The American Shareholder Amendment

For decades, the necessities of life in this country have been run as extraction operations. Housing, healthcare, food, energy, education, mobility, manufacturing. Private operators sit between you and the things you need to survive, and they charge you a premium for the privilege of needing them. That premium has a name now: the intermediation premium. The entire financial model of American necessity delivery depends on the fact that you have no alternative. That also has a name now: the absent-alternative premium.

This amendment ends both.

It declares the country's productive capacity, its land, water, energy grid, infrastructure, publicly funded research, and the technological systems built on citizen data, to be the common estate of every citizen. It gives every citizen one equal, permanent, non-transferable share in that estate. It creates a public institution called the Fund to hold and compound the common estate on behalf of every citizen equally. It charters six public corporations called Corps to deliver the necessities of life directly to every citizen as a right of citizenship, not a product for sale. Workers inside the Corps own and govern the enterprise through employee-shares. The private market operates freely above the necessity floor. Below it, no one profits from the fact that you need to eat, need shelter, or need a doctor.

The amendment transfers the country's necessity infrastructure from private extraction to citizen ownership over a ten-year window. It pays prior owners for the physical replacement cost of what they built. It does not pay them for the premium they charged you for having no choice. It protects every existing federal benefit program during the transition. It guarantees every displaced worker twenty-four months of full compensation and retraining. It bans corporate political money. It builds public democratic infrastructure for elections and shareholder governance. It creates a court system with the power to enforce every provision against every officer, including the President and the Treasury. And it makes itself almost impossible to weaken: any future amendment that narrows citizen rights requires a two-thirds citizen supermajority to pass.

The twelve sections below are the architecture.