SCOTUS: Provides Immediate Opportunity to Confront Corporate Personhood

[Amy6627]

From http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/

Special Action Alert, September 10

Supreme Court Provides Immediate Opportunity to Confront Corporate Personhood

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court conducted re-argument in Citizens United v FEC, in which the Court debated whether to overturn two previous Court rulings and more than 60 years of legislative precedents banning corporations from directly spending company funds to elect or defeat political candidates.

This is a crucial case that could influence our potential for democracy for decades to come. Win or lose, the opportunity is ripe to raise public debate over the legitimacy of granting constitutional "rights" to corporations. Please mark a block of time on your calendar this week to express your thoughts via letters to the editor, talk radio, blogs, and personal conversations. Please refer to our Tips for Effective Letters page if writing inspires you, and just ask us if you'd like a review to maximize your chance of getting published (please have one other person give you feedback before sending it to us): [e-mail]. Almost every newspaper covered the story, so responding to coverage in your local media is usually the best opportunity.Please BCC us if you submit a letter.

Conservative radio and media outlets are especially important places to speak out. Consider raising arguments used by Justice Roberts at his confirmation hearing when he pledged to respect established precedent, those by former Justice Rehquist, or from the American Independent Business Alliance on harm to small business that would result.

Unfortunately, the timing of President Obama's address on health care meant this crucial case received less attention. We know many of our readers are active in health insurance reform efforts, so ponder this: As difficult as passing meaningful reform is today, how much tougher will it be if the Court allows corporations to spend unlimited sums on elections? How many politicians will cast votes that harm profits for a large corporation, knowing it can easily spend sums dwarfing today's campaign budgets attacking her/him?

Please think of at least one action you can take to spread word, and feel free to contact us for additional information or assistance. See our Citizens United v FEC overview page for more details and links.

http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/

[The Magistrate]

1. To regard Corporations As Persons Under the Constitution, Ma'am, Is Monstrous As It Is Foolish

[MNDemNY]

3. From what I could glean from the oral arguments ...

It seems the conservatives n the court are all in favor of "corporate person hood"

[rocktivity]

4. And is it not at the very heart of facism?

This is what the town hall teabagging screamers should be screaming about!!!


rocktivity

[MNDemNY]

6. Glen Beck says otherwise.

[Amy6627]

10. Absolutely! n/t

[The Magistrate]

11. Not Really, Ma'am: That is Something Of a Mis-Understanding

In speaking of a 'corporate state', Mussolini was employing an older definition of corporate, the root meaning of grouped in a single body, a whole, meaning by it the fascist state was a unitary thing, in which no separate elements existed: he was saying fascist Italy was a single body, without classes, interests, or any faction save his Party.

Indeed, the influence and control of large business interests on the right totalitarians on the early mid twentieth century is much over-rated. Businessmen did not create these movements, and certainly did not dictate policy to them. They destroyed enemies of big business in their countries, but did so for their own purposes, and of their own volition. Businessmen profited from their rule, at least in heavy industry, but this was a by-product of the movements' extreme and popular nationalism. It was as dangerous for a tycoon to defy these movements as it was for anyone else, once they had the reins firmly in hand.

The problem with corporate person-hood taken as equal to a citizen in public and political life is, as someone once said, 'they have neither souls to be damned nor bodies to be kicked". The corporation is a legal device for pooling capital and limiting the personal liability of people who devote capital to the corporation for its debts and actions. That is all, and that is hardly a sound footing for participation in political life. Taken as a 'person', a corporation is pretty much a sociopath, since it is chartered to have no responsibility save its own self-aggrandizement, whatever that may cost others. What actually happens when a corporation is treated as a citizen in political life is that it simply amplifies the political views of those persons in a position to control its expenditures, and make them in effect a nobility, worth in political terms thousands, even millions, of citizens, by virtue of the capital they control. This certainly is a breeding ground for oligarchic rule, and antithetical to democracy. Given that the business and managerial class in our society tends to rightist views on economic matters, it is clear that here, the threat posed by this enhancement of their political power through regarding corporations as persons with rights of free speech is one of a rightist stranglehold on political life.

Note that nothing which would flow from removing the rights of a political person would have the slightest impact on the rights of persons who own in some proportion, or are employed at some level in, a corporation. Shareholders and employees could make any donations, or publish and circulate, anything they afford, either individually or in personal association. All they would be restricted from doing would be directly employing fund sof the corporation itself to do this.

[BR_Parkway]

12. So Iran & N Korea could buy up 51% of the stock and get an equal

voice in our elections as the people?

Typical RW stupidity - "oh look, here's a short cut to getting what we want for our corporate masters - even though it goes against everything we claim to stand for to our constituents"

[d_b]

2. k&r

This is the big one. I loves me some health care, but the progressive community should be focusing all their efforts onto this one right now. This needs way more coverage than it's getting.

[MNDemNY]

5. Scalia, are you hitting UnRec again?

[TxRider]

7. I for one welcome our new corporate masters...

Seriously...

If this is going to happen now is the best time.

While we have control of the legislature and can quickly pass a bill that will account for whatever the supreme court finds unconstitutional about current law.

And not even repubs would stand against it.

I'm not too worried about this.

[ohheckyeah]

8. I went looking for information on

corporate personhood and found something very interesting. The Boston Tea Party wasn't protesting a tax increase, it was protesting a tax cut for the East India Company. Puts a whole new light on the "tea parties" doesn't it?

It wasn't called the Boston Tea Party until the 1830s, after Jefferson had died. Anyhow, I wanted to know more about it, so I went off in search of a good book on the topic.
What I found was there were really no good modern books in print, at least that I could find, examining the Tea Party. Most were just children's books, and terribly inaccurate. Part of this was probably because the participants had all sworn a 50-year oath of silence, and none survived to tell the tale but one. Which is what led me to find, rather serendipitously in an obscure antiquarian bookstore, a copy of "Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party with a Memoir of George R.T. Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbor in 1773," printed in Oswego, New York by S. S. Bliss in 1834.

In this book, Hewes, who was a teenager at the time of the Tea Party (which he named in 1834), tells that the whole point of this million-dollar (in today's terms) act of vandalism was to protest a tax cut -- a corporate tax break -- that the British had given to the East India Company, which would allow it to unfairly compete with and wipe out the thousands of small entrepreneurial tea importers and tea shops that dotted the colonies.

I'd thought I remembered from school that the Tea Act of 1773 was a tax increase, so I had to check the Encyclopedia Britannica, which, sure enough, said that the Tea Act was a tax cut. So what the colonists were protesting was the principle of taxation without representation, but what they meant was what today would be termed "tax breaks for multinational corporations while the average person gets screwed." http://tribes.tribe.net/outlawcorporatepoliticalpacs/thread/e189a57c-0cbf-4648-baa2-4de7cbaa71e6

[Amy6627]

9. Yes! The East Inda Tea Company was the 'Walmart' of the time.

Thom Hartmann talks about this all the time on his show and he has a great book that I highly recommend, Unequal Protection, (The rise of corporate dominance and the theft of human rights).
http://www.thomhartmann.com