The sinister story of Kyrsten Sinema's turn to conservatism and political corruption

[Javaman]

https://www.rawstory.com/the-sinister-story-of-kyrsten-sinema-s-turn-to-conservatism-and-political-corruption/

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Following the Citizens United script, the Republican she confronted in that race (Vernon Parker) used corporate and billionaire money to carpet-bomb their district airwaves with ads calling her "a radical left-wing activist promoting hatred toward our country, our allies, and our families" and warning people that she "engaged in pagan rituals."

The district was heavily Democratic (Obama handily won it that year) but the race was close enough that it took six full days for the AP to call it for Sinema. And that, apparently, was when she decided that if you can only barely beat them, you'd damn well better join them.

Sinema quickly joined other Democrats who'd followed the Citizens United path to the flashing neon lights of big money, joining the so-called "Problem Solvers" caucus that owes its existence in part to the Wall Street-funded front group "No Labels."

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In Justice Stevens' dissent in Citizens United, he pointed out that corporations in their modern form didn't even exist when the Constitution was written in 1787 and got its first ten amendments in 1791, including the First which protects free speech.

"All general business corporation statues appear to date from well after 1800," Stevens pointed out to his conservative colleagues on the Court. "The Framers thus took it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare. Unlike our colleagues, they had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans they had in mind.

more at link...

[CrispyQ]

1. Corporate Personhood

We need to revoke corporate personhood. The founders never meant for corporations to have the same Constitutional rights as We the People. Other non-living entities such as civics groups, churches, labor unions, even governments, only have the privileges that we grant them.

How the 14th Amendment Made Corporations Into 'People'
ORIGINAL:JUN 15, 2018
UPDATED:OCT 15, 2018

https://www.history.com/news/14th-amendment-corporate-personhood-made-corporations-into-people

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An 1886 headnote forever shifted the meaning of the 14th Amendment.

Corporations aren’t specifically mentioned in the 14th Amendment, or anywhere else in the Constitution. But going back to the earliest years of the republic, when the Bank of the United States brought the first corporate rights case before the Supreme Court, U.S. corporations have sought many of the same rights guaranteed to individuals, including the rights to own property, enter into contracts, and to sue and be sued just like individuals.

But it wasn’t until the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Rail Road that the Court appeared to grant a corporation the same rights as an individual under the 14th Amendment. The case is remembered less for the decision itself—the state had improperly assessed taxes to the railroad company—than for a headnote added to it by the court reporter at the time, which quoted Chief Justice Morrison Waite as saying: “The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.”

In later cases, this headnote would be treated as an official part of the verdict, and Waite’s conclusion reaffirmed in subsequent decisions by the Court, from an 1888 case involving a steel-mining company to the 1978 Bellotti decision, which granted corporations the right to spend unlimited funds on ballot initiatives as part of their First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

In the 2010 case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC), the most sweeping expansion of corporate rights yet, the Supreme Court cited Bellotti in its highly controversial 5-4 ruling that political speech by corporations is a form of free speech that is also covered under the First Amendment. In 2014’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, another 5-4 ruling by the Court granted the right of closely-held companies, which aren’t traded on the stock market, to file for exemptions to federal laws on religious grounds.

Here's a great one page primer on corporate personhood, from the Sierra Club:
https://vault.sierraclub.org/sierra/200509/corporation.asp

Here's a fantastic timeline of human rights vs. corporate rights from Reclaim Democracy:
https://reclaimdemocracy.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/personhood_timeline.pdf

And here's Reclaim Democracy's corporate personhood main page. It's worth reading every link.
https://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-personhood/

Getting money out of our electoral process would go a long way to fixing things in this country.