not for whoever won the contract.
A chicken farmer borrows hundreds of thousands to build the barns, then raises birds they don't own, on feed they don't control, for one company that ranks them against their neighbors — and pays the top farmers with money docked from the bottom ones. Complain, and you get "bad flocks" and slide down the rankings. The company can cancel the contract at will, leaving you with decades of debt and no buyer. In 2022 the median chicken farmer's household income was below zero.Check it
The zero-sum tournament is over: no farmer's bonus may be paid by docking another farmer — if a company rewards performance, the company pays for it. Every grower is guaranteed enough to cover real costs and the debt the company made them take on. If a company demands you sink decades of capital into barns, it has to offer a contract long enough to pay that back — no more binding you for life while it walks away flock-to-flock. You get to see the formula you're paid by and verify the inputs. And you can organize, report abuse, and speak up without retaliation. Whoever controls the birds, feed, and methods carries the responsibility — not the farmer left holding the debt.
Who decides which colleges get billions in your tax dollars? Private "accreditors" — whose boards were stacked with executives from the very for-profit schools they were judging. They rubber-stamped schools that faked job-placement numbers and defrauded students, funneling billions in federal aid to them until they collapsed. The foxes were guarding the henhouse, and when the schools imploded, the students were left holding the debt.Check it
Deciding who gets public money is a public job — the final call rests with an accountable official, never a private club. If private reviewers judge quality, they have to be genuinely independent: no one who works for the schools they're judging, or did within the last four years, gets to sit in judgment or write the standards. The standards must serve students and taxpayers, not protect the incumbents. Gatekeepers who wave through fraud are personally on the hook. And when a captured gatekeeper or a fraudulent school collapses, the students who trusted the system don't eat the loss.
A nuclear-cleanup contractor billed the government for a multi-year campaign lobbying Congress — to keep its own contract funded. You read that right: the company charged taxpayers for the work of squeezing more money out of taxpayers. When public money can be spent to lobby for more public money, the contract never ends, the costs never stop, and you're paying for your own fleecing.Check it
Public money can't be used to lobby for more public money — period. Not as "overhead," not routed through an affiliate or trade association, not by shuffling the books so other cash is freed up to lobby. If you take public funds and also lobby, you have to prove with separate accounts that not a dollar of the public's money paid for it. Break the rule and the money is clawed back with a matching penalty, the executives are personally liable, and repeat offenders get barred from future contracts. You can still petition your government all you want — just with your own money, not ours.
Most of the FDA's drug-review budget comes straight from the drug companies whose products it's supposed to judge. And every five years, the industry sits down and negotiates the terms of its own regulation as the price of that money — including talking the agency into monitoring the safety of already-approved drugs less. An agency approved a $56,000-a-year Alzheimer's drug over its own experts' objection that it didn't work. When the people you regulate pay your salary and set your rules, whose agency is it?Check it
The people being regulated can't control the regulator through its checkbook. Fees don't disappear — but they go into the general treasury, and the agency is funded by Congress like any other, so it never depends on the companies it judges. The industry can comment on rules in the open, like anyone else — but it can never negotiate the terms of its own oversight, the speed of its own approvals, or how hard it gets watched, in exchange for money. Watching drugs already on the market has to be funded just as well as approving new ones. And no reviewer's job or promotion can ride on how many of the payers' products they wave through. The fee can pay for the work; it can never buy the answer.
The oil, gas, coal, and minerals under public land belong to all of us — but the companies that pull them out tell the government how much they owe, and the government mostly takes their word for it. Billions in royalties went uncollected; regulators partied with the industry they were supposed to audit; and a 150-year-old law still lets hardrock miners take gold and copper off public land for free. Meanwhile the towns that breathe the dust and drink the fouled water — and the ones left poisoned and abandoned after the company moved on — got nothing.Check it
What's the public's is the public's. Anyone extracting the people's resources pays a fair, market-based return — no more giveaways, no more taking the company's word for what it owes. The public independently audits the amount, and the burden of proving they paid in full is on the company, not on you to catch the shortfall. The money — plus the returns on any company the public owns a stake in — flows into one Permanent Public Trust. The principal is preserved forever (you can't sell the same coal twice), and the earnings are paid to the people who bear the burden: the extraction towns, the processing and data-center towns with the sky-high power bills, and the abandoned places still living with the cancer and contamination. Half goes straight to residents as their share; the rest cleans up the damage and funds health care in those communities — and any town that misspends that money gets cut off until it proves otherwise, with residents' own checks protected and whistleblowers shielded.
About a third of America's ambassadorships — the people who represent the whole country to foreign governments — are handed out to the biggest campaign donors, many with zero diplomatic qualifications. Their only credential is the size of the check they wrote. And the officials who approve billion-dollar weapons sales to foreign governments can walk straight out the door into a paycheck from the very defense contractor who profited from the sale, or from the foreign government that got the weapons. When public office and life-or-death decisions are for sale, they stop serving the public.Check it
Public office is a trust, not merchandise. No appointment — ambassador or otherwise — may be traded for a campaign donation or any other thing of value, whether the money comes before as a bribe or after as a reward; a big donation is not a qualification. Sensitive posts must go to people actually fit to serve, and any donation-appointment tie has to be disclosed. And the arms-sales revolving door slams shut: an official who approves a weapons sale can't cash in for at least four years from the contractor who profited or the foreign government that received the arms — and secretly lining up that payday while still in office corrupts the decision itself. Sell the nation's weapons for the nation's security, not for your next job.
Right now you can own a company through an anonymous shell company and no one — not the public, not investors, often not even law enforcement — can find out who's really behind it. Anonymous shells are the go-to tool for oligarchs hiding wealth, kleptocrats laundering stolen money, corporations dodging taxes, sanctions-evaders, and criminals moving dirty cash. Congress finally passed a law to end this — and in 2025-26 the Treasury gutted it, exempting 99% of companies (33 million of them) and moving to destroy the ownership database. The powerful get to stay invisible.Check it
A corporation isn't a person and has no right to exist — it's a privilege the public grants, and the price of that privilege is transparency. There's a public register of who really owns and controls every company, traced through every layer to the actual human beings, open for anyone — investor, journalist, or citizen — to look up. No more anonymous entities: no identifiable human owner, no privileges. The only thing anyone can hide is a home address, and only a person facing a real safety threat (like a domestic-violence survivor hiding from an abuser) — and even then their name and ownership stay public; only their location is shielded. And there's no escape by running: caught concealers face frozen assets, voided transfers clawed back, personal liability with the corporate shield stripped, and a ban on spinning up a new company to start over. And it can't be quietly gutted or exempted away the way the last law was.
Now there is one national floor of honest-governance, disclosure, and fiduciary rules that no company can fall below — no matter where it incorporates or reincorporates to hide. States stay free to require more; none may offer less. The race to the bottom becomes a race to the top. (Article Thirty-One, Section 7; CS-9 Fights 35–39.)
This is the plain-language version. The binding text is CS-9, which implements Article Eighteen of the Constitution — the article the drafters called the reason this document exists — and Article Thirty-One, the rights and limits of organizations.
This is your country’s law. Help shape the next draft of it.
