from AlterNet:
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Joshua Holland: Now, although it's been with us for a very long time, it wasn’t until the 1980s that corporate starting breaking it out with increasing frequency. Can you give us just a couple of examples of where corporations asserted these constitutional rights?
Thom Hartmann: Sure. In short form, in 1874 I believe it was, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution were passed to free the slaves. The 14th Amendment says that everybody has equal rights under the law.
I think it was clear to the authors, and pretty much to everybody, that they were talking about human beings -- natural persons. But in the 1880s, a decade later, the railroad corporations, which, as a result of the Civil Warm were the largest corporations in America, started bringing a series of cases before the Supreme Court ... they all started in the 9th Circuit Court in California under Judge Steven J. Field, asserting that because the word "natural" does not exist in the 14th Amendment, that corporations should be considered persons.
JH: Now let me just interrupt you here. If I were to go down to a law school and get out the kind of textbook that maybe a first-year law student would read, it would say that the courts had in fact decided that in the case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. Is that right?
TH: When I first wrote Unequal Protection --the first edition came out I think in 2000 or thereabouts -- I was invited to the Vermont Law School to give a talk on it, and I spoke to about 300 law students, professors and history teachers. And I said raise your hand if you know that in 1886, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, corporations were given the rights of persons under the reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution? And pretty much everybody in the room raised their hand and I think the few who didn't just hadn't gotten to that point in their studies. And then I proceeded over the course of the next hour to demolish it basically by reading from the case.
There was a case before the Supreme Court in the 1980s, called First National Bank of Boston v. Belotti, which was one of the first cases in the modern era that really gave corporations the right to participate in political elections. Massachusetts had this law that said corporations could only give money to ballot initiatives that effected their businesses. But the case involved a ballot initiative to regulate gay marriage, and the banks had no rights to spend money on that -- the stockholders' money. And the First National Bank of Boston had broken that law. The Attorney General sued them and won in Massachusetts, and it was taken to the Supreme Court. And in that case, Justice Renquist -- who, regardless of what you think of him, was one of the most brilliant jurists of our time -- wrote a dissent in Boston v. Belotti. And in that dissent -- what I'm giving you is my bad paraphrasing of it -- Renquist said, "Back in 1886, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, this Court, without the benefit of public debate or discourse, decided that corporations have equal rights under the 14th Amendment." Then he went on to say how he thought that it was a wrongly decided case. .............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.alternet.org/books/148608/the_supreme_court_sold_out_our_democracy_--_how_to_fight_the_corporate_takeover_of_our_elections/?page=1