Corp Personhood 28th amend

SEE CORP PERSON 3 LEGAL

MERRI OK

see CU, camp finance reform. judic comm

new const convention (alec!)

new tag 28 3/18 not impl

capt 816

see corp person 2 for 2015 content; see also indiv amendments

RED antagonist means they want to get rid of corp pers, = good guys

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https://www.ecowatch.com/kyrsten-sinema-environment-climate-change-2619538159.html

thom h

when}:Bobby Kennedy went after organized crime in the early 1960s, one of the things he learned was that the Mafia had a series of rituals new members went through to declare their loyalty and promise they'd never turn away from their new benefactors. Once in, they'd be showered with money and protection, but they could never leave and even facedserious problems if they betrayed the syndicate.

Which brings us to the story of Kyrsten Sinema.

For a republican democracy to actually work, average citizens with a passion for making their country better must be able to run for public office without needing wealthy or powerful patrons; this is a concept thatdates back to Aristotle's rantson the topic. And Sinema was, in the beginning, just that sort of person. But I'm getting ahead of myself…

After the Nixon and Agnew bribery scandals were fully revealed with a series of congressional investigations leading to Nixon's resignation in 1974, Congress passed and President Jerry Ford signed into law a series of "good government" laws that provided for public funding of elections and strictly limited the role of big money in campaigns.

Just like the 1/6 attack on the Capitol produced a "select" committee to investigate the anti-democracy crimes of Donald Trump and his cronies, Congress authorized the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities to look into Nixon's abuses and make recommendations.

The committee's 100-page report documented how Nixon had taken bribes (most notably $400,000 from ITT to squash an antitrust lawsuit); used "dark" money from wealthy friends and corporations to set up astroturf "citizens committees" (an early version of the Tea Party) to make it appear he had widespread support among the American public; and used off-the-books money to both support loyal Republican politicians whose help he needed as well as to pay for his "opposition research" surveillance which included the Watergate break-in of the DNC's headquarters.

In response to the report, Congress passed an exhaustive set of new laws and regulations, most significantly creating from scratch the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), outlawing secret donations to politicians while providing for public funding of federal elections to diminish the power of big money. (Jimmy Carter was the only presidential candidate to win using such public funding.)

Over the years since, conservatives on the Supreme Court have repeatedly gutted provisions of the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), most famously in 2010 with their notorious Citizens United decision,

with that stroke, over the loud objections of the four "liberals" on the Court, corporations were absolutely deemed as "persons" with full constitutional rights, and billionaires or corporations pouring massive amounts of money into campaign coffers was changed from "bribery and political corruption" to an exercise of the constitutionally-protected "right of free speech."

Into this milieu stepped Kyrsten Sinema, running from a seat in the Arizona Senate for the US House of Representatives in 2012 as an "out" bisexual and political progressive. The campaign quickly turned ugly.

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.

[vid]

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."

Quietly and without fanfare, she began voting with Republicans and the corporate- and billionaire-owned Democrats, supporting efforts to deregulate big banks, "reform" Social Security and Medicare, and make it harder to for government to protect regular investors or even buyers of used cars from being ripped off.

She voted with the Chamber 77 percent of the time in her first term; in return, political networks run by rightwing billionaires and the US Chamber of Commerce showered her with support. In her first re-election race, in 2014, she was one of only five democrats endorsed by the notoriously rightwing Chamber.

She'd proved herself as a "made woman," just like the old mafiosi documented by RFK in the 1960s, willing to do whatever it takes, compromise whatever principles she espoused, to get into and stay in the good graces of the large and well-funded rightwing syndicates unleashed by Citizens United.

So it should surprise precisely nobody that Sinema is parroting the Chamber's and the billionaire network's line that President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan is too generous in helping and protecting average Americans and too punitive in taxing the morbidly rich. After all, once you're in, you leave at your own considerable peril, even when 70 percent of your state's voters want the bill to pass.

And this is a genuine crisis for America because if President Biden is frustrated in his attempt to pass his Build Back Better legislation (that is overwhelmingly supported by Americans across the political spectrum) — all because business groups, giant corporations and rightwing billionaires are asserting ownership over their two "made" senators — there's a very good chance that today's cynicism and political violence is just a preview of the rest of the decade.

But this isn't as much a story about Sinema as it is about today's larger political dysfunction for which she's become, along with Joe Manchin, a poster child.

Increasingly, because of the Supreme Court's betrayal of American values, it's become impossible for people like the younger Sinema to rise from social worker to the United States Senate without big money behind them. Our media is absolutely unwilling to call this what even Andrew Jackson would have labeled it: political corruption. But that's what it is and it's eating away at our republic like a metastasized cancer.

A guest on Brian Stelter's CNN program yesterday pointed out that there are today more autocracies in the world than democracies and, generally, democracies are on the decline. This corruption of everyday politics by the rich and powerful is how democracies begin the shift to autocracy or oligarchy, as I document in gruesome detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class.

While the naked corruption of Sinema and Joe Manchin is a source of outrage for Democrats across America, what's far more important is that it reveals how deep the rot of money in American politics has gone, thanks entirely to a corrupted Supreme Court.

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.

"The fact that corporations are different from human beings might seem to need no elaboration, except that the majority opinion almost completely elides it…. Unlike natural persons, corporations have 'limited liability' for their owners and managers, 'perpetual life,' separation of ownership and control, 'and favorable treatment of the accumulation of assets….' Unlike voters in U.S. elections, corporations may be foreign controlled."

Noting that corporations "inescapably structure the life of every citizen," Stevens continued: "It might be added that corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their 'personhood' often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of 'We the People' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."

Even worse than the short-term effect of a corporation's dominating an election or a ballot initiative, Stevens said (as if he had a time machine to look at us now),was the fact that corporations corrupting politics would, inevitably, cause average working Americans — the 95 percent who make less than $100,000 a year — to conclude that their "democracy" is now rigged.

The result, Stevens wrote, is that average people would simply stop participating in politics, stop being informed about politics, and stop voting…or become angry and cynical. Our democracy, he suggested, would be immeasurably damaged and ultimately vulnerable to corporate-supported demagogues and oligarchs. Our constitutional republic, ifCitizens United stands, could wither and could die.

"In addition to this immediate drowning out of noncorporate voices," Stevens wrote in 2010, "there may be deleterious effects that follow soon thereafter. Corporate 'domination' of electioneering can generate the impression that corporations dominate our democracy.

"When citizens turn on their televisions and radios before an election and hear only corporate electioneering, they may lose faith in their capacity, as citizens, to influence public policy. A Government captured by corporate interests, they may come to believe, will be neither responsive to their needs nor willing to give their views a fair hearing.

"The predictable result is cynicism and disenchantment: an increased perception that large spenders 'call the tune' and a reduced 'willingness of voters to take part in democratic governance.' To the extent that corporations are allowed to exert undue influence in electoral races, the speech of the eventual winners of those races may also be chilled." (Emphasis mine)

As if he were looking at Kyrsten Sinema facing a tough choice about her own political survival leading up to the 2014 election, Stevens added:

"Politicians who fear that a certain corporation can make or break their reelection chances may be cowed into silence about that corporation."

And, again looking into his time machine to today, the now-deceased Stevens pointed to the frustration of average Americans with Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin.

"On a variety of levels, unregulated corporate electioneering might diminish the ability of citizens to 'hold officials accountable to the people,' and disserve the goal of a public debate that is 'uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.'"

Stevens and his fellow "liberals" on the Court were both prescient and right.

They warned in their dissent that foreign money would corrupt our elections and we saw that in a big way in 2016. There's apparently no way of knowing how much of today's political turmoil — from school board to election commission to hospital and airplane violence — is being orchestrated and amplified by foreign players on social media masquerading as Americans to weaken our country.

They warned that because of the Citizens United decision Americans would become cynical and reactionary; that's happening today. Armed militias are in our streets, people are regularly assaulted for their perceived politics, and rightwing media demagogues make millions (literally) promoting hate and fear.

And, they warned, it could doom our republic, something that's now within our sight.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Healthcare and more than 30+ other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

√ First Amendment Right Not to Speak, Negative Speech Rights and Commercial Speech Rights

The Supreme Court overturned a California state law allowing a ratepayer advocacy group to enclose information in the utility corporations’ billing envelopes calling for regulations that would lower utility rates and a New York law that would save energy by banning the promotion of the use of electricity by a utility corporation.

A court also overturned a Vermont law mandating the disclosure of a dangerous synthetic growth hormone on dairy products.These court-invented rights have been used by corporate entities to defy the legitimate rights of people to know factual information; the authority of government to protect the health, safety, and welfare of residents; the provision of basic health needs of employees; and the ability to hold corporations publicly accountable.

VS TWITTER FILES BS?

√ Fourth Amendment Search and Seizure Rights

The Supreme Court overturned laws mandating routine surprise inspections of corporate property, claiming the “right of the people to be secure in their persons [and] houses... against unreasonable searches and seizures” applied to corporations. These judicial decisions treat corporate entities like human persons, even though the Fourth Amendment’s original language applies only to human beings, their homes, and personal effects. Governmental attempts to protect the public from the dangers stemming from commercial activities like food contamination, drug impurities, automobile defects, and environmental hazards are thwarted by removing surprise inspections, thus allowing businesses to hide, alter, or disguise dangerous conditions.

BOEING DOOR 737 MAX?

√ Fifth Amendment Takings Rights

The Supreme Court has struck down regulatory laws protecting homeowners and workers from corporations, claiming the laws are a “taking of property without just compensation.” This includes a Pennsylvania law regulating the mining of coal beneath homes to prevent their sinking and a California law allowing union organizers from having access to agricultural employees at worksites under certain conditions.

Public laws to protect residents, communities, and the natural world should supersede legally mandated compensation of lost present and future corporate profits. This is especially urgent as it becomes more evident that to tackle climate change, fossil fuels must be kept in the ground. This may simply not be possible as long as corporations can assert Fifth Amendment “takings rights.”

Corporate constitutional rights transcend Citizens United and corporate First Amendment political “free speech” rights. All the good work by individuals and organizations to legalize protections of individuals, communities, and nature and hold corporate entities accountable for their harms will never be systemically achieved as long as we continue to constitutionalize corporate rights as equivalent to the rights of human persons.

The We the People Amendment (HJR54) is the only current proposal that seeks the abolition of all corporate constitutional rights. More support is needed to add co-sponsors. The amendment, however, will never achieve sufficient power to make change until we decolonize our minds from believing that corporate rule and rights are inevitable and irreversible. A good place to start, especially on this day, is to internalize the statement: “Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that a property is a person.”

It’s time we quickly end the life of constitutional corporate persons.

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southern sheriff hypo:

Free Speech For People Legal Advocacy Program mailing address:

634 Commonwealth Ave. #209

Newton, MA 02459

Free Speech For People Legal Advocacy Program by phone, please call: 617-244-0234

Ron Fein 4/15 good

Hi - pleased to hear from you, and keep up the good work.

Our co-founder, Jeff Clements, speaks widely on this, but he was just in SF in February: https://acslaw.secure.force.com/rsvp?id=a0YG0000007sL3zMAE

I don’t have any plans to be in the Bay Area anytime soon, but I’ll see if I can think of anyone who’s local there who might be good. I’m not sure about Steve Mayer - you’re welcome to try, but the nature of his involvement in the Prop 49 brief was limited to the question of whether ballot measures can contain advisory questions, not the topic of corporate constitutional rights. I honestly have no idea what his thoughts are on that.

In the meantime, just tell these lawyers “associational standing - see NAACP v. Alabama ex rel Patterson.” It’s a decision from before the widespread expansion of corporate constitutional rights that’s strikingly similar to the Planned Parenthood hypo. The Supreme Court held that the NAACP couldn’t raise any constitutional claims of its own against the state’s demand for its membership lists, but it could assert claims on behalf of its members, whose freedom of association was jeopardized by the state’s order. This logic wouldn’t apply to most for-profit corporations: Exxon shareholders aren’t “associating” when they buy Exxon stock.

april 23

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corp harm:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JoADLDc6p0BcnVxf6jWld7nHafn3LxXyFP3UQIKeRA8/edit?usp=sharing

My research at UCSC is mapping the denialosphere:

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#-7084

flying postman http://www.gofundme.com/sn8gc2s

http://www.democracyisforpeople.org/

http://jimhightower.com/node/8693#.VdNe1_lViko

Representatives Earl Blumenauer (OR),Louise Slaughter(NY), and Peter DeFazio (OR) have stepped up to support House Joint Resolution 48 -- the only amendment that deals with both Supreme Court doctrines granting constitutional rights to artificial entities and defining spending money as free speech!

Move to Amend is pleased to announce these new co-sponsors for our We The People Amendment -- introduced in the US House of Representatives by Rick Nolan (MN) in April 2015!

OMG

Murray Energy v. Public Citizen (2014)—A corporation sued a public interest group that criticized the corporation because it blocked a health and safety rule for defamation, violation of privacy, and alleged that the corporation suffered mental anguish and emotional distress,

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http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2009/09/sonia-sotomayor-and-the-corporate-personhood.html

09/17/2009

Sonia Sotomayor and the Corporate Personhood

Jess Bravin reports that: WSJ)

In her maiden Supreme Court appearance last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a provocative comment that probed the foundations of corporate law. ... Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

A DailyKosite observed: "If Justice Sotomayor keeps up with this line of thinking, she will truly represent a great progressive change on a much too corporate-friendly Court."

Maybe so. Maybe not.

If she keeps up with this line of thinking, the one sure thing is that she'll be making a fundamental error (or, more precisely, two fundamental errors).

There are a couple of different ideas bollixed up in Sotomayor's statement. We need to entangle them.

Let's start with the idea of corporate personhood.

It is certainly true that the corporation's legal personhood is a mere legal fiction. A corporation is not a moral actor. Edward, First Baron Thurlow, put it best:"Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and nobody to be kicked?"The corporation is simply a nexus of contracts between factors of production.

Although the corporation’s legal personality obviously is a fiction, it is a very useful one. Consider a large forestry company, owning forest land in many states. If the company were required to list all of its owners—i.e., every shareholder—on every deed recorded in every county in which it owned property, and also had to amend those filings every time a shareholder sold stock, there would be an intolerable burden not only on the firm but also on government agencies that deal with the firm. Hence, for example, it is useful for the law to allow the corporation to sue and be sued in its own name and to own and deal in property in its own name.

Likewise, the corporation's legal personhood is a useful fiction in constitutional law. Government regulation of corporations obviously impacts the people for whose relationships the corporate serves as a nexus. (You see how hard it is to even talk about the corporation without reifying it?) It's useful to allow the corporation to provide those persons with a single voice when seeking constitutional protections.

Indeed, doing so is not just useful, it is necessary to protect the rights of the parties to those various contracts. As Larry Ribstein explains in Corporate Political Speech, 49 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 109, because "a corporation is a nexus of contracts, these contract rights should be constitutionally protected to the same extent as other contract rights. Thus, the state must show why intervention in the corporate contract is constitutionally justified given the availability of self-protection through private contracting." He continues:

The Court must begin to base its decisions on well-developed modern economic theory rather than on unsupported assertions about corporations and the political process. It is particularly important to understand that any regulation of corporate speech or of the electoral process can have far-reaching consequences in terms of both the costs of governing the firm and the deadweight costs of effecting wealth transfers among interest groups. Until the Court understands these consequences, its decisions may be the proverbial bull in the china shop, particularly as pressure builds for more extensive reform of campaign financing and of corporate political activity.

While it may be useful to allow the corporation "person" standing to assert collective rights, however, it is very important to remember that this is still a fiction that we embrace to facilitate protection of the rights of individuals. As Ribstein recently blogged:

In a nutshell, viewing the corporation as an entity for First Amendment purposes actually serves to push the speech rights of owners and managers under a rug. Abandoning entity reasoning would focus on what matters for the First Amendment analysis. My article and blog post just linked show that once you do that, and put the arguments for limiting speech rights under an analytical spotlight, they look pretty weak.

A distinct problem with Sotomayor's analysis is her treatment of the corporation as a creature of state law. It is true that a corporation must have a certificate of incorporation from the state to obtain legal recognition as such. We might reasonably infer from Sotomayor's overall comment, however, that she accepts some version of the old concession theory, pursuant to which the corporation was regarded as a quasi-state actor exercising powers delegated by the state. It has been over half-a-century since corporate legal theory, of any political or economic stripe, took the concession theory seriously. In particular, concession theory is plainly inconsistent with the contractarian model of the firm, which treats corporate law as nothing more than a set of standard form contract terms provided by the state to facilitate private ordering.

Note how the two points are related. The state provides the corporate form as a means of facilitating private ordering amongst people. When the state wrongfully interferes with how those people have ordered their relationships, those people need the protections of the Constitution. Collective action problems of various sorts may prevent them from banding together to vindicate their rights. Accordingly, the law allows the corporation--under the control of its board of directors--to seek the necessary Constitutional protections on behalf of the community of stakeholders (and, especially, the shareholders who hold the residual claim).

I treat these issues in more detail in my article, Community and Statism: A Conservative Contractarian Critique of Progressive Corporate Law Scholarship.

Showdown? Sixth Circuit OKs New Cigarette Warning Label

By Robyn Hagan Cain on March 19, 2012 3:03 PM

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that the new, graphic cigarette warning labels do not violate tobacco companies’ free speech rights, reports Politico.

In a lengthy opinion, the court affirmed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act’s restrictions on the marketing of modified-risk tobacco products and bans on event sponsorship, branding non-tobacco merchandise, and free sampling, as well as the requirement that tobacco manufacturers reserve significant packaging space for textual health warnings.

The court also agreed with the district court that the new color graphic and non-graphic warning label requirement is constitutional.

But it wasn't all good news for the government: the court appellate court rejected black-and-white, text-only advertising restrictions imposed on tobacco companies.

Discount Tobacco City & Lottery, Inc., a coalition of manufacturers and sellers, challenged the advertising restrictions under the Act approximately two months after President Obama signed it into law. The group sued the U.S. government, claiming that the Act violates their free speech rights under the First Amendment, constitutes an unlawful taking under the Fifth Amendment, and infringes on their Fifth Amendment due process rights.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals largely disagreed. Writing for the majority, Judge Eric Clay concluded, "The warning labels required by the Act do not impose any restriction on Plaintiffs' dissemination of speech, nor do they touch upon Plaintiffs' core speech. Instead, the labels serve as disclaimers to the public regarding the incontestable health consequences of using tobacco."

That's a far cry from last month's D.C. district court decision, finding that the new cigarette warning requirement violated the tobacco industry's free speech rightswithout a compelling government interest. While the D.C. decision may still be appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the split could lead to a Supreme Court showdown between tobacco companies and the government.

Related Resources:

Discount Tobacco City & Lottery v. USA (Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Cigarette Warnings Violate 1st Amendment, Federal Judge Rules (FindLaw's Decided)
Contribution Prohibition is Lawful Limit on Free Speech Rights (FindLaw's Fourth Circuit Blog)

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By Jeff Clements July 25, 2014

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/07/25/pass-the-28th-amendment-to-ensure-corporations-are-not-people

James Madison and the founding generation of Americans viewed the concentration of wealth and power as the greatest threat to constitutional self-government. Today, their fear is our reality. As a result, we see a broken government responsive only to the largest corporations and privileged few. We see ordinary Americans sidelined as spectators to a big money political game. We see formidable national and global challenges exacerbated by politicians operating in a systemically corrupted system.

The Supreme Court’s series of misguided 5-4 rulings such as Citizens United v. FEC has created special rights for “things,”such as money and corporations, while constricting the right of all people to be heard, to an equal vote, to representation and participation in self-government. And while billions of dollars of special interest money, often secret, flood our political process and corrupt our government, corporations from Hobby Lobby to Monsanto to Peabody Energy increasingly deploy the new “corporate veto” in the courts to skirt even the most basic public laws.

We can despair and give up on a government of, for and by the people. Or we can do what virtually every generation of Americans before us has done when we fall short of our promise of self-government – we can renew democracy with our power to amend the Constitution.

[SEE: Political Cartoons]

Constitutional amendments have always come in waves, beginning immediately after the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The convention was only able to win approval of the Constitution by the exercise of the amendment power of the people and the states. In the first four years of our new republic, Americans deployed the process required by Article V – approval by two-thirds of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states – to add the first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights, to the Constitution. For good measure, Americans added the 11th Amendment in 1795, overturning a Supreme Court decision empowering private bondholders to haul states into federal court.

The next wave of Article V amendments came amid the tumult of the Civil War, with the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to end slavery, and to ensure equal protection, due process and voting rights for all, regardless of race. Three amendments in five years, and the broken promise of the American republic renewed.

At the turn of the 20th century, when concentrations of wealth and corporate power threatened liberty and self-government, Americans turned again to Article V. Three amendments between 1913 and 1920 (the 16th, 17th and 19th) reversed the Supreme Court’s decision striking down the federal income tax, ended the appointment of senators in favor of election by the people in the states, and secured the right to vote and participate in government, regardless of gender.

This pattern in times of economic, social, global and cultural shifts happens again and again, most recently with the adoption of four amendments in 10 years between 1961 and 1971. Three of these amendments better secured equality of voting and representation, with the prohibition of the “poll taxes” that had kept many citizens from the ballot, the expansion of representation to Americans in the District of Columbia, and the securing of equal voting rights for men and women over 18 years old.

[MORE: Cartoons about Congress]

Article V’s Constitutional amendment process has proved to be exactly the kind of tool of a sovereign, free people that the framers of the Constitution had in mind. It is our indispensable lever of self-government when grave threats to the promise of liberty and honest, effective self-government no longer can be ignored.

The 28th Amendment to overturn Citizens United and secure equal voting and participation for all Americans is picking up steam in Congress. The Senate will hold a floor vote this fall on an amendment resolution that already has 48 co-sponsors. More than 100 members of the House introduced a similar resolution on July 15, 2014. This did not begin in Congress, though, nor was the amendment hatched up as a partisan talking point at election time. Instead, Congress began to act only after millions of Americans – Republicans, Democrats and independents – said enough is enough.

Over the last four years, in hundreds of cities and towns, and 16 states, Americans have come together to propose and pass 28th Amendment resolutions by overwhelming, cross-partisan margins. In Montana, for example, on the day in November 2012 that President Obama lost the state by 10 percentage points, 75 percent of Montana voters approved a 28th Amendment ballot initiative.

The American promise is simple: Human beings are endowed with equal, fundamental rights. We safeguard those rights by establishing government accountable to all the people, with limitations and balances to prevent the kind of systemic corruption we now see before us. It’s time again to turn to the great American tool of self-government: our power to amend the Constitution to restore that promise. endit

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greenpeace traces back to powell memo:

Another significant shift in the law since Powell’s memo was circulated has been the gradual expansion of corporate constitutional rights (referred to by some business groups as “business civil liberties”), especially in the realms of commercial and political speech. The most infamous example is the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In the commercial sphere, companies have similarly used corporate speech doctrines to challenge various restrictions on corporate advertising (e.g. direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs for off-label uses), limits on media ownership, and product safety labeling requirements (e.g. cigarettes and genetically modified foods).

Corporate constitutional rights are regularly claimed (with the implicit threat of litigation) in opposition to new or proposed regulations. One recent example came during recent attacks on regulations created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform package, which contained a provision requiring that companies report their use of tin, gold and other minerals that can be traced back to the conflict-ridden Democratic Republic of the Congo. In its comments to the SEC, Tiffany & Co. claimed the SEC rules would “compel speech in a manner that violates the First Amendment.”

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/12/9/corporate_conquistadors_new_report_exposes_how

corps profit from agw

Should McDonald’s & Monsanto Have the Same Rights as People? A Debate on Corporate Personhood

Five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Citizens United v.FEC decision striking down the prohibition on corporate expenditures in federal elections. In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people, with the same right to influence politics as voters. Meanwhile, many corporations including McDonald’s, Monsanto and Peabody Energyhave cited the principle of corporate constitutional rights in recent efforts to fight back against new laws. McDonald’s and other franchises are suing the city of Seattle over its new $15-an-hour minimum wage law, arguing it violates its corporate personhood rights. They are basing their case on the 14th Amendment, a constitutional provision written to protect newly freed slaves after the Civil War and ensure equal rights for all people. Monsanto is challenging Vermont’s recently passed GMO-labeling law under the First Amendment, claiming that it forces them to "speak" against their will. We host a debate on the movement to draft a constitutional amendment to overturn the doctrine of corporate constitutional rights with two guests: Ron Fein, legal director at Free Speech for People, and Kent Greenfield, professor of law and Dean’s Research Scholar at Boston College Law School.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Five years ago, the Supreme Court handed down its Citizens United decision striking down the prohibition on corporate expenditures in federal elections. The court’s 5-4 decision opened the floodgates for corporate and undisclosed dark money to pour into the election process. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the number of donors giving more than $1 million to outside groups during elections has grown from two in 2006 to 84 in the 2014 congressional elections. The right-wing Koch Brothers have pledged to use their network of conservative advocacy groups to spend a staggering $900 million in advance of the 2016 presidential election.

AMY GOODMAN: In the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court ruled corporations are people, with the same right to influence politics as voters. Meanwhile, many corporations, including McDonald’s, Monsanto and Peabody Energy, have cited the principle of corporate constitutional rights in recent efforts to fight back against new laws. McDonald’s and other franchises are now suing the city of Seattle over its new$15-an-hour minimum wage law, arguing it violates its corporate personhood rights. On Tuesday, the International Franchise Association told a federal judge that the law unfairly discriminates against franchise owners by treating them differently than local small business proprietors. They’re basing their case on the 14th Amendment, a constitutional provision written to protect newly freed slaves after the Civil War and ensure equal rights for all people. Monsanto is challenging Vermont’s recently passed GMO-labeling law under the First Amendment, claiming it forces them to speak against their will.

Today we host a debate. Joining us from Watertown, Massachusetts, is Ron Fein, legal director of the organization Free Speech for People, which backs a constitutional amendment to overturn the doctrine of corporate constitutional rights. And in Boston we’re joined by Kent Greenfield. He’s a professor of law and Dean’s Research Scholar at Boston College Law School. He recently wrote a piece for The Washington Monthlycalled "Let Us Now Praise Corporate Persons."

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Ron Fein, let’s begin with you. Explain what is meant by "corporate personhood."

RON FEIN: Well, thank you, Amy and Juan, and thanks also to Professor Greenfield, who I do have great respect for as an expert in state corporations law. But we’re talking now about the Constitution.

The idea of a corporate personhood is a doctrine that comes outoriginally of state law, and it enables a corporation to have some of the legal rights of people when we deem that it is appropriate for them to do so. So, for example, a corporation can own property, sell property, sue and be sued. And that’s all good. But when we’re talking about the Constitution, thatmetaphor of the corporation as a person becomes extremely dangerous, because it leads to fuzzy thinking. And that’s why we see things like the Equal Protection Clause cases, where corporations are claiming that regulations about the minimum wage that treat certain types of corporations differently from others are a form of discrimination that we should be concerned about. And similarly, under theFirst Amendment, we see also corporations using the metaphor of personhood to refuse to speak, as if they were a dissenting religious minority, when what’s being asked of them is to disclose information about what’s in the products that they sell.

So when you take that metaphor of corporate personhood from its origins in state law and you transpose it onto the Constitution, it becomes extremely dangerous. And that’s why we’ve seen a sustained and renewed assault on laws, ranging from minimum wage to genetically engineered food disclosure, to disclosure of products coming from war-torn regions of Central Africa, to a St. Louis, Missouri, ballot initiative that seeks only to end public tax breaks for fossil fuel producers and is also being challenged as violating the Equal Protection Clause.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Kent Greenfield, could you lay out why you believe that expansion of corporate personhood would actually bring more accountability by corporations?

KENT GREENFIELD: Sure, Juan. And again, thank you for inviting me on. And again I will say hello to Ron Fein, whose work I respect quite a bit.

So, I think—first of all, I should say that I think the examples that you raised so far in this segment about the Seattle minimum wage and some of the forced disclosure laws,I think the corporations should lose in those cases. My point is that corporate personhood is often misunderstood. And Ron is correct that, for the most part, corporate personhood is simply just another way of saying that corporations ought to be separate legal entities—and that’s a wonderful thing. It bolsters the ability, the legal ability, to hold corporations accountable. Think about the BP oil spill from several years ago, 2010. If the corporation itself was not a legal entity, it would be hard to hold anybody accountable. It would be hard to hold—the individuals involved certainly don’t have deep enough pockets to pay back the horrible damage that was caused there.

I think where Ron and I would disagree is that whether corporations should be able to assert—ever assert—any constitutional rights. AndI think that some constitutional rights some of the time are appropriate for corporations to assert. And the easiest example is, of course, media corporations. The New York Times, a media conglomerate, certainly ought to have First Amendment rights. That’s an easy case. I think the harder cases are what to do about election spending and the like. And in those cases, I think, as Amy suggested at the beginning of the segment, I think the torrent of money going—independent money going into politics these days is a danger to democracy.But I think the money—the danger is money, whether it comes from corporations or individuals. And most of the money that we’re seeing, actually, in politics these days is coming from rich individuals, not corporations.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what you’re really debating is whether a constitutional amendment should be put forward. But before we talk about that, I wanted to ask Kent Greenfield, on this issue, for example, of the suit that was heard this week, explain what’s happening. Why is McDonald’s, the other corporations, Comfort Inn, Holiday Inn—why are they suing Seattle over Seattle’s minimum wage hike to $15 an hour? Explain what it’s all about.

KENT GREENFIELD: Actually, I don’t—actually, I don’t know. I’ve heard about that case, but maybe Ron Fein knows more about it.

AMY GOODMAN: Ron Fein, if you know?

RON FEIN: Yes. Thank you. I’d be happy to explain. We filed a friend-of-the-court brief in that case. The claim that is being brought by the International Franchise Association against Seattle’s new $15-an-hour living wage law is that the schedule for implementation treats franchise businesses unfairly because it phases them in at a different schedule than local small businesses, so they have to comply with the law at a different time. And the reason for that was the Seattle City Council studied the issue, and they determined that, for example, a McDonald’s restaurant with 50 employees is not really comparable to a small independent restaurant with 50 employees, because it gets the benefits of coordinated marketing and advertising and product development and bulk purchase agreements that an independent restaurant doesn’t get. That’s the basis for their claim.

Now, they’ve challenged the Seattle living wage law under a whole kitchen sink of theories. One of them is the Equal Protection Clause. And that clause is part of the 14th Amendment, which was designed to protect the rights of the freed slaves after the Civil War. And it is good that the Equal Protection Clause has expanded in recent years to protect additional categories of people, like gay and lesbian Americans, as we’ve seen in the marriage equality movement, but it was never intended to protect corporations. And, in fact, our research has shown that the authors of the 14th Amendment in the 1860s, as Reconstruction was occurring in the South, were particularly concerned about whether the newly freed slaves were able to earn fair living wages. And the United States government took action, leading up to the 14th Amendment, to ensure that there were fair living wages available for the freed slaves as they continued working in the South.

So, the corporate claims under the Equal Protection Clause came from after the Civil War, when the Supreme Court determined, with no evidence or interpretation whatsoever, that when the Equal Protection Clause says that a state cannot deny the equal protection of the laws to any persons within its jurisdiction, that persons includes corporations. And the Supreme Court then used this as a tool throughout the Gilded Age, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, to strike down minimum wage laws, child labor laws and a host of other laws. And that continued until the New Deal, when, finally,FDR, with the public at his back, stood up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court backed down. And that led to the postwar era of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, when corporations were not asserting any constitutional claims, by and large, and yet we had the greatest shared economic prosperity of this country in generations.

AMY GOODMAN:So McDonald’s is comparing itself to freed slaves.

RON FEIN: In essence.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, just the Vermont case, Monsanto challenging Vermont’s recently passed GMO-labeling law under the First Amendment, claiming it forces them to speak against their will?

RON FEIN: Yes. This is a line of cases known as "compelled speech." And it starts with the 1940s, where the Supreme Court held that Jehovah’s Witnesses shouldn’t be forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance against their will, because it violates their human dignity. In recent years, the courts have begun extending that same principle to corporations. But corporations are artificial entities created by state laws. They’re not endowed by their creator with inalienable rights; they’re endowed by state laws with specific rights provided in their charters.

But the courts have now been granting the right to avoid disclosure of product ingredients to corporations. And so, when Monsanto and other grocery food manufacturers are challenging Vermont’s law, saying that they do not wish to reveal whether their products contain genetically engineered ingredients or not, they’re actually standing on some recent Supreme Court First Amendment precedent that’s in their favor. And unfortunately, as our legal adviser, John Coates of Harvard Law School, has shown, in recent years there’s been a corporate takeover of the First Amendment, where an increasing percentage of the courts’ First Amendment dockets are occupied now by corporate claims of this type.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Ron Fein and Kent Greenfield, we have break. We’re going to come back to our discussion and focus on the constitutional amendment movement, how that would affect corporations and regular everyday people. This is Democracy Now!We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Ron Fein, Free Speech for People’s legal director, and Kent Greenfield, professor of law and Dean’s Research Scholar at Boston College Law School. Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to ask Kent Greenfield, on the issue of the criminal justice system, a person commits a crime, they go to jail. A corporation commits a crime, it gets a fine. Or, I mean, a corporation can’t be jailed. Could you talk about, in terms of criminal justice—you blow up—a factory blows up, and you kill several of the workers. Or a mine, there’s a mine accident, and your negligence results in the deaths of several of your workers. Nobody goes to jail, in terms of a corporation.

KENT GREENFIELD: Right, it’s just the nature of the entity. Sometimes responsible individuals within the corporation are held accountable. And let me speak to the Seattle cases and the Vermont cases that Ron Fein had talked about before, too. I think the corporations ought to [but don't? esp with rove gop engr judges at state level as well as fed?] lose both of those cases. I think where we differ is that I don’t think that it’s impossible to imagine a situation where corporations ought to be able to raise some kind of constitutional right. So, for example, if corporations do not have a right to be free of compelled speech, one can imagine all kinds of bad laws being passed forcing corporations to say things—you know, fly an American flag when they don’t want to, or post a photograph of the president as you enter a workplace. But I think—so, I think where we differ, and even on the criminal justice thing, I think what we need to take into account is that some constitutional rights make sense to apply to corporations, and some do not. The right to be—to have due process in the criminal justice system, if corporations don’t have that right, then their ability to make money, to create wealth of the rest of us, will be endangered. Nobody would invest in them. And we’ll remember that constitutional rights are simply another way of saying that government power should be constrained. And if no corporation can assert the right to free speech or even equal protection in any situation, then the government can really act willy-nilly toward those corporate entities, and that would be a bad thing.[note no rebuttal here]

AMY GOODMAN: Ron Fein, can you explain the constitutional amendment movement? What constitutional amendment is being proposed?

RON FEIN: Yes, thank you. There are two constitutional amendments that we at FreeSpeechForPeople.org and other allies in the field are promoting. One is called the Democracy for All Amendment, and that would overturn the Supreme Court’s campaign finance decisions. So that would enable local, state and federal government to set limits on spending money and raising money to influence elections. The other constitutional amendment that we’re promoting is called the People’s Rights Amendment, and that would clarify that the rights in the Constitution are rights of natural persons, not corporations.

Now, that doesn’t mean that there will never be a case where a corporation can come into court asserting the rights that belong to natural persons. The problem is, the way the Supreme Court has it set up right now is that corporations are always assumed to be asserting rights that ultimately belong to actual people. A corporation can just waltz into court assuming it has a constitutional right, and it might win or lose on the details, but no one questions whether it has the right. What our amendment would do is it would force the courts to do a two-step analysis. The first step would be to say, "Who are the actual people who are being affected by this law, and do they have a constitutional right at issue here?" The second step would be to say, "Do those people have a constitutional right to use the corporate tool to exercise that right?"And so, what that would mean is that we would have to look behind the corporate form to say, "Are there actual people here whose rights are actually being violated?"And that would change the entire discourse that we’ve been having.

And in terms of the question about corporate crime, I think that there are two things that need to happen. One, we need to have continued individual responsibility. White-collar criminals should be prosecuted more than they have been. But also, it is in fact true that a corporation can get the death penalty. Every state of the union has some provision for revoking corporate charters. And these powers belong usually to the attorney general of the state. They’re not often used nowadays. But at FreeSpeechForPeople.org, we are very shortly going to have on our website amodel corporate charter revocation law that would provide that when a corporation has committed repeated multiple felonies within a short period of time, then its corporate charter can and should be revoked.

KENT GREENFIELD: So, one thing that I would say with regard to the People’s Rights Amendment is that the two-step analysis that Ron Fein is suggesting would not change the outcome in Citizens United itself. The court did not—in that case, did not say that Citizens United, the corporate entity, had rights that were violated. What it said was that Citizens United was an association of citizens, and in constraining that organization’s ability to publish its—to release its movie, it was violating the rights of its members.And so, the People’s Rights Amendment would not change the effect—the outcome inCitizens United itself, which is bizarre to think that all this effort is being put forth to pass an amendment that wouldn’t change the outcome.[note again no rebut]

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Kent Greenfield, could you talk about the Hobby Lobby case and how that affects the discussion, the debate on the issue of corporate personhood?

KENT GREENFIELD: Right, so Hobby Lobby was this case that came down last year, where a group of evangelical Christian shareholders own a privately held arts and crafts retailer in the Midwest—many of your listeners and watchers will know it—and they were asserting religious freedom rights to be free of Obamacare’s requirement that they provide their employees with contraceptive services within their healthcare plan. And there was a group of corporate law professors, sort of left-of-center corporate law professors—and I was one of them—who wrote an amicus brief to the court that said, really, the answer to this question depends on corporate personhood, because if you see the corporate entity as a separate entity, as a corporate person in and of itself, then it cannot borrow the religious freedom interests of the shareholders. And what the problem in that case, when the Supreme Court held in favor of the corporation, was that it neglected and ignored corporate personhood rather than furthered it.[(?]

AMY GOODMAN: So, Ron Fein, where do these constitutional amendments stand right now?

RON FEIN: Well, when we began the constitutional amendment campaigns the day of theCitizens United decision, a lot of people thought that they would never go anywhere. But, in fact, we have got 16 states and over 630 cities and towns across 38 states that have passed resolutions,either by ballot initiative or by votes of the legislature, endorsing the constitutional amendment movement. And we had a Senate vote on the floor of the Senate this past fall, which got a majority of Senate votes, although it didn’t reach the necessary two-thirds threshold. But constitutional amendments take a long time. These are not processes that happen quickly, because the Constitution itself provides for a process to make sure that constitutional amendments are deliberate. So right now we’re in the phase of building grassroots support and educating people about the need to restore and repair our Constitution to the vision that the founders had. And for that, I think you for the opportunity to appear on this program.

AMY GOODMAN: How do corporate rights compare to—or corporate personhood, how does it relate to human rights?

RON FEIN: What you see, ironically, is that most often an assertion of corporate rights, as part of this new corporate civil rights movement, acts directly against human rights.So, again, to review just some of the cases, in the living wage challenges, which we’re seeing not only in Seattle, but also in Los Angeles, when the corporation is asserting an Equal Protection Clause right to not pay the living wage on the same schedule that they would be required to by the law, that goes against the human rights of the workers to receive that living wage on which they can feed their families. When Monsanto and other grocery manufacturers are asserting a First Amendment right not to reveal what products they are selling that contain genetically engineered ingredients, that violates the rights of Vermont consumers who want to know that information. And when you see the National Association of Manufacturers challenging a federal law that requires them to disclose whether their products contain minerals that come from the Democratic Republic of Congo, because, again, they don’t want to speak about it, that has a direct impact on the lives of people who live in Africa who are being harmed by the ongoing conflict and by the minerals trade that fuels the militias. So, when you see a corporation asserting a constitutional right, whether it be in the case of Hobby Lobby, with the shareholders asserting a right that acts to the detriment of their employees, or in any of these other cases we’ve discussed, it’s usually to the detriment of people.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What about that, Kent Greenfield, the inverse relationship between human rights and corporate rights?

KENT GREENFIELD: Right. I agree that corporate accountability is a problem, that corporate power is a problem, that there’s often a tension between human rights and corporate rights. And I’ve been—I’ve spent my career trying to craft solutions to that problem within corporate governance. And I think that’s where progressive efforts should be aimed, not toward constitutional right—constitutional amendments, which in the end would do little to address the real problems. I think thereal problems come from the fact that corporations are managed and structured to further the interests of the managerial and financial elite. And how to make corporations more accountable, more attuned to issues of human rights and the like, is to make corporations themselves more democratic, to make the corporate governance, to make boards of directors attuned to interests of all stakeholders, to interests of society. I think I would put employees on the boards of directors of companies. And this is something that works in Europe. We know that it works there, Germany, where half of the board of directors of every major company—Siemens, VW, what have you—are populated by worker representatives. The economy is doing well. These companies are doing well. And they are seen as much more pluralistic and much more attentive to the needs of all their stakeholders. And we here in the United States have this blind spot when it comes to corporations. We think that they are in service of shareholders. And Ron Fein and others, with whom I’ve worked for a long time, all recognize that the core problem here is corporate power. We simply disagree about how to address it. I think to go at the—to the heart of how corporations are managed is the real remedy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. It’s a conversation we will continue to have. Kent Greenfield, professor of law and Dean’s Research Scholar at Boston College Law School, we’ll link to your piece in The Washington Monthly, "Let Us Now Praise Corporate Persons." And Ron Fein, legal director at Free Speech for People. This is Democracy Now! When we come back, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. Stay with us.

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/13/should_mcdonalds_monsanto_have_the_same

http://ecowatch.com/2014/10/01/jailing-climate-deniers-robert-kennedy-jr

Pull charter: rfk2

Jailing Climate Deniers

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Hysterics at the right wing think tanks and their acolytes at The Washington Times, talk radio and the blogosphere, are foaming in apoplexy because I supposedly suggested that “all climate deniers should be jailed.” Last week, that canard leapt from the wingnut echo chamber into New York magazine, which reported, under Jonathan Chait’s by-line, that “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.shares the opinion that climate denial should be criminalized.” Chait was quoting the National Review’s Kevin Williamson who made that outlandish claim at one of Heritage Foundation’s annual “Conference for Kooks.” Of course I never said that. I support the First Amendment which makes room for any citizen to, even knowingly, spew far more vile lies without legal consequence.

I do, however, believe that corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty. This can be accomplished through an existing legal proceeding known as “charter revocation.” State Attorneys General can invoke this remedy whenever corporations put their profit-making before the “public welfare.”

In 1998, New York State’s Republican Attorney General, Dennis Vacco successfully invoked the “corporate death penalty” to revoke the charters of two non-profit tax-exempt tobacco industry front groups, The Tobacco Institute and the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR). The two groups Vacco annulled were creatures of a decade long campaign funded principally by tobacco giant, Brown & Williamson to avoid costly health regulations that would diminish the profit margins of an industry that was killing one out of five of its customers. “Doubt is our Product,” explained Brown & Williamson’s notorious 1969 memo outlining the reptilian communications strategy that hatched its front groups.

Vacco complained that these companies were “[feeding] the public a pack of lies in an underhanded effort to promote smoking so as to addict America’s kids.” Attorney General Vacco seized their assets and distributed them to public institutions.

Laws in every state maintain that companies that fail to comply with prescribed standards of corporate behavior may be either dissolved or, in the case of foreign corporations, lose their rights to operate within that state’s borders. These rules can be quite expansive and, in contrast to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent rulings on campaign finance law, companies, under state laws, enjoy far less protection than human beings. New York, for example, prescribes corporate death whenever a company fails to “serve the common good” and “to cause no harm.”

Just as Big Tobacco funded the now moribund CTR and the Tobacco Institute to systematically deceive the public about the perils of cigarettes, the carbon cronies, with far larger profits at stake, have funded an army of front groups to persuade the public that global warming is a hoax.

For more than a decade, petroleum industry behemoths lead by Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, have waged a successful multi-million dollar propaganda blitz to mislead the public about global warming using the same techniques honed by Big Tobacco in its campaign to hoodwink the public about smoking.

In their efforts to impede state, national and international efforts to protect humans from the destructive climate chaos, both companies have engaged in massive spending sprees purchasing phony “junk” science devised to undermine the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming. Between 1997 and 2013, ExxonMobil, pumped more than $29.9 million into an elaborate network of more than 75 front groups to manufacture skepticism about the oncoming climate catastrophe. At the same time, Koch Industries has piped at least $67,042,064 to more than 50 groups that play central roles in the Koch-funded offensive against climate science.

Two decades after Brown & Williamson’s notorious “Doubt is our Product” memo, the oil industry launched its own anti-science juggernaut replicating Big Tobacco’s and utilizing many of the same corrupt scientists and PR firms. Two secret memos dictated the blueprint for Big Carbon’s anti-science offensive. The American Petroleum Institute (API)—lobbyist for ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell and ConocoPhillips—was the spear tip of a multi-million dollar campaign to confound American citizens about climate science by manipulating the media. On April 3, 1998, API laid out its “Global Climate Science Communications action plan,” the detailed blueprint of “tactics and strategies” for deceiving the American people and press by sewing doubts about climate science. The API team would create front groups and “educate” editorial boards and corporate CEOs to challenge “prevailing scientific wisdom.” Under “recruiting and training,” API outlines its plan for tapping neophyte—“read malleable”—scientists and tame journalists (“e.g. John Stossel,” the memo suggests) to bamboozle the public. “Victory will be achieved,” API promises, “when average citizens and the media recognize uncertainties in climate science;” recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the “conventional wisdom.”

Four years later in 2002, conservative pollster Frank Luntz in an influential memo to President George Bush and oil patch lawmakers, applauded the industry for the success of the API campaign. “Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community.” Nevertheless, he warned Big Carbon’s indentured servants on Capitol Hill “the science [is closing against us] but is not yet closed.” He advised, “therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”

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Over the next dozen years, a string of front groups conducted the deceptive anti-science campaign outlined in the API’s 1998 plan and Luntz’s 2002 memo and funded primarily by ExxonMobil and Koch.

Among the groups that have received millions from Exxon and Koch Industries are the Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, Cooler Heads Coalition, Global Climate Coalition, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity, Heartland Institute, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), George C. Marshall Institute, State Policy Network, Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Like the Tobacco Institute and CTR, these front groups are snake pits for sociopaths. Run by venomous carbon industry toadies, they stable a craven menagerie of propaganda wizards, slick biostitutes, tobacco scientists, snake oil hucksters, voodoo economists and other so called “experts” employed to publish beguiling studies, appear on TV and radio, and write deceptive articles critiquing the “flawed science” predicting climate change. They broadcast zany theories to bolster policies that encourage increased energy consumption, torpedo renewable energy, attack pollution rules, maintain Big Carbon’s obscene government subsidies and, in general, provide the philosophical underpinnings for a system of cushy socialism for the “dirty energy” tycoons and bitter, savage capitalism for the rest of mankind.

For example, CEI, which describes itself as being “a leader in the fight against the global warming scare,” spent years denying that warming was real, and then, as the tsunami of evidence made that position untenable, pivoted to the more defensible posture that human beings are not causing it. CEI has more recently beat its final retreat to the terminal default position that global warming is great because it will “create a milder, greener, more prosperous world.” The floods, fires, drought, rising oceans, disappearing ice caps, melting glaciers, drowned cities and refugees have not exactly been “mild.” But things have been prosperous and “green”—if one means greenbacks—for the Koch Brothers and ExxonMobil, who are enjoying the biggest profits in world history. “You’re Welcome, Planet Earth!”

AEI, one of the richest and most influential think tanks in the U.S.—and the high priest of climate denial—offered a $10,000 bounty in 2006 to any scientist or economist who could produce an article undermining the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. The IPCC report was the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science representing the scientific consensus among thousands of climate scientists comprising the leading and most prestigious and scientific stars from more than 130 participating nations.

Any state attorney general with the will, resolve and viscera to stand to up to the dangerous and duplicitous corporate propagandists, has authority to annul the charters of each of these mercenary merchants of deceit. An attorney general with particularly potent glands could revoke the charters not just oil industry surrogates like AEI and CEI, he or she could also withdraw state operating authority from the soulless, nationless oil companies that have sponsored “Big Lie” campaigns and force them to sell their in-state assets to more responsible competitors.

Koch Industries and ExxonMobil [see update , had own research early 10/15] have particularly distinguished themselves as candidates for corporate death. No other companies have worked harder or spent more money to impede the government from taking action on global warming to safeguard public welfare. Both companies have employed artifice on a massive scale and spent tens of millions of dollars to purchase fraudulent junk science. The greedy, immoral, anti-social pathology behind ExxonMobil and Koch’s mendacious crusade is even starker given the open acknowledgment since 2007 by the other major oil companies including Shell, Chevron and BP, that burning oil is causing climate change.

Though they like to invoke patriotic themes and drape themselves in the flag, the oil barons have persistently demonstrated their enthusiasm for putting corporate profits ahead of the public welfare.

“I’m not a U.S. company,” Exxon’s legendary former CEO, Lee Raymond told his board, “and I don’t make decisions on what is good for the U.S..” These companies are not friends to America. They are enemies of mankind.

The notion that a state attorney general might actually execute one of these villains is not a pipe dream. State attorneys general have historically shown a willingness to stand up to American democracy’s biggest corporate bullies including, Wall Street, Big Tobacco, coal burning utilities and the oil titans even in eras, like the present, when corporate money has subverted our democracy and extracted the spinal cords from most politicians. It was 46 courageous state attorneys generals who brought down the cigarette companies. It was nine northeastern state attorneys general who sued the coal burning utilities for damages to their citizens from airborne pollutants. And it was state attorneys general in New York, Ohio and Texas who, during the Gilded Age, dismantled the Standard Oil octopus, and restored economic democracy to America. That deadly Frankenstein monster, now reassembled and resurrected as ExxonMobil, poses an even greater threat today to our historical values and quality of life.

Let’s all hope for and vote for a home state Attorney General candidate who promises to stand up against carbon’s duplicitous proxies and fight for truth, justice and democracy, and to provide our children with safe, healthy, dignified and wholesome communities and the prosperity that should not be exclusive to the Koch Brothers and ExxonMobil.

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On June 3, 2014, a hearing was held by the Senate Judiciary’s subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights to discuss SJR 19. SJR 19 is a joint resolution, introduced by Senator Tom Udall (New Mexico), proposing a 28th amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would allow Congress and the states to regulate the raising and spending of money in elections.

At that hearing, petitions with more than 2 million signers in support of an amendment were delivered to the subcommittee.When discussing SJR 19, Senator Udall stated that elections should be about the quality of ideas, not the size of bank accounts.

About 2 weeks later, on June 18, a debate was held and a successful vote taken to move SJR 19 from subcommittee to the full Senate Judiciary Committee. There will be debate on the resolution and a vote taken by the full Senate Judiciary Committee sometime later in July or after the Senate comes back from the August recess. If successful, which is highly likely, SJR 19 would then move to the full Senate. It is at that point where things would get difficult. You can help by calling your senators and asking them to support SJR 19.

By a straight party-line vote of 54-42, the U.S. Senate failed to pass a constitutional amendment that would have overruled the awful Citizens Uniteddecision.

But our work had an impact. All five Senate Democrats whose support was unknown—Mary Landrieu, Mary Pryor, Joe Donnelly, Tim Kaine & Mark Warner—ended up voting “yes.”

https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/19/text

Mr. Udall of New Mexico (for himself, Mr. Bennet, Mr. Harkin, Mr. Schumer, Mrs. Shaheen, Mr. Whitehouse, Mr. Tester, Mrs. Boxer, Mr. Coons, Mr.King, Mr. Murphy, Mr. Wyden, Mr. Franken, Ms. Klobuchar, Mr. Udall of Colorado, Mr. Johnson of South Dakota, Mr. Menendez, Mr. Reed, Mr.Blumenthal, Mr. Heinrich, Mr. Merkley, Mrs. Feinstein, Mr. Begich, Mr. Cardin, Mrs. Gillibrand, Mrs. Hagan, Ms. Mikulski, Ms. Baldwin, Mr.Markey, Ms. Warren, Mr. Brown, Mr. Walsh, Mr. Durbin, Mr. Reid, Ms. Hirono, Mr. Carper, Mrs. Murray, Mr. Schatz, Mr. Sanders, Mr.Rockefeller, Ms. Stabenow, Mr. Booker, Ms. Heitkamp, Mr. Manchin, Mrs. McCaskill, Ms. Cantwell, and Mr. Nelson) introduced the following joint resolution; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

But emphasize that the Udall amendment (SJR19) is not adequate. It is defective for these reasons: (pick your reasons from the above). An adequate amendment would say clearly and boldly that Corporations Are Not People, and that Money Is Not Speech.

:{:{:{

}:}:}:

:{:{Such an amendment has already been proposed: The “We The People Amendment”, HJR29, introduced by Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI). Please introduce this proposal into the Senate, add your name as a co-sponsor and promote it among your colleagues. (HJR29 is supported by Alliance for Democracy and our ally, Move to Amend)

Because SJR19 has also been introduced in the House (HJR119), call your US Representative as well with the same message. }:}:

again: MTA endorse

We the People Amendment (HJR48) Introduced in 114th Congress

April 29, 2015

(Washington D.C.) - The movement for constitutional reforms that would end what organizers call “corporate rule” has arrived in the chambers of the 114th Congress. This morning, members of the U.S. House of Representatives joined Move to Amend by announcing their sponsorship of the “We the People Amendment,” which clearly and unequivocally states that:

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Representatives Nolan and Pocan Introduce 'We the People' Amendment

Submitted by oskebuckley on Mon, 02/11/2013 - 12:13

On Monday, February 11, Move to Amend announced the introduction in Congress of the 'We the People' amendment by Representative Rick Nolan and Representative Mark Pocan. The amendment states:

"Rights recognized under the Constitution belong to human beings only, and not to government-created artificial legal entities such as corporations and limited liability companies; and

Political campaign spending is not a form of speech protected under the First Amendment."

Congratulations to Move to Amend on the introduction of the 'We the People' amendment!

To read the press release announcing the 'We the People' amendment, **click here**.

To read the text of the 'We the People' amendment, **click here**.

The United States could be on the verge of calling its first constitutional convention since 1787—and the American Legislative Exchange Council, or “ALEC,” has been working behind the scenes to make it happen, including through its new lobbying arm, the Jeffersonian Project.

ALEC is urging state legislators to pass state resolutions calling for a constitutional convention in order to pass a federal balanced budget amendment.

The campaign has attracted little media attention, but the legislation that could trigger a convention are moving forward much more quickly than many have anticipated. Although there are many unanswered legal questions about the constitutional convention strategy -- and fears on both the right and left of an out-of-control "runaway convention -- if a balanced budget amendment were eventually enacted it would cripple the federal government’s ability to spend, likely forcing steep cuts in earned benefit programs such as Social Security and blocking Congress from responding to economic downturns or natural disasters.

Article V Constitutional Convention Could be Nearing

Article V of the U.S. Constitution provides that thirty-four states (two-thirds) can trigger a convention to propose amendments, which must then be ratified by 38 states (three-fourths).

According to some counts, resolutions calling for a constitutional convention to create a balanced budget amendment have been passed in at least 24 of the necessary 34 states. In just the past seven months, twelve states have proposed such resolutions – in most cases sponsored by ALEC members -- and six of those measures have passed.

Because a constitutional convention has never been triggered under Article V a cloud of uncertainty hangs over the effort. It is not clear whether a state’s resolution calling for a convention can expire, nor is it clear whether a state can rescind their demand after it is made. U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) has asked Congress to resolve these issues, although it is unclear whether House Speaker John Boehner will take up the effort.

ALEC Behind the Scenes of the Balanced Budget Push

ALEC has promoted a model resolution calling for such a convention for decades. But it has recently made the effort a top priority. In 2011, ALEC published a handbook for state legislatorson how to use Article V of the U.S. Constitution to push for a balanced budget amendment.

As the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has previously reported, at its last two meetings ALEC has hosted workshops on the amendment strategy from the group “Citizens for Self Governance.” The group is led by Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler, and its boardincludes Wisconsinite Eric O'Keefe, who was subpoenaed in the “John Doe” criminal probe into Scott Walker’s 2012 campaign activities. After ALEC’s meeting last December, around one hundred state legislators convened to discuss the Article V convention process.

Following that meeting, resolutions calling for an Article V convention have been proposed in sixteen states, in most cases by ALEC members; six have passed.

The sponsor in Louisiana, state Rep. Joe Harrison, was even named ALEC Legislator of the Year 2014 for "his efforts on Louisiana’s unanimous passage of the Balance[d] Budget Amendment."

When the resolution was introduced in Wisconsin, Rep. Chris Taylor, a Wisconsin Democrat who attended ALEC's summer 2013 meeting, said that the proposal "comes right out of the 'Convention of States' workshop and materials presented at ALEC where state legislators were promised bundled campaign contributions and grassroots support if they joined this effort to amend the federal constitution."

Two of the right-wing political advocacy groups lobbying for the bill in Wisconsin, Americans for Prosperity and the National Federation of Independent Business, are ALEC members with close ties to the Koch brothers: David Koch founded and funds AFP, and the NFIB has received millions from the Koch political network. The NFIB was recently added to ALEC’s corporate board, where it sits with a representative of Koch Industries.

Jeffersonian Project Used to Lobby for BBA

ALEC's new lobbying arm, the Jeffersonian Project, appears to have been used to lobby for the bills....http://www.prwatch.org/node/12554

IRATE

http://scc-mta.org/sites/default/files/MTA_IRATE_Doc_Version_02_04_13.pdf

Powell Era Supreme Court

Corporation's First Amendment Free Speech Rights (Political & Commercial Speech)

Political Speech:

Democracy of the People, by the People, and for the People

Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976)

First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765 (1978)

Citizens Unitedv. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 50 (2010)

American Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Steve Bullock, Attorney General of

Montana, 567 U.S. __ (2012)

Commercial Speech:

Whose speech is heard, the corporation's or the people's?

Central Hudson Gas & Elec. Corp. v. Public Utilities Comm'n, 447 U.S. 557

(1980)

Pacific Gas & Elec. Co. v. Public Utilities Comm'n, 475 U.S. 1, reh. den., 475 U.S.

1133 (1986)

Safe Community / Health, Safety and Well-being of the People

International Dairy Foods Assoc'n v. Amestoy, No.876, Docket 95-7819 (2nd Cir

1996)

Safe Community & Right to Protect the Children in our

===

Congress

sj 19:The Democrats on the US Senate Committee On The Judiciary spoke

unanimously yesterday, passing a resolution for a constitutional

amendment to correct most of the damage done by the Citizens United,

and other related rogue recent Supreme Court decisions. 7/14 on to house?

===

wiki: 7/14

States lawmakers and local elected officials urge for federal constitutional amendment

Sixteen states have called for a **constitutional amendment** to reverse the court's decision:

California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and West Virginia.^[112][113]

In Vermont, the General Assembly approved "Joint Resolution Senate" No. 27 on May 2, 2014, going so far as to apply to Congress to call an Article V Convention to draft and propose a federal constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. In California, the lower house of the Legislature approved "Assembly Joint Resolution" No. 1 on January 30, 2014, to likewise call a constitutional convention to pass an amendment that would repeal the decision; the California Senate has not yet acted, however.^[114][115] And in Minnesota, the House of Representatives has yet to vote on "Senate File" No. 17 which was approved by that state's Senate on May 2, 2013.

On a local level, Washington D.C. and almost 400 other municipalities have also passed resolutions requesting a federal constitutional amendment—itemized on the United for the People website.^[116]

===

http://jeffreifman.com/2014/07/01/hobby-lobby-latest-evolution-corporate-constitutional-rights/

pelosi fundraiser 9/14

:{Sen. Tammy Baldwin

Sen. Mark Begich

Sen. Michael Bennet

Sen. Sherrod Brown

Sen. Richard Blumenthal

Sen. Kay Hagan

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp

Sen. Ed Markey

Sen. Robert Menendez

Sen. Jon Tester

Sen. Mark Pryor

Sen. Harry Reid

Sen. Tom Udall

Sen. Debbie Stabenow

:{:{Rep. Bruce Braley}:

Rep. Tim Bishop

Rep. Nancy Pelosi

Rep. Gary Peters

Rep. Scott Peters

Rep. John Tierney

Rep. Brad Schneider

Rep. Debbie Wassermen Schultz

Hon. Alison Lundergan Grimes

Hon. Natalie Tennant}: :{

Daily Kos

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee}:

udall

43 cosponsors (41D, 2I) (show)

Bennet, Michael [D-CO]

Boxer, Barbara [D-CA]

Coons, Chris [D-DE]

Franken, Alan “Al” [D-MN]

Harkin, Thomas “Tom” [D-IA]

King, Angus [I-ME]

Klobuchar, Amy [D-MN]

Murphy, Christopher [D-CT]

Schumer, Charles “Chuck” [D-NY]

Shaheen, Jeanne [D-NH]

Tester, Jon [D-MT]

Udall, Mark [D-CO]

Whitehouse, Sheldon [D-RI]

Wyden, Ron [D-OR]

Johnson, Tim [D-SD]

(joined Jun 19, 2013)

Menéndez, Robert “Bob” [D-NJ]

(joined Jun 19, 2013)

Reed, John “Jack” [D-RI]

(joined Jun 19, 2013)

Blumenthal, Richard [D-CT]

(joined Jun 20, 2013)

Heinrich, Martin [D-NM]

(joined Jun 24, 2013)

Merkley, Jeff [D-OR]

(joined Jun 27, 2013)

Begich, Mark [D-AK]

(joined Jul 17, 2013)

Feinstein, Dianne [D-CA]

(joined Jul 17, 2013)

Cardin, Benjamin [D-MD]

(joined Jul 23, 2013)

Gillibrand, Kirsten [D-NY]

(joined Sep 09, 2013)

Hagan, Kay [D-NC]

(joined Oct 08, 2013)

Baldwin, Tammy [D-WI]

(joined Oct 28, 2013)

Markey, Edward “Ed” [D-MA]

(joined Oct 28, 2013)

Mikulski, Barbara [D-MD]

(joined Oct 28, 2013)

Warren, Elizabeth [D-MA]

(joined Nov 20, 2013)

Brown, Sherrod [D-OH]

(joined Apr 02, 2014)

Durbin, Richard [D-IL]

(joined Apr 02, 2014)

Walsh, John [D-MT]

(joined Apr 02, 2014)

Hirono, Mazie [D-HI]

(joined Apr 28, 2014)

Reid, Harry [D-NV]

(joined Apr 28, 2014)

Carper, Thomas [D-DE]

(joined Apr 29, 2014)

Murray, Patty [D-WA]

(joined Apr 30, 2014)

Schatz, Brian [D-HI]

(joined May 01, 2014)

Sanders, Bernard “Bernie” [I-VT]

(joined May 06, 2014)

Rockefeller, John “Jay” [D-WV]

(joined May 08, 2014)

Stabenow, Debbie [D-MI]

(joined May 12, 2014)

Booker, Cory [D-NJ]

(joined May 20, 2014)

Heitkamp, Heidi [D-ND]

(joined Jun 02, 2014)

Manchin, Joe [D-WV]

(joined Jun 05, 2014)

===

Note: The Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee today approved an amended S.J. Res. 19, a constitutional amendment proposed by U.S. Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) that aims to overturnCitizens United v. Federal Election Commissionand other U.S. Supreme Court decisions relating to campaign finance.

Here’s what will become the 28th Amendment:

To advance democratic self-government and political equality, and to protect the integrity of government and the electoral process, Congress and the States may regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections.

Congress and the States shall have power to implement and enforce this article by appropriate legislation, and may distinguish between natural persons and corporations or other artificial entities created by law, including by prohibiting such entities from spending money to influence elections.

Nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress or the States the power to abridge the freedom of the press.

Public Citizen worked very closely with key senators on that simple yet powerful language.

And at 3:49 p.m. Eastern time yesterday, the amendment was formally adopted by the Senate’s Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights Subcommittee.

Of course, there is an awful lot of work yet to do.

The amendment now moves to theSenate Judiciary Committee. That’s scheduled for July 10.

And then it goes to the full Senate, either later in July, or after the August congressional recess.

===

CALIFORNIA LEGISLATURE— 2013–2014 REGULAR SESSION

SENATE BILL

No. 1272

---

Introduced by Senator Lieu (Principal coauthor: Senator Jackson) (Coauthors: Senators DeSaulnier, Hancock, Padilla, and Torres) (Coauthors: Assembly MembersMuratsuchi, V.ManuelPérez, Skinner, Wieckowski and Williams)
February 21, 2014

Introduced by Senator Lieu

(Principal coauthor: Senator Jackson)

(Coauthors: Senators DeSaulnier, Hancock, Padilla, and Torres)

(Coauthors: Assembly MembersMuratsuchi, V.ManuelPérez, Skinner, Wieckowski and Williams)

February 21, 2014

---

An act to submit an advisory question to the voters relating to campaign finance, calling an election, to take effect immediately.

LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST

SB 1272, as amended, Lieu. Campaign finance: advisory election.

This bill would call a special election to be consolidated with the November 4, 2014, statewide general election. The bill would require the Secretary of State to submit to the voters at the November 4, 2014, consolidated election an advisory question asking whether the Congress of the United States should propose, and the California Legislature should ratify, an amendment or amendments to the United States Constitution to overturn Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) 558 U.S. 310, and other applicable judicial precedents, as specified. The bill would require the Secretary of State to communicate the results of this election to the Congress of the United States.

This bill would declare that it is to take effect immediately as an act calling an election.

DIGEST KEY

Vote: majority Appropriation: no Fiscal Committee: yes Local Program: no

---

BILL TEXT

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:

SECTION 1.

This act shall be known and may be cited as the Overturn Citizens United Act.

SEC. 2.

The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(a) The United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights are intended to protect the rights of individual human beings.

(b) Corporations are not mentioned in the United States Constitution and the people have never granted constitutional rights to corporations, nor have we decreed that corporations have authority that exceeds the authority of “We the People.”

(c) In Connecticut General Life Insurance Company v. Johnson (1938) 303 U.S. 77, United States Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black stated in his dissent, “I do not believe the word ‘person’ in the Fourteenth Amendment includes corporations.”

(d) In Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990) 494 U.S. 652, the United States Supreme Court recognized the threat to a republican form of government posed by “the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.”....

udall http://www.prwatch.org/node/12504

yikes, CU meets local ordinances:

Early in April, coal industry executive Shaun McCutcheon won big when the Supreme Courtswept away limits on how much money wealthy donors can contribute to federal political campaigns. But in St. Louis, Mo.,coal interests are trying to prevent people from even voting.

This story began when ordinary citizensjoined together and took a stand against both climate change and their city’s destructive practice of granting enormous tax breaks to big business while cutting funding for public services. They talked to thousands of residents who were upset that St. Louis keeps giving away tens of millions of dollars of badly needed public money to **Peabody**Energy (the world’s largest private-sector coal company) and the lobbyists, banks, and law firms that enable it. And after hearing over and over again that “there oughta be a law” against corporate welfare for polluters, they did what we learned in civics class: they wrote a law that wouldban public financial incentives to unsustainable energy producers and their major business partners.

They didn’t just write the law: Under the banner of Take Back St. Louis, they walked door-to-door, talking to friends, neighbors, and strangers about their idea. They collected over 22,000 signatures — more than 10 percent of all the voters in St. Louis— on a petition for a ballot initiative. The city’s elections boardverified the signatures, and began preparing to print ballots.

This is where you might expect to hear about a vigorous election campaign, with arguments from both sides put to the voters, a spirited debate about the future of St. Louis and our planet, and finally, the voters making their choice at the ballot box. You might even expect to hear about the coal company spending millions of dollars to fight the initiative in the days before the vote.

But you’d be wrong: There was no vote. Instead, thecoal company’s lawyers rushedto court and asked a judge to block the election on the grounds that the law would unfairly discriminate against the coal company and its business partners, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. The judge agreed, and cited the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision for the theory that business entities “are entitled to constitutional protection as citizens.” He issued a preliminary injunction blocking the vote, and scheduled a trial for March 31.

At the trial, Take Back St. Louis provided evidence about the environmental damage caused by burning coal, and the damage to the fabric of St. Louis caused by the city’s penchant for giving away public dollars to big business. The other side didn’t put any witnesses on the stand. The judge may make his final decision any day now.

Not everyone will agree that this ballot initiative is the best policy, and that’s fine. The Take Back St. Louis folks think they can convince a majority of St. Louis voters, and they’re willing to take on the coal interests in a contest for votes. But first, the court has to get out of the way. Now that the judge has the evidence, he has a chance to get this right, lift his injunction, and let the vote proceed.

Whether or not you think that giving tax breaks to coal companies and their business partners is a good idea, we should all agree that this is a question for voters, not judges. Because it was bad enough when coal companies could simply open their checkbooks to flood elections with unlimited spending; now they won’t even let people vote.

Ron Fein is the Legal Director forFree Speech For People, an organization dedicated to challenging the misuse of corporate power and restoring republican democracy to the people.

http://grist.org/business-technology/do-coal-companies-have-more-rights-than-voters/

more: http://www.2014missouriexhibit.org/Take-Back-St-Louis-Ballot-Initiative-St-Louis-MO

MORE and its allies believe that public dollars should not support billion dollar fossil fuel companies but instead should go towards grassroots projects like revitalizing the city’s abundant vacant buildings and lots, funding existing renewable energy ideas, and ultimately rebuilding St. Louis as a more sustainable city.

By stopping the flow of development dollars from going to big corporations and making them pay their fair share of taxes, MORE also hopes that money will go towards the St. Louis Public Schools and other public infrastructure.

Energy corporations such as Peabody Coal and Laclede Gas are the main power sources of St. Louis, both literally and figuratively, and claim to be benevolent corporate citizens, donating millions of dollars to organizations throughout the city. Yet these corporations, milking close ties to state and municipal politicians, receive millions of dollars in tax breaks each year, directing money away from important public services. For example, in 2010 Peabody received a tax break on $61 million worth of purchases for new equipment and building improvements, of which roughly $2 million was diverted away from St. Louis public schools. The political and economic prosperity that once enabled the growth of these massive energy companies is now their entitlement. By relying on corporations like Peabody and Laclede to maintain downtown infrastructure and stimulate economic growth, politicians are forced to grant such tax breaks at the expense of education, investment in new companies, and more sustainable energy sources.

While these energy corporations have a powerful political and economic hold on St. Louis, they also have a large environmental impact. Coal, oil, and natural gas have a detrimental effect on the immediate environment by polluting the air and water, but they also have a global impact by intensifying climate change.

Investment should be directed not only toward our political and economic futures, but also toward the future of our planet as a whole.

No successful city – St. Louis included – can sustainably grow and thrive amid climate change. The effects of climate change are already too great to ignore, and the continued reliance upon fossil fuel corporations exacerbates these environmental problems as well as intensifies economic and social inequalities in the city.

The Take Back St. Louis petition successfully qualified for the April 2014 City of St. Louis ballot; however, energy corporations threatened by the initiative have responded by exercising their municipal control. Peabody’s former lobbyist Jane Dueker, from Stinson Leornard Street law firm, filed for a temporary restraining order on the motion in February 2014 and won. The voices of 22,000 citizens have been silenced, and the public vote has been denied. The Take Back St. Louis is now back in court and will hopefully be ruled on in mid-April.We hope that the initiative will be on the August or November ballot.

For decades now, large corporations like Peabody have received massive tax breaks in the name of economic growth even as study after study shows that the allocation of these tax breaks does not increase jobs and only exacerbates racial and economic inequality (East-West Gateway, 2011).

---

While Dueker may not be a household name, she worked in the Missouri attorney general’s office (alongside then-staff colleague Chris Koster) and later was chief of staff for then-Gov. Bob Holden. The St. Louis native served during a tumultuous time in Democratic politics -- when Republicans had taken over both chambers of the Missouri General Assembly and Holden was under political siege.

Dueker eventually returned to the private sector after Holden left office, joining the law firm now known as Stinson Leonard Street. She has been involved in high-profile legal cases, including lawsuits against St. Louis County’s trash program and a proposed St. Louis ballot initiative aimed at Peabody Energy.

On the show, Dueker said:

Her first public service job was in then-Attorney General Bill Webster’s office. The Republican officeholder eventually went to prison after he lost to Democrat Mel Carnahan in the 1992 gubernatorial contest.
She faced an “unbelievably challenging” experience being chief of staff when Republicans completed their takeover of the Missouri General Assembly. Despite some very public battles, Dueker emphasized that Holden and the GOP majorities were able to accomplish some important initiatives.
Holden’s decision to place a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage on the August ballot severely complicated his re-election chances. Holden went on to lose to then-Auditor Claire McCaskill in the Democratic primary.
Her experience in the private sector and government gave her plenty of insight in building her “governmental solutions” practice at Stinson Leonard Street. “The beauty of all the experience that I’ve had has helped me because it gives me a lot of tools to solve the problem,” she said.
After initially supporting him, she grew more and more disenchanted with St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley’s administration. Dueker is now supporting Councilman Steve Stenger’s bid to upend Dooley in the Aug. 5 Democratic primary.

===

http://www.takebackstlouis.com/the_initiative

---

may 30

On Tuesday, a St. Louis judge threw out a ballot initiative that would amend the city charter to prohibit tax breaks for fossil fuel companies and their major business partners. Before residents even had a chance to vote.

The story began when citizens took a stand against both climate change and St. Louis’ destructive practice of granting tax breaks to big business while cutting funding for public services. They wrote a law and collected enough signatures to put it on the ballot for a public vote.

But nobody can vote.

Coal allies, fearful that the initiative would pass, pursued a two-pronged strategy to prevent it from ever reaching the ballot. And the success (so far) of that strategy shows why the democratic system is rigged in favor of big corporations and special interests.

First, the court challenge. This week, the judge issued a final order preventing St. Louis residents from voting on the initiative. The judge theorized that state law doesn’t allow cities to make rules about who gets tax breaks, and that the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause prevents voters from saying that they don’t want to give tax breaks to coal companies and their business partners. On the latter point, the judge opined that, under the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, “business organizations are ‘persons’ entitled to equal protection as well as other constitutional rights.”

Second, the legislative challenge. While the case was pending, the mayor’s office pushed a curious amendment to an obscure state bill. In the middle of a bill about county prosecutors and sewer districts, you’ll find a provision that specifically prohibits the city of St. Louis from passing, by ballot measure, any restrictions on tax breaks for coal mining companies. There’s only one coal mining company in St. Louis known to receive city tax breaks: Peabody Energy.

So in court, the claim is that coal companies’ constitutional rights are violated by a citizen initiative to stem the flow of special tax breaks. And in the Legislature — where Peabody donors spent almost half a million dollars in the last two elections — the legislators slip in a special provision preventing St. Louis voters from taking a vote on whether to give tax breaks to Peabody.

Is democracy in St. Louis only for those who can pay? The office of the mayor — whom Peabody funds — has helped to both challenge the initiative in court and lobby the Legislature to prevent St. Louisans from voting on city policy.

We’re at a turning point. The Supreme Court keeps striking down common-sense rules to limit the influence of wealthy donors and corporate interests in our political system. Next week, the U.S. Senate is holding a hearing on a constitutional amendment to restore our ability to limit the influence of money in politics, and the full Senate will vote on it this year.

Ultimately, this isn’t just about tax breaks for one coal company in one city. It’s about our democracy, and why we must fight to reclaim it.

Ron Fein is the legal director of Free Speech For People, and co-counsel to the Take Back St. Louis campaign, along with a Missouri-based legal team. Stuart Keating is a St. Louis attorney with a practice specializing in environmental and corporate law, and is co-counsel to the Take Back St. Louis campaign.

---

links http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/judge-keeps-take-back-st-louis-initiative-off-ballot/article_2a1a22aa-21d8-5577-890a-a9401aae3c16.html

may 27/14

Opponents of the “Take Back St. Louis” initiative succeeded Tuesday in their effort to block the measure from going before voters in the city.

St. Louis Circuit Judge Robert Dierker issued an order prohibiting the city’s Election Board from putting the measure on a ballot.

Dierker’s ruling is a defeat for Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, or MORE, which led a petition effort to block tax incentives for any company that engages in “unsustainable” energy production — or does $1 million a year in business with such an entity.

Opponents filed suit Jan. 31 to keep the initiative off the April 8 ballot. The suit described the proposed city charter amendment as “intentionally arbitrary and vague” and “disastrous public policy.” It said many businesses could be blocked from receiving city services, perhaps unknowingly because of vague definitions in the measure.

In his 24-page ruling, Dierker said the proposal would “exclude a variety of enterprises from qualifying for benefits under the statutory regime of economic incentives or, (in MORE’s) parlance, corporate welfare.”

MORE’s main target is Peabody Energy, which received tax breaks from the city when it expanded its headquarters in 2011. The group has said tax breaks would be better directed to help small businesses and revitalize poor parts of St. Louis.

Backers of the initiative said that, although they were disappointed by Dierker’s decision, the setback would be temporary. Supporters said in a statement that they were confident an appellate court would put the measure before voters in August or November.

The Take Back St. Louis initiative was begun to correct what the statement said were Mayor Francis Slay’s “failings in gouging the St. Louis public schools and other public programs in order to subsidize corporations.”

Organizations active in the Take Back St. Louis effort will continue to support those who organize against “unsustainable energy producers” such as Peabody and hold the St. Louis Development Corp. accountable for creating living-wage jobs, initiative backers said.

Dierker’s ruling is in a suit filed by Jane Dueker, a lawyer and former Peabody lobbyist.

He ruled that the “manifest purpose” of MORE’s effort “is not so much to advance the use of approved fuels, as to punish enterprises which deal in the disfavored fuels and to punish the enterprises which deal with the disfavored energy producers for their presumed role in furthering the business of the disfavored producers.”

Tim Bryant covers commercial real estate, development and other business stories for the Post-Dispatch. He blogs at Building Blocks, the Post-Dispatch development blog.

6 may mayor/state block: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/political-fix/slay-s-office-turns-to-legislature-to-block-local-ballot/article_ec94707c-78ad-5edc-8895-fc1f8e7b2164.html

hobby lobby religious freedom?!

Senator John Tester of Montana has introduced a constitutional amendment bill in the U.S. Senate to reverse Citizens United v. FEC, and to make it clear that corporations do not have constitutional rights.

Senator Tom Udallhas also introduced a constitutional amendment bill, to end the outsized influence of big money over politics. There's a similar bill pending in the House.

See http://freespeechforpeople.org/node/579 for a complete report

Sixteen states have formally called for an amendment by ballot measure, resolutions passed by the legislature, or official letters signed by a majority of state legislators:

California Colorado Connecticut Delaware

Hawaii Illinois Maine Maryland

Massachusetts Montana New Jersey New Mexico

Oregon Rhode Island Vermont West Virginia

In addition, nearly 500 cities, towns, and counties, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia have called for an amendment, and more than 2,000 elected officials nationwide are on record supporting one.

A 2010 Peter Hart poll found that 82% of Americans support congressional action to limit corporate spending on elections (which Citizens Unitedunleashed), and that 79% support a constitutional amendment to accomplish this. This past September, an Associated Press poll found that 83% of Americans favor limits on the amount of money corporations, unions, and other organizations can spend on our elections.

Public support is also bipartisan. The 2010 Peter Hart poll revealed that 68% of Republicans, 82% of independents, and 87% of Democrats support an amendment. The 2012 AP poll showed that 81% of Republicans, 78% of independents, and 85% of Democrats want to limit corporate, union, and other outside spending.

===

"Lethal But Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health" :{

Nicholas Freudenberg}:

http://www.booktv.org/Program/15446/Lethal+But+Legal+Corporations+Consumption+and+Protecting+Public+Health.aspx

===

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Category:Corporate_Rights portal

===

Following the Supreme Court’s misguided Citizens United ruling, this is another crushing step in the corporate march to power that we push back against every day at Public Citizen.

OK, here’s what we know:

1. After a child was injured, a report was submitted to the Consumer Product Safety Commission through a database (that Public Citizen helped establish) for sharing information about potentially dangerous products.

2. The company that makes the product sued to have the report removed from the database.

3.Even though the company initiated the lawsuit, it was worried that unflattering information about it could come to light during the case, so it asked to be allowed to hide behind an alias and for the case to be conducted in complete secrecy.

4.. The judge granted the company’s request, permitting it to be known only as “Company Doe.”

5. The case lasted nine months, all of it with no public input or oversight

6. The final decision wasn’t made public until three months after the case ended, and even then the judge’s ruling, which permanently blocked the report from appearing in the database, had key portions blacked out — including the name of the company and the product, the names of witnesses, and the facts on which the judge relied.

As far as my legal team can determine,never before — in the history of American jurisprudence — has a judge agreed that a court record can be sealed to protect the reputation of a company.

If We the People can’t observe what goes on inside our nation’s courtrooms, how can we make sure that corporations are held accountable if (when) they cross the line?

How can we keep ourselves, our loved ones and our communities safe?

Now, here’s where this gets really scary — where it’s about much, much more than some specialized governmental database or isolated legal proceeding.

Because what do you think other companies will do as word gets out about this case?

:{:{Before you know it, every business that has a safety complaint will sue to keep that information out of the government’s product safety database and seal all court files related to its suit.}:

Maybe it’s already happening and we just don’t know because the cases have been kept under wraps.

The public’s right of access to court proceedings has precedent going back to the very origins of our legal system.}:

Up to now, exceptions were made only in the most sensitive cases, such as to protect the identities of children or where a person was at risk of physical retaliation.

It is both bewildering and horrifying that the system now seems prepared to extend that exceptional protection to non-human corporate entities that have no greater fear than an unfavorable review or diminished profits.

This case — like Citizens United before it — is emblematic of the ongoing and unprecedented legal maneuvering by which corporations are seizing rights that until recently were universally and rightly understood to belong to people.

So, that’s the trick.

What about the treat?

For starters, Public Citizen has filed an appeal to overturn this case and the dangerous precedent it sets.

In fact, we are arguing TODAY at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia.

We will not allow corporations to secure the right to litigate in secret and thwart the American people’s ability to hold corporate power accountable.

public citizen org

===

lighter side:

huffpo

Corporate Personhood in the Fast Lane: Jonathan Frieman, Citizen, Takes a Stand

Posted: 03/21/2013 1:52 pm

Russ Baker interviews Jonathan Frieman, who took an unusual stand against corporate personhood. Frieman was stopped in October by a sheriff in Marin County (a San Francisco suburb)--for driving solo in the lane for high-occupancy vehicles. He then pulled out corporate papers and argued that he was traveling with another person--since corporations count as persons. In January, he got his day in court. He didn't win, but he did show how creative approaches can make people pay attention. His action drew local and national media coverage.

But what's the significance of "corporate personhood"? This bizarre concept treats corporations as essentially the same as persons. It makes it infinitely more difficult to prosecute individual corporate wrongdoers and makes it possible for corporations to continue to dominate American politics and election spending by invoking constitutional protections intended for "real" persons. It was perhaps made most famous in the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, which asserted that the government may not restrict independent political expenditures by corporations and unions, and cited "personhood." Polls conducted in the decision's aftermath found 80 percent of Americans opposed.

RB: Russ Baker

JF: Jonathan Frieman

RB: Why don't you start at the beginning?.

JF: The story actually is 14 years old. In 1999, I wanted some way to try to get corporations to invest in a sustainable future, by looking at their legal structure. So I checked out everything, directorships, board memberships, personhood, you name it. I looked at their history of how they gained their huge powers over two hundred years of jurisprudence.

A lawyer I know thought we could go after the case that gave personhood to corporations because that quality was conferred upon them, rather than being legislated or litigated. It felt so logical that if you took away their personhood, corporations would fold up and go away. But I was disabused of that notion fairly early.

RB: How were you disabused and why?

JF: Well, a good friend interested in the issue of corporations sent me to see a fellow namedJim Turner in DC, who was one of the first Nader's Raiders. Turner clearly stated that corporate personhood is a red herring. "Corporations are just waiting for you to go after personhood," he said, "because if you take personhood away from corporations, they would still exist as a body. You can still gather in groups under the First Amendment to do business, as in the right of assembly, to manufacture a product or to provide a service." Personhood wouldn't change anything. And he said, rather use personhood as a learning tool.

RB: How is it a learning tool?

JF: Just the fact that corporations have personhood is stunning. It's so absurd, so outrageous, because Chevron or WalMart or General Electric have billions of dollars of revenue and control our food and fuel and politics. They don't die or go to jail and yet are considered to be persons under the law.

And when people learn that corporations are imaginary entities and yet are considered persons, their mind goes verklempt.

In 2002 I'd done a lot of legal research and I knew that the definition of a person included corporations at the state level, the county level, and the municipal level in their definitions section. And I was driving down the highway-I wasn't in the carpool lane-I saw the sign that said that 'two or more persons had to be in the vehicle in order for the car to be in the carpool lane. And I said to myself, Hmmm, I wonder if the California Vehicle Code defines the word "person" to include a corporation? And, sure enough, that's exactly what it says: persons are human beings or corporations, and it then occurred to me in a flash that, legally, I could drive in the carpool lane during restricted hours with incorporation papers, and that I should not get a ticket.

RB: So it was your idea that whenever you were carrying those incorporation papers, you could argue that, because you were an official of that corporation, you could cite the personhood connection?

JF: One doesn't have to be an official of a corporation-it is assumed that you only need the papers because incorporation papers bring a corporation into "being."

So I was in the carpool lane with incorporation papers and finally got stopped in October of 2012. Over the last ten years I'd gone out about 25 times to no avail. So when I got stopped, I showed the officer the papers-he barely looked at them. He gave me the ticket and as I was about to drive away he said, "You need two persons in the vehicle." I raised the papers once again and said, "And I do."

RB: And what happened in court?

JF: Well, in traffic court the procedure here in California is that first, the cop gets his say. Then the defense gets to cross-examine the officer. Then the court rules.

So the officer says he saw me in the HOV lane and told me to stop and that he gave me a ticket for not having two persons in the vehicle. He was very professional both during the stop and in court, but I bet he was not expecting that giving me a ticket in October meant that in January he'd be presenting his case to a phalanx of TV cameras broadcasting his face all over the world.

My attorney, Ford Greene, then presented the point, which is simple-the law says persons are humans or corporations and that incorporation papers are, as I said, the closest thing to manifesting a corporation. He also said that the law is ambiguous, in that a person is both a human being and a corporation. And that when you are going to deprive an individual of their property, in this case a $500 fine, they need to know the exact meaning of the law.

RB: And then what happened?

JF: The judge, who had allowed cameras into the courtroom, realized he sat on the horns of a dilemma. If he said yes to incorporation papers, then he's saying that everyone can bring incorporation papers into the carpool lane to signify that person. He also realized that saying no meant that corporations were not persons. And I knew he understood that because of the little smile which was playing on his lips throughout the entire proceeding.

So he started out by first noting that this was a very unique and original way of addressing corporate personhood. Then he took the path of saying that "going to go to the original intent of the law of the HOV lane which is to get people out of their cars and into one car in that lane." And so, no, he ruled that I could not use corporation papers to signify a person-even though the law interprets it strictly that it says that.

RB: So what now?

JF: We're going to appeal. The irony is straight out of Stephen Colbert-the court denied that corporations were persons and said I owe almost $500. I'm saying the letter of the law declares that I am indeed allowed to use incorporation papers to stand in for the corporate person. I don't WANT to pay that fine, even though I've paid 6 times that in legal fees.

RB: I think the weakness of this corporate personhood stuff is it doesn't emotionally resonate with a lot of people.

JF: You know, Russ, I think the evidence demonstrates a strong emotional resonance to the contrary. because of all the efforts to overturn Citizens United. Look at all the resolutions passed by large cities across the nation against it.

And the reception to the case was amazing-even Fox News was bemused by the effort and was interested in the result. And when I spoke at a protest event commemorating Citizens United about a week or so after the decision, the applause and support I got was overwhelming. The looks on people's faces when I tell them what I did is always one of delight.

RB: And what have you learned?

JF: That this issue in fact strikes very deeply into all our hearts. People really want an answer as to the absurdity of corporate power, and the way I approached this issue provides that in part because it gives people an emotional boost and a chuckle. The deep history of our nation shows that we began by measuring certain humans, the slaves, as 3/5 of a person. Then the slaves were freed in 1865. But before women got the vote, and before integration in 1955 and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and the disabilities act in 1990, corporations received personhood from a Supreme Court decision in 1886. So this nation's legal history is all about who is, and who is not, a person.

And about a week after the court decision, while I was reflecting on the huge media exposure and the broad support for what I did, I was literally moved to tears--to realize that one person, by himself, could do something useful and symbolic on behalf of everyone. Also, to realize that one could assert one's own "human personhood." It's very satisfying.

Follow Russ Baker on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/whowhatwhy**

===

COMMONDREAMS, January 1, 2003 &

IMPACT PRESS, Feb/Mar, 2003

Title: “Now Corporations Claim the Right to ‘Lie’”

Author: Thom Hartmann

WILD MATTERS, February 2003

Title: “Americans Revolt in Pennsylvania: New Battle Lines Are Drawn”

Author: Thom Hartmann

THE HIGHTOWER LOWDOWN, April 2003

Title: “How a Clerical Error Made Corporations ‘People’”

Author: Jim Hightower

Faculty Evaluators: Mary Gomes Ph.D. , Ken Marcus Ph.D.

Student Researchers: Chris Salvano, Sherry Grant, Melissa Jones

Partial Mainstream Coverage: The New York Times, The LA Times, USA Today, Fortune Magazine, The Ottawa Citizen.

Since the founding of our country, a debate has raged over the nature of corporations and whether they should be entitled to the same right to legal “personhood” as actual people. This idea of corporate personhood has recently come under scrutiny.

It was back in 1886 that a Supreme Court decision (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company) ostensibly led to corporate personhood and free speech rights, thereby guaranteeing protections under the 1st and 14th amendments. However, according to Thom Hartmann, the relatively mundane court case never actually granted these personhood rights to corporations. In fact, Chief Justice Morrison Waite wrote, “We avoided meeting the Constitutional question in the decision.” Yet, when writing up the case summary -that has no legal status-the Court reporter, a former railroad president named J.C. Bancroft Davis, declared: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a state to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” But the Court had made no such legal determination. It was the clerk’s opinion and misrepresentation of the case in the headnote upon which current claims of corporate personhood and free speech entitlements now rests.

In 1978, however, the Supreme Court further entrenched the idea of corporate personhood by deciding that corporations were entitled to the free speech right to give money to political causes – linking free speech with financial clout. Interestingly, in a dissent to the decision, Chief Justice William Rehnquist pointed out the flawed 1886 precedent and criticized its interpretation over the years saying, “This Court decided at an early date, with neither argument nor discussion, that a business corporation is a ‘person’ entitled to the protection of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

But more recently, in December 2002, Porter Township, Pennsylvania unanimously passed an ordinance denying corporate claims to personhood. The Township is the first and only local government in the United States to deny these civil and constitutional rights to corporations. Porter Township and neighboring Rush Township have laws that govern the local dumping of Pittsburgh-generated sludge by charging the dumping companies a “tipping fee.” In 2000, Synagro Corporation, one of the largest dumping companies in the nation, sued Rush Township, claiming that as a corporate citizen, the Township violated Synagro’s 14th amendment rights. In response, Porter Township, passed its precedent-setting ordinance claiming that the dumping company, or any corporation within its jurisdiction, may not wield personhood and free speech privileges.

A more high-profile challenge to corporate personhood involves a lawsuit against Nikeand its claims on third-world labor practices. In 1998, Nike CEO Phil Knight wrote a New York Times op-ed piece responding to criticisms of Nike’s Asian labor practices. As was widely reported in the mainstream press in mid-April of this year, San Francisco consumer advocate Marc Kasky filed a lawsuit against Nike believing the company misled the public about its labor practices. Nike, however, claims that the First Amendment protects Nike’s statements, making it irrelevant whether the statements are true or false.

In May 2002, the California Supreme Court ruled against Nike saying its statements were commercial speech, and can therefore be regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. This ruling, writes Justice Joyce L. Kennard, “means only that when a business enterprise, to promote and defend its sales and profits, makes factual representations about its own product or its own operations, it must speak truthfully.”

On April 26, 2003, the Ottawa Citizen provided some pro-Nike coverage of the current case against Nike saying, “The case began some years ago when anti-globalizers accused Nike of exploiting workers at its factories abroad. The Nike-bashing was unrelenting, and the company fought back.” Hartmann’s article also notes The New York Times’ editorial support for Nike saying, “In a real democracy, even the people you disagree with get to have their say.” That’s true says Hartmann, but Nike is not a person-it’s a corporation.

By the release of Censored 2004, the Nike case will probably be a settled issue. It is likely that Porter Township’s ordinance will be challenged in higher courts in the near future. However, Hartmann’s research and writings show that the legality on which corporate claims to personhood and free speech rights rests is dubious.

UPDATE BY JIM HIGHTOWER: Anyone seeking to preserve America’s fragile democracy must first understand the scope and magnitude of the powers aligned against it. We live in an age in which corporations have been enthroned and corruption in high places has enabled power and wealth to be aggregated into an increasingly smaller number of hands. As citizens concerned with the future of human rights in a democratic republic, it’s vital that we now speak up and spread the word about “Corporate Personhood,” which lies at the heart of the challenge facing us today.

On April 23, 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Nike v. Kasky, the Nike Corporation’s appeal of an April 2002 California Supreme Court ruling. In Kasky v. Nike, the California court rejected claims by Nike’s lawyers that the First Amendment immunized Nike from being sued under state consumer protection laws (for allegedly misrepresenting facts in a public relations campaign). The U.S. Supreme Court (where the case is Nike Inc, et al. v. Marc Kasky since Nike is the party appealing) likely will issue a ruling by late June on the Constitutional issue of whether Nike can claim exemption from the California law under the First Amendment. The Court will not consider the merits of the original lawsuit, in which Mr. Kasky sued Nike for deceptive practices.

The story in the Hightower Lowdown received no additional coverage by mainstream media sources. However, the Nike v. Kasky case has generated a substantial amount of interest, although the opinions are predictable. As of May 25, 2003, four of the five largest U.S. newspapers had editorialized on behalf of the Nike Corporation. Though all five had received submissions from nationally published writers, none had published dissenting commentaries. The Rocky Mountain News (#27-Denver) was alone among the top-50 papers in allowing space for a dissent to their pro-Nike editorial. The Sacramento Bee (ranked #31) thus far is the only paper to critique Nike’s “free speech” claims in an editorial (while arguing that the Supreme Court should dismiss Kasky’s suit on other grounds).

For more information go to:

ReclaimDemocracy.org (P.O. Box 532, Boulder, CO 80306; 303-402-0105;

http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org)

Program on Corporations Law and Democracy (P.O. Box 246, South Yarmouth, MA

02664; 508-398-1145; http://www.poclad.org)

Alliance for Democracy (760 Main Street, Waltham, MA 02451; 781-894-1179;

http://www.thealliancefordemocracy.org

===

Why do corporations have the same rights as you?

There's a term that describes a situation when a court makes something out of nothing: It's called legal fiction. This jargon refers to the law's ability to decree that something that's not necessarily true is true. It's somewhat like a person in a discussion agreeing to accept an opinion as fact for the sake of argument in order to move the discussion along. Legal fiction helps to move proceedings along.

A sterling example of legal fiction is what's called corporate personhood. Think about it: A corporation isn't a person. It's a business, a pool of investors' money used to conduct transactions and hopefully make a profit. But in order to determine the legality of business proceedings, the legal fiction of treating a corporation as an artificial person was created.

This concept isn't new. In ancient Roman law, a corporation was considered a juristic person: a single, nonhuman entity that legally represented a group of many people[source: Sherman]. The idea makes sense; after all, a corporation is made up of people's financial contributions.

But a corporation is more superhuman than human. It can function beyond the natural limits of age that govern humans, and as such can produce dividends for its investors, whose stock certificates can be willed and passed down as part of their estates. A corporation doesn't die with its originator -- it can live indefinitely (so long as it's profitable). Nor does a corporation need the same things that an actual person does. Corporations don't require food or water, and they can't feel pain [source: Hartmann].

The laws that govern people take our human weaknesses into account. For example, our prison system is designed to incarcerate the human body. You can't imprison a corporation, though. So granting human treatment to nonhuman corporations is tricky: It's like breathing life into a superhuman that can't feel pain and, after setting him free, hoping for the best.

It would make sense that in dealing with corporations, the United States would tread lightly and limit the power that these artificial persons have. This hasn't necessarily been the case, however. In fact, in the United States, corporations have the same protections under the Constitution that humans do.

So how did corporations come to enjoy the same Constitutional protections that people do? It all started with a court reporter. In his book, "Unequal protection: The rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," author Thom Hartmann describes the situation that gave rise to Constitutional protection for corporations.

Since corporations had been viewed as artificial persons for millennia, the debate over whether they should be afforded the same rights as humans had been raging long before the 14th Amendment was adopted.Thomas Jefferson had suggested explicit language to govern corporate entities, like requiring maximum life spans, be put into the Constitution. His stipulations didn't make the cut, however. And once the 14th Amendment was created, the Constitution actually expanded -- rather than limited -- the scope of corporations' power.

The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, and it gave the federal government ultimate power over the states in respect to the rights of newly freed slaves. The amendment sought to overturn state-level legislation that was being created to limit the liberties of freedmen after the Civil War. The federal government circumvented each one of these laws with a broad sweep: Through the 14th Amendment, Congress granted equal protection under the law to every person [source: Library of Congress]. That last word is important, since in the eyes of the law, a corporation is an artificial person.

While the 14th Amendment opened the door for corporate Constitutional rights, the issue wasn't really addressed until 1868. A dispute over whether a county has the right to tax a corporation turned out to settle this much larger issue in a very strange way.

In the case ofSanta Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the Supreme Court decided that only the state that charters a corporation can tax it. This decision upheld the long-standing custom in America of state governance of corporations. It's the state that grants a corporation its charter -- its license to do business -- and it's up to the state to tax and regulate the corporation.

But a note written by the court reporter at the heading of the decision went further than that. Although another, private note from the Chief Justice said that the court had purposely avoided the issue of Constitutional corporate protection, the reporter chose to make his own addition to the records. He noted that the court had decided that corporations are persons under the 14th Amendment, and as such are subject to the same protections under the law as anyone else [source: Hartmann].

What's strange, Hartmann points out, is that the justices hadn't ruled that way at all. Even fishier, the court reporter was a former railroad president [source: Hartmann]. Ultimately, since it was a headnote (a commentary prefix to the court record) written by the reporter, it didn't constitute law. But it did set precedent. Two years later, this idea was upheld in another case: Pembina Consolidated Mining and Milling Co. v. Pennsylvania [source: Aljalian].

Just how much Constitutional protection corporations should be afforded is still being hammered out today, court case by court case. Read about some of these cases on the next page.

The remarkably odd stipulation that, as artificial persons, corporations should enjoy the same Constitutional protections as humans has given rise to some equally odd arguments. Time and again, the strength of this assumption has been tested in court. As a result, this American tradition has been upheld and challenged.

In the 1990s, the athletic company Nike was accused of running sweatshops -- factories that employ labor at substandard conditions and low wages -- in developing Asian countries. The story came to the fore even more in 2001. That year, Nike launched a shoe line that allowed customers to have whatever they pleased embroidered on the company's shoes. One MIT graduate student lodged his order: He wanted the word "sweatshop" embroidered on his pair.

The company refused his order, and the student circulated the e-mail Nike had sent him. The media took notice. In short order, stories of Nike's overseas labor practices made it into the pages of news outlets like the Wall Street Journal [source: The Industry Standard].

In an ongoing public relations campaign, Nike said it did not use exploitative labor practices, and it actually protected workers' rights abroad. Based on proof that contradicted the PR blitz, a California man sued the company in 1998 for false advertising [source: BBC]. The company challenged the issue, saying that as an artificial person, it was allowed to lie. Lying, after all, is protected by the freedom of speech granted in the First Amendment.

Nike lost in the California Supreme Court, but appealed. After accepting the case, the Supreme Court deferred it back to the lower courts [source: New York Times]. Ultimately, the company settled the suit for $1.5 million, which went to a labor rights group [source: BBC]. In 2005, Nike published a report of the working conditions in its overseas factories, which included admissions of employee mistreatment [source: The Guardian].

Nike's not alone in seeking Constitutional protection against bad publicity. In 1986,Dow Chemical sued the federal government. The company argued that the use of aerial photography by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was a violation of the corporation's Fourth Amendment rights. Dow asserted that the EPA shouldn't be able to snap photos in search of federal violations. The Fourth Amendment protects Americans from unreasonable search and seizure, and Dow alleged its rights were violated by EPA flyovers [source: Connecticut General Assembly]. The Supreme Court ultimately decided 5 to 4 to uphold the lost case, opining that Dow couldn't reasonably expect privacy in its chemical plant [source: New York Times].

But corporations have been successful in court as well. In the1978 case Marshall v. Barlow's, Inc., the Supreme Court established freedom from search for businesses under the Fourth Amendment. Prior to the ruling, agents from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) could inspect any business for safety violations without alerting the owner or asking his or her permission [source: USSC Plus]. Following the Marshall case, incorporated businesses were granted the same protection human citizens have from police searches. OSHA now must either receive permission from the owner or show evidence that a violation has occurred and obtain a search warrant [source: CBIA].

For more information on business and other related topics, visit the next page.

LEARN MORE

How Capitalism Works

Is a free market really "free" if it's regulated?

TreeHugger.com: Corporations & Green Branding

Lots More Information

Kasky v. Nike — Do Corporations Have a Right to Lie?

Introduction

Kasky v. Nike (Nike v. Kasky at the U.S. Supreme Court) involved the Nike Corporation’s appeal of an April 2002 California Supreme Court ruling.The California court rejected claims by Nike’s lawyers that the First Amendment immunized the company from being sued for an allegedly deceptive public relations campaign. A trial on the merits was precluded by the parties’ settlement following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to send the case back to a lower court.

This page presents all sides of the Nike case and the larger issues ofcorporate or commercial speech. We created this page to examine the judicial creation of constitutional rights for corporations and to raise awareness of the far-reaching negative effects that precedent has for democracy and our lives.

We reject the claim that the authors of our Bill of Rights intended to define persons as including corporations (see Corporate Personhoodpage for more on this). In addition to provoking public debate, we are working to persuade the American Civil Liberties Union to halt or reverse its practice of advocating for corporate personhood (the ACLU board backed Nike in court, though they offer no evidence of member support). We believe such advocacy ultimately undermines the critical human rights work for which the ACLU was founded (more below).

Facts, Reporting and Items Offering Competing Views

Just the Facts - Background on the events that led to the lawsuit (as stated by California appeals court)
Statement by the Northern California ACLU (with our responses to points raised within) – This is a good introduction to opposing arguments on treating corporations as persons. Our FAQ’s also presents direct point/counterpoint on the case.
A detailed New York Times report preceding oral argument at the U.S. Supreme Court.
On June 26, 2003, the Supreme Court dismissed Nike’s challenge of California law that allows citizens to sue for deceptive advertising. News coverage of the Court’s Decision

Arguments Against Nike’s Claimed “Right to Lie”

First Amendment Follies: Expanding Corporate Speech Rights by Robert Weismann
Our sign-on letter to the ACLU, urging its directors to stop advocating corporate personhood. This letter offers detailed argument and links to our endorsement form to urge the ACLU to change its position.

Arguments for Nike or for Corporations to enjoy Bill of Rights Protections

Within days of Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich circulating a“dear colleague” letter, urging them to sign on to the Congressional brief in support of Kasky, all five Oregon representatives–Nike’s headquarters–circulated a letter arguing for Nike and asking colleagues not to sign on.

Commentaries Not Explicitly Advocating for Either Party

A critical response to media corporations’ advocacy by Cynthia Cotts (Village Voice)
On the Wings of Nike: A streamlined approach to the commercial speech doctrine by Anne Cunningham and Craig Greeman. Published by Communications and the Law (35 pp analysis-pdf)

Legal Briefs for Marc Kasky

Note: all briefs linked on this page are PDFs.

Respondent’s (Kasky) Brief in Opposition filed with U.S. Supreme Court (prior to Court granting certiorari)
Marc Kasky’s Original Complaint
ReclaimDemocracy.org amicus brief to U.S. Supreme Court(submitted by the National Voting Rights Institute).
Amicus Brief from California AFL/CIO to California Court of Appeals
California Attorney General’s brief to state supreme court

Legal Briefs for Nike

Nike Inc.’s Briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court

Nike Inc. Final Brief (62 pp,)
Nike Inc. Petition for Certiorari (asking Court to review CA court decision) (128pp)
Nike Inc. Reply to Marc Kasky’s Brief to the Court (prior to Court’s granting certiorari) (15 pp)

Amici Briefs

Kasky vs. Nike Inc: Court Decisions and Documents

The US Supreme Court decision, with dissent and concurrence
U.S. Supreme Court oral argument transcript
The California Supreme Court decision in favor of Kasky (72pp)
The California statutes under which Nike was sued are printed in the last six pages of Respondent’s (Kasky) Brief in Opposition to U.S. Supreme Court

A Few Significant Court Cases in the Evolution of “Commercial Speech”

First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978) cleared the way for massive increases in corporate corruption of politics. Spending money to influence politics is now a corporate “right.” Justice Rehnquist’s dissent here is a recommended read.
Central Hudson Gas v. Public Service Comm. of NY * (1980) This oft-cited case concerns a state ban on ads promoting electricity consumption
FEC v. Massachusetts Citizens for Life, Inc. (1986)
Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990) Upheld limits on corporate spending in elections
International Dairy v. Amnestoy (1996) Vermont law requiring labeling of dairy products using BGH is overturned
44 Liquormart v. Rhode Island (1996) State ban on advertising of alcohol prices is struck down

Move to Amend’s We the People Amendment clearly states that artificial entities (organizations created by government) have no inherent rights under our Constitution. That's the level playing field we need to ensure our right to self-governance.

Many "artificial entities" do good work -- including unions, non-profits, and even lots of corporations. But when it comes to our Constitution, only human beings should be recognized as having inalienable rights.

But you might be asking, what about thoseunions? Well...

A Federal Appeals Court recently overturned a law requiring employers to post information informing workers of their rights, ruling that such a law was a violation of the corporation’s right NOT to speak under the First Amendment.

So, according to the Court: The free speech of corporations trumps the free speech of organized Labor.What about the union's "free speech"? Or a worker's right to free speech in the workplace?

Many people don't realize that unions don't currently enjoy the same legal rights as large corporations, and when push comes to shove, the courts consistently side with big corporations over workers’ rights.

In an article we recently published to Common Dreams, we discuss a specific form of judicial activism called Lochnerizing, which is when judges overturn democratically enacted legislation -- legislation often passed to protect workers’ rights.

When it comes down to brass tacks, unions are in the same position as the rest of us and should be a vital part of the movement to pass the We the People Amendment.Until we make clear that only people have Constitutional rights, all protections we put in place to protect workers (or to protect small business, or community welfare, or the environment) will be in jeopardy of being overturned in court by a company with deep enough pockets to change our laws.

We ask that you read our article, like it and share it so that more people join the discussion. Please take a few moments to post a comment and tell us what you think -- and don't forget to invite everyone to sign our petition and join the movement to amend!

In solidarity,

Roman Collins & Laura Bonham

For the Move to Amend Coalition

PS -- Join us this week on **Move to Amend Reports**. Our guest will be Richard Monje, a longtime union organizer and newest member of Move to Amend's National Leadership Team.

Move to Amend Reports airs live every Thursday at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern -- tune in at http://blogtalkradio.com/movetoamend.

Guns and Butter

"The Trans Pacific Partnership Forum" with Georgia Kelly, Arthur Stamoulis, Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese 6/12/13

allows TNcorp to sue country for damages; can't force them to change eg environment law, just make it so expensive thy will have to; already some small pacts used by corp to force small country to cave on their regs

sen baucus retiring but pro fast track (new orwellian name) ordered arrest of spkr/activist

phrma, banks, mfg/retilers think chinese labor too expensive (3x viet nam)

all rooted in battle for seattle, so corps look for way around wto

www.citizentrade.org

it's our economy

===

For those who have a copy of Jeffrey Clements Corporations are not People, he has a long discussion of the case, International Dairy Foods Assoc. v Amestoy (1996), in which the Federal District Court struck down the Vermont Law based on the corporationâ€™ s First Amendment rights. (Pages 39-45 in Clementsâ€™ book.)

Since Bovine Growth Hormone is associated with higher incidence of some cancers as well as the increase in anti-biotic resistant bacteria, and is banned in most advanced countries of the world, telling the people of Vermont that they didnâ€™t even have the right to know that this substance was in their food, is one of the most dramatic examples of how extending constitutional rights to corporations has taken away fundamental rights of people.

===

Students can be silenced when they say something that can remotely be interpreted as favoring illegal drugs. Contrast this with the right of tobacco corporations to advertise their addictive drug directly to students. In a case called Lorillard Tobacco Co. v. Reilly, the Court voided a Massachusetts law forbidding tobacco billboards within 1,000 feet of a school. In fact, the Court went further and held that, under the First Amendment, the state could not even require smokeless tobacco and cigar advertisements in stores to be posted a minimum of five feet above the floor, so that toddlers would be protected from colorful cartoons of Joe Camel.

extensive: http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-personhood/

eg http://reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood_negative_free_speech_corporations/

gOing Deeper: Articles, Briefs & Books

Recommended Articles

The Hijacking of the 14th Amendment by Doug Hammerstrom (pdf)
Santa Clara Blues by William Meyers (pdf). Also in HTML format
Taking Care of Business: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation by Richard Grossman and Frank Adams
Personalizing the Impersonal: Corporations and the Bill of Rights by Carl Mayer. Recommended for lawyers or those interested in a detailed legal history (70 pp html).
When Silence is Not Golden: Negative Corporate Free Speech by Dean Ritz
Abolish Corporate Personhood by Molly Morgan and Jan Edwards.
The PBS program NOW compiled some useful resources on the topic for this 2005 episode.
Court Rules Corporations Enjoy Human Rights, Some People Don’t
Monsanto Claims “Negative Free Speech” Rights Should Preclude Product Labels that Can Harm Sales of its Products

Recommended Books

The People’s Business by Charlie Cray and Lee Drutman
Gangs of America by Ted Nace
Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann
When Corporations Rule the World by David Korten
The Transformation of American Law 1870-1960 by Morton Horwitz (for those interested in detailed legal background). See also Volume 1: 1780-1860.

Note: we often are asked for “the best” book on the topic, but we can’t single out one. All of the above are excellent reads with different strengths (they are listed from most to least recent). Feel free to ask if you seek a specific focus.

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A talk by Richard Grossman (1943 - 2011) of the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD) http://www.poclad.org/ on challenging corporate law and lore, given February 10, 2005.

Part I of this talk...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HowKoNmODNY

Q&A...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zqw1UIGUv4k

corp make the rules to make the rules, so regulation approach ltd. progressives saw corp state rising out of feudal slave state? ppl's party 1892 let's make sure we actually haVE A REPUBLIC, but lost. corp lawyers worked w/ progressive leaders. then we ask the corps to do a little less damage (eg surface mining act hist used to sue epa to stop mtntop; SOCM got help to write a law ~ strip mining; bill sign boycotted by socm; 90% of mtntop permits granted; the law is going what it was DESIGNED to do, really regulate activists and empower corps!

eg big mobilization ! gulf war 2 but a small # of ppl cd override; why is progress so slow? why so long to undo labor = criminal conspiracy? problem is NOT corp resp etc. not breaking law b/c law can deal w/ that. not law but LORE; law and lore say employees have no rights; most of the harms are legal eg have PERMIT to dump toxins.

Mass law ~ tobacco billbd next to school scotus 9-0 ; 1k laws have been ruled unconst.

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California Man Cites Corporate Personhood To Protest Carpool Lane Violation | A California driver who snuck into a carpool lane that requires two or more passengers in a vehicle claims he should not have to pay his ticket because “he had corporate incorporation papers in his car at the time and, he says, the state vehicle code views corporations as persons—therefore he and his corporation constituted a two-person carpool.” This is obviously an absurd legal argument, but, sadly no less absurd than the argument the Supreme Court’s conservative justices embraced in Citizens United.

Corporation-as-carpool dispute curbed

by Jason Walsh | Posted: Friday, January 4, 2013 2:47 pm

Alas, a disputed carpool lane infraction didn’t loosen corporate America’s grip on election financing, as San Rafael resident Jonathan Frieman’s creative ticket appeal fell on unsympathetic ears Monday at Marin Traffic Court.

Frieman was contesting his $478 carpool lane violation on the grounds that while driving south through the two-passenger lane in Novato last October, a set of incorporating documents constituted a second person in the vehicle—if the U.S. Supreme Court grants corporations the same free speech rights as citizens, as it seemed to in the 2010 Citizens United ruling, argued Frieman, then he and his corporation papers count as two people in the carpool lane.

According to a press release from Kathleen Russell Consulting, the Mill Valley-based firm handling publicity for Frieman’s quest for justice, state vehicle code 470’s definition of a person includes “natural persons and corporations.”

Frieman has vowed to to appeal the case all the way to the Supreme Court “in an effort to expose the impracticality of corporate personhood.”

"Corporations are imaginary entities, and we've let them run wild," says Frieman. "Their original intent 200 years ago at the dawn of our nation was to serve human beings. So I'm wresting back that power by making their personhood serve me."

The concept of corporate personhood has been an ongoing controversy for years—but it hit the mainstream in 2010 following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, which held that restricting political expenditures by corporations was a violation of their First Amendment rights to free speech. Implicit in such a ruling, some argue, is that the Constitution grants protections to corporations as if they were people.

Representing Frieman at traffic court was attorney Ford Greene—he, too, says the state vehicle code treats a person and a corporation as equivalent.

" When a corporation is present in one's car, it is sufficient to qualify as a two-person occupancy for commuter lane purposes," says Greene, who’s also a San Anselmo city councilmember. "When the corporate presence in our electoral process is financially dominant, by parity it appears appropriate to recognize such presence in an automobile."

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odd paradox; March 5, 2013 |

This story [3] originally appeared at OnEarth.org [4].

During my 12-year career as a newspaper reporter, I spent thousands of hours sitting through city council meetings, zoning board hearings, property tax appeals, school board work sessions, and just about every other kind of attention-sapping municipal meeting you could possibly imagine. (It wasn’t all bad: I met my wife at one.) At these meetings, it wasn’t uncommon for the same topics to come up over and over again, frequently with the same people making the same points about the same issues that everyone in attendance has heard a million times before. (Think “Parks and Rec [5]” without any laughs.) So I sympathize, perhaps more than I should, with elected officials and public servants who would like to find a way to make topics they’ve heard about and debated endlessly just … go ... away.

Still, I had never heard of a town that actually imposed a gag order on its own citizens, until the Natural Resources Defense Council (which publishes OnEarth) received complaints about atown board in Sanford, New York (population: 2,400), that told its residents they could no longer bring up concerns about fracking at town meetings.

NRDC and a local partner, Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy, sued the Sanford town board [6] last month, claiming that the ban on fracking discussions violates the First Amendment rights of the town’s residents, some of whom are NRDC members. In a complaint to the U.S. District Court, the organizations say the town violated the U.S. and New York State constitutions by restricting residents’ right to free speech during the public participation portion of town meetings, which remains open to all other topics -- just not fracking. (Below is [7] at which the gag order was adopted.)

Sanford sits in what is called New York’s Southern Tier, on the Pennsylvania border. More importantly for this discussion, it’s in the heart of Marcellus Shale country, where a deep-rock formation contains large natural gas reserves that can only be reached through a controversial and disruptive process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. South of the border, Pennsylvania communities are being swarmed by natural gas drillers who are driving a boom in U.S. energy development -- along with concerns about air and water pollution, health impacts, community division, and declining property values. (For an account of how one Pennsylvania community is being affected, see “Fracking the Amish [8].”) North of the border, though, a moratorium prevents fracking while New York State regulators study whether it can be done safely, and what rules are needed to protect residents. UPDATE: State Health Department Commissioner Nirav Shah said that [a key health review on fracking [9] is going to take more time, likely pushing back a decision that had been expected by the end of this month.]

Communities that stand to be affected by fracking have taken positions on both sides of the debate, with some expressing support for the economic benefits and others enacting rules to forbid natural gas drilling inside their borders. Sanford’s town board has come down largely on the pro-fracking side, even leasing land to a natural gas company for drilling within the town and passing a resolution urging state lawmakers to allow fracking to proceed. A week before the gag order was imposed, Town Supervisor Dewey Decker signed a letter to Governor Cuomo asserting that a delay was “only empowering opponents” -- including, presumably, the opponents in his own community.

Naturally, those fracking opponents weren’t too happy about the board’s pro-drilling actions, and they were vocal about it during the board’s public comment sessions, leading to the gag order. Herbert Kline, an attorney who represents Sanford, told the Associated Press, [10] "People who were against fracking had, in the minds of the town board, monopolized discussion in the public participation portion of prior meetings to the extent that very little other business could be accomplished.”

You know what? Tough. Again speaking as someone who has spent thousands of hours in public meetings, that’s what happens when people have strong opinions about issues that matter to their lives, their families, and their community: they want to talk about them, and they want their elected decision makers to listen. And for people who live in the Marcellus Shale region, it’s hard to imagine an issue more vital to their health and homes than fracking. Mike Mustante, one of the Sanford residents prevented from speaking out, told NRDC that by gagging him, the town board “ended any chance that I might have to affect the future value of my home, or the quality of the air I breathe, or the water I drink.” That’s the kind of thing a guy won't shut up about.

See more stories tagged with:

fracking [11]

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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/environment/gag-order-town-board-decides-community-can-no-longer-discuss-fracking-town-meetings

Links:

[1] http://www.nrdc.org/onearth

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/scott-dodd

[3] http://www.onearth.org/blog/town-board-to-residents-shut-up-about-fracking

[4] http://www.onearth.org/

[5] mailto:http://www.nbc.com/parks-and-recreation/

[6] http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/ksinding/youre_silencing_us_-_protectin.html

[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0IVHa2IASE

[8] http://www.onearth.org/article/fracking-the-amish

[9] http://www.timesunion.com/business/article/Health-Dept-Fracking-review-needs-more-time-4272342.php#ixzz2KiqmBxD6

[10] http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hBWjkUEABp-Pu8Fb3sAUA9bgfiPA?docId=f3c091db1a6f4bf5b1b3a8d2f07b2b91

[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/fracking-0

[12] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:November 7, 2012 CONTACT:Move to Amend, info@MoveToAmend.org

Move to Amend Wins Big at the Ballot Box: Americans Fed Up with Big Money and Undue Corporate Influence

From Massachusetts to Oregon, Colorado to Illinois and Wisconsin, and Ohio to California, citizens throughout the country voted overwhelmingly Tuesday for their legislators to pass a constitutional amendment to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling and declare that only human beings – not corporations – are entitled to constitutional rights and that money is not speech and campaign spending can be regulated.

Residents in over 150 cities had the opportunity to vote on measures calling for an end to the doctrines of corporate constitutional rights and money as free speech, and in every single town the vote was supportive. Often by an overwhelming margin.

In Eau Claire, WI the vote was 71% in favor

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powell wrote majority opinion for belotti

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Richmond anti-soda tax committee sues for federal protection from city's campaign disclosure rules

By Robert Rogers

Contra Costa Times

Posted: 09/04/2012 04:24:13 PM PDT

Updated: 09/04/2012 04:54:26 PM PDT

Related Stories

RICHMOND -- The beverage industry-funded campaign against a local ballot measure has sued the city in federal court, arguing that Richmond's campaign-disclosure laws targeting special interest groups violate the First Amendment.

The suit, filed in federal court in San Francisco on Aug. 30, seeks an order barring the city from imposing its campaign ordinance on the Community Coalition Against **Beverage**Taxes, a declaration that the groups' **First Amendment rights were violated and money to cover court costs.**

The coalition is funded mostly by the American Beverage Association and has spent more than $350,000 locally in an effort to defeat a November ballot **measure that could impose a penny-per-ounce tax on sales of all sugar-sweetened beverages in the city.**

"Plaintiffs urgently seek this court's protection from the city of Richmond's threat," reads the lawsuit, filed by Christopher Skinnell of Nielsen Merksamer Parrinello Gross & Leoni LLP, "to 'strictly enforce' against them an inapplicable and **unconstitutional **ordinance that would**impair their efforts to speak in opposition** to a controversial ballot measure proposed by Richmond's mayor and City Council."

The ordinance, passed unanimously by the council in June, requires all mass mailings be accompanied by the words "Major funding by," followed by the five largest contributors, with the information on the "front page" of all distributed material.

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How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive. Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored is not at all clear.

That should be a matter of serious immediate concern. What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine what kind of world will greet that event. It is not an attractive prospect if present tendencies persist -- not least, because the Great Charter is being shredded before our eyes.

The first scholarly edition of Magna Carta was published by the eminent jurist William Blackstone. It was not an easy task. There was no good text available. As he wrote, “the body of the charter has been unfortunately gnawn by rats” -- a comment that carries grim symbolism today, as we take up the task the rats left unfinished.

Blackstone’s edition actually includes two charters. It was entitled The Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest. The first, the Charter of Liberties, is widely recognized to be the foundation of the fundamental rights of the English-speaking peoples -- or as Winston Churchill put it more expansively, “the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land.” Churchill was referring specifically to the reaffirmation of the Charter by Parliament in the Petition of Right, imploring King Charles to recognize that the law is sovereign, not the King. Charles agreed briefly, but soon violated his pledge, setting the stage for the murderous Civil War.

After a bitter conflict between King and Parliament, the power of royalty in the person of Charles II was restored. In defeat, Magna Carta was not forgotten. One of the leaders of Parliament, Henry Vane, was beheaded. On the scaffold, he tried to read a speech denouncing the sentence as a violation of Magna Carta, but was drowned out by trumpets to ensure that such scandalous words would not be heard by the cheering crowds. His major crime had been to draft a petition calling the people “the original of all just power” in civil society -- not the King, not even God. That was the position that had been strongly advocated by Roger Williams, the founder of the first free society in what is now the state of Rhode Island. His heretical views influenced Milton and Locke, though Williams went much farther, founding the modern doctrine of separation of church and state, still much contested even in the liberal democracies.

As often is the case, apparent defeat nevertheless carried the struggle for freedom and rights forward. Shortly after Vane’s execution, King Charles granted a Royal Charter to the Rhode Island plantations, declaring that “the form of government is Democratical,” and furthermore that the government could affirm freedom of conscience for Papists, atheists, Jews, Turks -- even Quakers, one of the most feared and brutalized of the many sects that were appearing in those turbulent days. All of this was astonishing in the climate of the times.

A few years later, the Charter of Liberties was enriched by the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, formally entitled “an Act for the better securing the liberty of the subject, and for prevention of imprisonment beyond the seas.” The U.S. Constitution, borrowing from English common law, affirms that “the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended” except in case of rebellion or invasion. In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the rights guaranteed by this Act were “[c]onsidered by the Founders [of the American Republic] as the highest safeguard of liberty.” All of these words should resonate today.

The Second Charter and the Commons

The significance of the companion charter, the Charter of the Forest, is no less profound and perhaps even more pertinent today -- as explored in depth by Peter Linebaugh in his richly documented and stimulating history of Magna Carta and its later trajectory. The Charter of the Forest demanded protection of the commons from external power. The commons were the source of sustenance for the general population: their fuel, their food, their construction materials, whatever was essential for life. The forest was no primitive wilderness. It had been carefully developed over generations, maintained in common, its riches available to all, and preserved for future generations -- practices found today primarily in traditional societies that are under threat throughout the world.

The Charter of the Forest imposed limits to privatization. The Robin Hood myths capture the essence of its concerns (and it is not too surprising that the popular TV series of the 1950s, “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” was written anonymously by Hollywood screenwriters blacklisted for leftist convictions). By the seventeenth century, however, this Charter had fallen victim to the rise of the commodity economy and capitalist practice and morality.

With the commons no longer protected for cooperative nurturing and use, the rights of the common people were restricted to what could not be privatized, a category that continues to shrink to virtual invisibility. In Bolivia, the attempt to privatize water was, in the end, beaten back by an uprising that brought the indigenous majority to power for the first time in history. The World Bank has just ruled that the mining multinational Pacific Rim can proceed with a case against El Salvador for trying to preserve lands and communities from highly destructive gold mining. Environmental constraints threaten to deprive the company of future profits, a crime that can be punished under the rules of the investor-rights regime mislabeled as “free trade.” And this is only a tiny sample of struggles underway over much of the world, some involving extreme violence, as in the Eastern Congo, where millions have been killed in recent years to ensure an ample supply of minerals for cell phones and other uses, and of course ample profits.

The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived. The prevailing view today is captured by Garrett Hardin’s influential argument that “freedom in a commons brings ruin to us all,” the famous “tragedy of the commons”: what is not owned will be destroyed by individual avarice.

An international counterpart was the concept of terra nullius, employed to justify the expulsion of indigenous populations in the settler-colonial societies of the Anglosphere, or their “extermination,” as the founding fathers of the American Republic described what they were doing, sometimes with remorse, after the fact. According to this useful doctrine, the Indians had no property rights since they were just wanderers in an untamed wilderness. And the hard-working colonists could create value where there was none by turning that same wilderness to commercial use.

In reality, the colonists knew better and there were elaborate procedures of purchase and ratification by crown and parliament, later annulled by force when the evil creatures resisted extermination. The doctrine is often attributed to John Locke, but that is dubious. As a colonial administrator, he understood what was happening, and there is no basis for the attribution in his writings, as contemporary scholarship has shown convincingly, notably the work of the Australian scholar Paul Corcoran. (It was in Australia, in fact, that the doctrine has been most brutally employed.)

The grim forecasts of the tragedy of the commons are not without challenge. The late Elinor Olstrom won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for her work showing the superiority of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins. But the conventional doctrine has force if we accept its unstated premise: that humans are blindly driven by what American workers, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, bitterly called “the New Spirit of the Age, Gain Wealth forgetting all but Self.”

Like peasants and workers in England before them, American workers denounced this New Spirit, which was being imposed upon them, regarding it as demeaning and destructive, an assault on the very nature of free men and women. And I stress women; among those most active and vocal in condemning the destruction of the rights and dignity of free people by the capitalist industrial system were the “factory girls,” young women from the farms. They, too, were driven into the regime of supervised and controlled wage labor, which was regarded at the time as different from chattel slavery only in that it was temporary. That stand was considered so natural that it became a slogan of the Republican Party, and a banner under which northern workers carried arms during the American Civil War.

Controlling the Desire for Democracy

That was 150 years ago -- in England earlier. Huge efforts have been devoted since to inculcating the New Spirit of the Age. Major industries are devoted to the task: public relations, advertising, marketing generally, all of which add up to a very large component of the Gross Domestic Product. They are dedicated to what the great political economist Thorstein Veblen called “fabricating wants.” In the words of business leaders themselves, the task is to direct people to “the superficial things” of life, like “fashionable consumption.” That way people can be atomized, separated from one another, seeking personal gain alone, diverted from dangerous efforts to think for themselves and challenge authority.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the “engineering of consent” by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays. He was a respected Wilson-Roosevelt-Kennedy progressive, much like his contemporary, journalist Walter Lippmann, the most prominent public intellectual of twentieth century America, who praised “the manufacture of consent” as a “new art” in the practice of democracy.

Both recognized that the public must be “put in its place,” marginalized and controlled -- for their own interests of course. They were too “stupid and ignorant” to be allowed to run their own affairs. That task was to be left to the “intelligent minority,” who must be protected from “the trampling and the roar of [the] bewildered herd,” the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” -- the “rascal multitude” as they were termed by their seventeenth century predecessors. The role of the general population was to be “spectators,” not “participants in action,” in a properly functioning democratic society.

And the spectators must not be allowed to see too much. President Obama has set new standards in safeguarding this principle. He has, in fact, punished more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined, a real achievement for an administration that came to office promising transparency. WikiLeaks is only the most famous case, with British cooperation.

Among the many topics that are not the business of the bewildered herd is foreign affairs. Anyone who has studied declassified secret documents will have discovered that, to a large extent, their classification was meant to protect public officials from public scrutiny. Domestically, the rabble should not hear the advice given by the courts to major corporations: that they should devote some highly visible efforts to good works, so that an “aroused public” will not discover the enormous benefits provided to them by the nanny state. More generally the U.S. public should not learn that “state policies are overwhelmingly regressive, thus reinforcing and expanding social inequality,” though designed in ways that lead “people to think that the government helps only the undeserving poor, allowing politicians to mobilize and exploit anti-government rhetoric and values even as they continue to funnel support to their better-off constituents” -- I’m quoting from the main establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, not from some radical rag.

Over time, as societies became freer and the resort to state violence more constrained, the urge to devise sophisticated methods of control of attitudes and opinion has only grown. It is natural that the immense PR industry should have been created in the most free of societies, the United States and Great Britain. The first modern propaganda agency was the British Ministry of Information a century ago, which secretly defined its task as “to direct the thought of most of the world” -- primarily progressive American intellectuals, who had to be mobilized to come to the aid of Britain during World War I.

Its U.S. counterpart, the Committee on Public Information, was formed by Woodrow Wilson to drive a pacifist population to violent hatred of all things German -- with remarkable success. American commercial advertising deeply impressed others. Goebbels admired it and adapted it to Nazi propaganda, all too successfully. The Bolshevik leaders tried as well, but their efforts were clumsy and ineffective.

A primary domestic task has always been “to keep [the public] from our throats,” as essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson described the concerns of political leaders when the threat of democracy was becoming harder to suppress in the mid-nineteenth century. More recently, the activism of the 1960s elicited elite concerns about “excessive democracy,” and calls for measures to impose “more moderation” in democracy.

One particular concern was to introduce better controls over the institutions “responsible for the indoctrination of the young”: the schools, the universities, the churches, which were seen as failing that essential task. I’m quoting reactions from the left-liberal end of the mainstream spectrum, the liberal internationalists who later staffed the Carter administration, and their counterparts in other industrial societies. The right wing was much harsher. One of many manifestations of this urge has been the sharp rise in college tuition, not on economic grounds, as is easily shown. The device does, however, trap and control young people by debt, often for the rest of their lives, thus contributing to more effective indoctrination.

The Three-Fifths People

Pursuing these important topics further, we see that the destruction of the Charter of the Forest, and its obliteration from memory, relates rather closely to the continuing efforts to constrain the promise of the Charter of Liberties. The “New Spirit of the Age” cannot tolerate the pre-capitalist conception of the Forest as the shared endowment of the community at large, cared for communally for its own use and for future generations, protected from privatization, from transfer to the hands of private power for service to wealth, not needs. Inculcating the New Spirit is an essential prerequisite for achieving this end, and for preventing the Charter of Liberties from being misused to enable free citizens to determine their own fate.

Popular struggles to bring about a freer and more just society have been resisted by violence and repression, and massive efforts to control opinion and attitudes. Over time, however, they have met with considerable success, even though there is a long way to go and there is often regression. Right now, in fact.

The most famous part of the Charter of Liberties is Article 39, which declares that “no free man” shall be punished in any way, “nor will We proceed against or prosecute him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.”

Through many years of struggle, the principle has come to hold more broadly. The U.S. Constitution provides that no “person [shall] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law [and] a speedy and public trial” by peers. The basic principle is “presumption of innocence” -- what legal historians describe as “the seed of contemporary Anglo-American freedom,” referring to Article 39; and with the Nuremberg Tribunal in mind, a “particularly American brand of legalism: punishment only for those who could be proved to be guilty through a fair trial with a panoply of procedural protections” -- even if their guilt for some of the worst crimes in history is not in doubt.

The founders of course did not intend the term “person” to apply to all persons. Native Americans were not persons. Their rights were virtually nil. Women were scarcely persons. Wives were understood to be “covered” under the civil identity of their husbands in much the same way as children were subject to their parents. Blackstone’s principles held that “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.” Women are thus the property of their fathers or husbands. These principles remain up to very recent years. Until a Supreme Court decision of 1975, women did not even have a legal right to serve on juries. They were not peers. Just two weeks ago, Republican opposition blocked the Fairness Paycheck Act guaranteeing women equal pay for equal work. And it goes far beyond.

Slaves, of course, were not persons. They were in fact three-fifths human under the Constitution, so as to grant their owners greater voting power. Protection of slavery was no slight concern to the founders: it was one factor leading to the American revolution. In the 1772 Somerset case, Lord Mansfield determined that slavery is so “odious” that it cannot be tolerated in England, though it continued in British possessions for many years. American slave-owners could see the handwriting on the wall if the colonies remained under British rule. And it should be recalled that the slave states, including Virginia, had the greatest power and influence in the colonies. One can easily appreciate Dr. Johnson’s famous quip that “we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes.”

Post-Civil War amendments extended the concept person to African-Americans, ending slavery. In theory, at least. After about a decade of relative freedom, a condition akin to slavery was reintroduced by a North-South compact permitting the effective criminalization of black life. A black male standing on a street corner could be arrested for vagrancy, or for attempted rape if accused of looking at a white woman the wrong way. And once imprisoned he had few chances of ever escaping the system of “slavery by another name,” the term used by then-Wall Street Journal bureau chief Douglas Blackmon in an arresting study.

This new version of the “peculiar institution” provided much of the basis for the American industrial revolution, with a perfect work force for the steel industry and mining, along with agricultural production in the famous chain gangs: docile, obedient, no strikes, and no need for employers even to sustain their workers, an improvement over slavery. The system lasted in large measure until World War II, when free labor was needed for war production.

The postwar boom offered employment. A black man could get a job in a unionized auto plant, earn a decent salary, buy a house, and maybe send his children to college. That lasted for about 20 years, until the 1970s, when the economy was radically redesigned on newly dominant neoliberal principles, with rapid growth of financialization and the offshoring of production. The black population, now largely superfluous, has been recriminalized.

Until Ronald Reagan’s presidency, incarceration in the U.S. was within the spectrum of industrial societies. By now it is far beyond others. It targets primarily black males, increasingly also black women and Hispanics, largely guilty of victimless crimes under the fraudulent “drug wars.” Meanwhile, the wealth of African-American families has been virtually obliterated by the latest financial crisis, in no small measure thanks to criminal behavior of financial institutions, with impunity for the perpetrators, now richer than ever.

Looking over the history of African-Americans from the first arrival of slaves almost 500 years ago to the present, they have enjoyed the status of authentic persons for only a few decades. There is a long way to go to realize the promise of Magna Carta.

Sacred Persons and Undone Process

The post-Civil War fourteenth amendment granted the rights of persons to former slaves, though mostly in theory. At the same time, it created a new category of persons with rights: corporations. In fact, almost all the cases brought to the courts under the fourteenth amendment had to do with corporate rights, and by a century ago, they had determined that these collectivist legal fictions, established and sustained by state power, had the full rights of persons of flesh and blood; in fact, far greater rights, thanks to their scale, immortality, and protections of limited liability. Their rights by now far transcend those of mere humans. Under the “free trade agreements,” Pacific Rim can, for example, sue El Salvador for seeking to protect the environment; individuals cannot do the same. General Motors can claim national rights in Mexico. There is no need to dwell on what would happen if a Mexican demanded national rights in the United States.

Domestically, recent Supreme Court rulings greatly enhance the already enormous political power of corporations and the super-rich, striking further blows against the tottering relics of functioning political democracy.

Meanwhile Magna Carta is under more direct assault. Recall the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which barred “imprisonment beyond the seas,” and certainly the far more vicious procedure of imprisonment abroad for the purpose of torture -- what is now more politely called “rendition,” as when Tony Blair rendered Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj, now a leader of the rebellion, to the mercies of Qaddafi; or when U.S. authorities deported Canadian citizen Maher Arar to his native Syria, for imprisonment and torture, only later conceding that there was never any case against him. And many others, often through Shannon Airport, leading to courageous protests in Ireland.

The concept of due process has been extended under the Obama administration’s international assassination campaign in a way that renders this core element of the Charter of Liberties (and the Constitution) null and void. The Justice Department explained that the constitutional guarantee of due process, tracing to Magna Carta, is now satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch alone. The constitutional lawyer in the White House agreed. King John might have nodded with satisfaction.

The issue arose after the presidentially ordered assassination-by-drone of Anwar al-Awlaki, accused of inciting jihad in speech, writing, and unspecified actions. A headline in the New York Times captured the general elite reaction when he was murdered in a drone attack, along with the usual collateral damage. It read: “The West celebrates a cleric’s death.” Some eyebrows were lifted, however, because he was an American citizen, which raised questions about due process -- considered irrelevant when non-citizens are murdered at the whim of the chief executive. And irrelevant for citizens, too, under Obama administration due-process legal innovations.

Presumption of innocence has also been given a new and useful interpretation. As the New York Times reported, “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” So post-assassination determination of innocence maintains the sacred principle of presumption of innocence.

It would be ungracious to recall the Geneva Conventions, the foundation of modern humanitarian law: they bar “the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

The most famous recent case of executive assassination was Osama bin Laden, murdered after he was apprehended by 79 Navy seals, defenseless, accompanied only by his wife, his body reportedly dumped at sea without autopsy. Whatever one thinks of him, he was a suspect and nothing more than that. Even the FBI agreed.

Celebration in this case was overwhelming, but there were a few questions raised about the bland rejection of the principle of presumption of innocence, particularly when trial was hardly impossible. These were met with harsh condemnations. The most interesting was by a respected left-liberal political commentator, Matthew Yglesias, who explained that “one of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers,” so it is “amazingly naïve” to suggest that the U.S. should obey international law or other conditions that we righteously demand of the weak.

Only tactical objections can be raised to aggression, assassination, cyberwar, or other actions that the Holy State undertakes in the service of mankind. If the traditional victims see matters somewhat differently, that merely reveals their moral and intellectual backwardness. And the occasional Western critic who fails to comprehend these fundamental truths can be dismissed as “silly,” Yglesias explains -- incidentally, referring specifically to me, and I cheerfully confess my guilt.

Executive Terrorist Lists

Perhaps the most striking assault on the foundations of traditional liberties is a little-known case brought to the Supreme Court by the Obama administration, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. The Project was condemned for providing “material assistance” to the guerrilla organization PKK, which has fought for Kurdish rights in Turkey for many years and is listed as a terrorist group by the state executive. The “material assistance” was legal advice. The wording of the ruling would appear to apply quite broadly, for example, to discussions and research inquiry, even advice to the PKK to keep to nonviolent means. Again, there was a marginal fringe of criticism, but even those accepted the legitimacy of the state terrorist list -- arbitrary decisions by the executive, with no recourse.

The record of the terrorist list is of some interest. For example, in 1988 the Reagan administration declared Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress to be one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” so that Reagan could continue his support for the Apartheid regime and its murderous depredations in South Africa and in neighboring countries, as part of his “war on terror.” Twenty years later Mandela was finally removed from the terrorist list, and can now travel to the U.S. without a special waiver.

Another interesting case is Saddam Hussein, removed from the terrorist list in 1982 so that the Reagan administration could provide him with support for his invasion of Iran. The support continued well after the war ended. In 1989, President Bush I even invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the U.S. for advanced training in weapons production -- more information that must be kept from the eyes of the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.”

One of the ugliest examples of the use of the terrorist list has to do with the tortured people of Somalia. Immediately after September 11th, the United States closed down the Somali charitable network Al-Barakaat on grounds that it was financing terror. This achievement was hailed one of the great successes of the "war on terror." In contrast, Washington's withdrawal of its charges as without merit a year later aroused little notice.

Al-Barakaat was responsible for about half the $500 million in remittances to Somalia, “more than it earns from any other economic sector and 10 times the amount of foreign aid [Somalia] receives” a U.N. review determined. The charity also ran major businesses in Somalia, all destroyed. The leading academic scholar of Bush’s “financial war on terror,” Ibrahim Warde, concludes that apart from devastating the economy, this frivolous attack on a very fragile society “may have played a role in the rise... of Islamic fundamentalists,” another familiar consequence of the “war on terror.”

The very idea that the state should have the authority to make such judgments is a serious offense against the Charter of Liberties, as is the fact that it is considered uncontentious. If the Charter’s fall from grace continues on the path of the past few years, the future of rights and liberties looks dim.

Who Will Have the Last Laugh?

A few final words on the fate of the Charter of the Forest. Its goal was to protect the source of sustenance for the population, the commons, from external power -- in the early days, royalty; over the years, enclosures and other forms of privatization by predatory corporations and the state authorities who cooperate with them, have only accelerated and are properly rewarded. The damage is very broad.

If we listen to voices from the South today we can learn that “the conversion of public goods into private property through the privatization of our otherwise commonly held natural environment is one way neoliberal institutions remove the fragile threads that hold African nations together. Politics today has been reduced to a lucrative venture where one looks out mainly for returns on investment rather than on what one can contribute to rebuild highly degraded environments, communities, and a nation. This is one of the benefits that structural adjustment programmes inflicted on the continent -- the enthronement of corruption.” I’m quoting Nigerian poet and activist Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International, in his searing expose of the ravaging of Africa’s wealth, *To Cook a Continent*, the latest phase of the Western torture of Africa.

Torture that has always been planned at the highest level, it should be recognized. At the end of World War II, the U.S. held a position of unprecedented global power. Not surprisingly, careful and sophisticated plans were developed about how to organize the world. Each region was assigned its “function” by State Department planners, headed by the distinguished diplomat George Kennan. He determined that the U.S. had no special interest in Africa, so it should be handed over to Europe to “exploit” -- his word -- for its reconstruction. In the light of history, one might have imagined a different relation between Europe and Africa, but there is no indication that that was ever considered.

More recently, the U.S. has recognized that it, too, must join the game of exploiting Africa, along with new entries like China, which is busily at work compiling one of the worst records in destruction of the environment and oppression of the hapless victims.

It should be unnecessary to dwell on the extreme dangers posed by one central element of the predatory obsessions that are producing calamities all over the world: the reliance on fossil fuels, which courts global disaster, perhaps in the not-too-distant future. Details may be debated, but there is little serious doubt that the problems are serious, if not awesome, and that the longer we delay in addressing them, the more awful will be the legacy left to generations to come. There are some efforts to face reality, but they are far too minimal. The recent Rio+20 Conference opened with meager aspirations and derisory outcomes.

Meanwhile, power concentrations are charging in the opposite direction, led by the richest and most powerful country in world history. Congressional Republicans are dismantling the limited environmental protections initiated by Richard Nixon, who would be something of a dangerous radical in today’s political scene. The major business lobbies openly announce their propaganda campaigns to convince the public that there is no need for undue concern -- with some effect, as polls show.

The media cooperate by not even reporting the increasingly dire forecasts of international agencies and even the U.S. Department of Energy. The standard presentation is a debate between alarmists and skeptics: on one side virtually all qualified scientists, on the other a few holdouts. Not part of the debate are a very large number of experts, including the climate change program at MIT among others, who criticize the scientific consensus because it is too conservative and cautious, arguing that the truth when it comes to climate change is far more dire. Not surprisingly, the public is confused.

In his State of the Union speech in January, President Obama hailed the bright prospects of a century of energy self-sufficiency, thanks to new technologies that permit extraction of hydrocarbons from Canadian tar sands, shale, and other previously inaccessible sources. Others agree. The Financial Times forecasts a century of energy independence for the U.S. The report does mention the destructive local impact of the new methods. Unasked in these optimistic forecasts is the question what kind of a world will survive the rapacious onslaught.

In the lead in confronting the crisis throughout the world are indigenous communities, those who have always upheld the Charter of the Forests. The strongest stand has been taken by the one country they govern, Bolivia, the poorest country in South America and for centuries a victim of western destruction of the rich resources of one of the most advanced of the developed societies in the hemisphere, pre-Columbus.

After the ignominious collapse of the Copenhagen global climate change summit in 2009, Bolivia organized a People’s Summit with 35,000 participants from 140 countries -- not just representatives of governments, but also civil society and activists. It produced a People’s Agreement, which called for very sharp reduction in emissions, and a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. That is a key demand of indigenous communities all over the world. It is ridiculed by sophisticated westerners, but unless we can acquire some of their sensibility, they are likely to have the last laugh -- a laugh of grim despair.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of numerous best-selling political works, most recently,Hopes and Prospects,Making the Future, andOccupy. This is the full text of a speech he gave recently at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. His web site is www.chomsky.info. To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Chomsky discusses the recent shredding of the principles of the Magna Carta, click here or download it to your iPod here.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook, and check out the latest TD book, *Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050*.

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Arizona changed its law after 1886 so that the word person would include nonliving as well as living legal entities: “‘Person’ includes a corporation, company, partnership, firm, association or society, as well as a natural person.”[1]

Many states have varying definitions of person depending on the part of law at issue. For example, there was a 1998 U.S. Supreme Court case in which a large part of the argument had to do with whether the Federal Trade Commission had the authority, under California law, to act as a person in enforcing a judgment against a telemarketer.[2]

Limit-setting Legislation Isn’t Enough

As we’ve seen through the history of the Sherman Antitrust Act and other legislative attempts to control corporate behavior, the problem faced by citizens as well as directors and stockholders of corporations is systemic and rooted in how corporations are defined under the law.

Virtually every legislative session since the 1800s has seen new attempts to regulate or control corporate behavior, starting with Thomas Jefferson’s unsuccessful insistence that the Bill of Rights protect humans from “commercial monopolies.” Ultimately, most have either failed or been co-opted because they didn’t address the underlying structural issue of corporate personhood.

To solve this problem, then, new laws controlling corporations aren’t the ultimate answer. Instead what is needed is a foundational change in the definition of the relationship between living human beings and the nonliving legal fictions we call corporations. Only when corporations are again legally subordinate to those who authorized them—humans and the governments representing them—will true change be possible.

To bring this about will require a grassroots movement in communities all across America and the world to undo corporate personhood, leading to changes in the definitions of the word person.

Persistence

I’m not so naive as to think that this is something that will happen quickly or easily or will start at a national level. It will begin with you and me, at a local level, and percolate up from there, just as every substantial reformation movement has, from the American Revolution to the trust-busting Populist Movement of Teddy Roosevelt’s era to the Civil Rights Movement. Change happens when citizens stand up and say “I won’t have it anymore.”

Want a copy of the book? Receive*"Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became 'People' - And How You Can Fight Back"*as a thank-you gift with a donation of $35 or more to Truthout.

If history is any indicator, it won’t be a short or direct path. It may be in my children’s or their children’s lifetime that humans finally take back their governments and their planet from corporations, and it may even be generations beyond that, although the growing global climate crisis may galvanize people the world over to far more rapid action.

Along those lines sometimes the Constitution is amended quickly in response to an overall public uprising, as happened with the amendment to end Prohibition and the amendment to lower the voting age to eighteen, which was passed in response to the rage of teenagers being forced to serve in the Vietnam War over which they had no voting power.

Townships Fight Back

In 2001 several townships in Pennsylvania passed ordinances forbidding corporations from owning or controlling farms in their communities. “They chose to go that route instead of the regulatory route,” said attorney Thomas Linzey of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). “If we just got a regulation passed about, for example, odor from factory farms, then the entire debate from then on would be about odor. But what we want to challenge is the right for these huge corporate farming operations to exist in our communities in the first place.”[3]

In December 2001, Gene Mellott, the secretary for Thompson Township, Pennsylvania, told me that his township had adopted several such ordinances, including “an ordinance forbidding confined animal-feeding operations from being owned and operated by a corporation” and “one that deals with corporations who have a previous history of violations, denying them access to starting up an animal-feeding operation.”

Mellott noted at the time of our interview that one farmer was actually going through the processes specified by the ordinance, cooperating with the township, prior to opening a new animal-feeding operation.

Other townships weren’t so lucky, though, Mellott said. “In one township the agribiz corporations threatened to sue the directors of the township, both as directors and personally. They didn’t have the personal funds to fight that, so they decided not to pass the ordinance.”[4]

Iasked Linzey how a corporation could sue a township official for proposing legislation, and he said, “They allege that the township officials are planning to infringe on their civil rights.”

“Civil rights?”

“Yes, civil rights. Because they claim they’re persons, just like the township officials, so they can sue them, person to person, so to speak. That also immediately throws it into federal court, where the local officials will have to pay more for defense and won’t have the easy support of their local community.”[5]

If corporations weren’t persons, they couldn’t use such forms of harassment to prevent local officials from trying to protect their citizens from what may be unpleasant corporate neighbors.

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And that’s really the bottom line for township officials like Mellott, who said, “These ordinances were passed to protect our citizens [italics added] from pollution or side-effects of factory farms, water usage problems where they may draw down our reserves and making wells go dry—that sort of thing. We felt that a business that large should be regulated. I’ve heard the Farm Bureau is opposed to this, but the majority of the citizens of the township are in favor of them if they’re passed, and they’re the ones who elected us to represent their interests.”[6]

In the decade since I wrote the first edition of this book, Linzey has been busy. CELDF has become one of the foremost organizations in the country advocating for the rights of humans over corporations. It has helped start a “Democracy School” that trains citizen-activists (and goes way deeper than this book into the history of corporate power in America) and has helped or inspired hundreds of communities to directly take on corporate personhood.

Here are a few headlines from http://www.celdf.org circa January 2010:

Maine Town Passes Ordinance Asserting Local Self-governance and Stripping Corporate Personhood

Spokane Considers Community Bill of Rights

PA Citizens Denied Ballot Question to Add Local Bill of Rights: They Sue County Board of Elections, August 28, 2009

Pennsylvania Town Fights Big Coal on Mining Rights

Pittsylvania County, VA Citizens to County Government: Ban Uranium Mining, or Step Aside and We’ll Govern Under a New County Constitution!

Beccaria Township Citizens Appalled: Elected Official Calls Constituents “Traitors” and “A Mob” for Claiming Citizens Have Rights and Corporations Do Not

Newfield, Maine Citizens Adopt Local Law to Stop Corporate Takeover of Ground Water

Ecuador's Constitutional Assembly Calls on CELDF to Assist in Drafting Rights of Nature Language

The Right to Local Self-government: PA Attorney General Corbett Denies It Exists

As you can see, the battle continues. But more and more people are waking up to the issues, which in itself is progress!

Changing Local Laws First

So how do we make these changes? As with the family farmers in Pennsylvania with their and CELDF’s battle against corporate factory-farming operations that risk fouling their air, polluting their wells and river waters, and degrading their land, it will start at the local level.

I’ve helped fund an effort by attorneys Daniel Brannen and Thomas Linzey to check the laws of every single state in the union and Washington, D.C., to figure out how to best phrase local ordinances denying corporate personhood. You’ll find the proposed Model Ordinances to Rescind Corporate Personhood at http://www.thomhartmann.com; and there is a virtual encyclopedia of information on corporate personhood and what can be done about it at Linzey’s Web site, http://www.celdf.org.

In many communities you’ll have to get a city councilperson or other elected official to propose the law; in others, individuals themselves can place initiatives on ballots or before town meetings. Call your town hall to find out; ask, “How do I go about submitting a new law? What’s the process?” In so doing you will be joining all those down through the centuries who have initiated change in democracies around the world.

And just as those who worked for civil rights for specific groups of humans came up against resistance, there may be opposition to your proposal.

When Linzey helped local farmers and elected officials pass ordinances keeping corporate factory farms out of their communities, he said, “A ranking Republican state senator demanded that CELDF be banned from [speaking out in public] panels. The Farm Bureau actively interfered in one local government’s effort to pass the ordinance. And factory farm operatives began attending local government meetings.”

But that was just the beginning, Linzey notes. Next, “The Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce became more active, doing what the Chamber is designed to do—painting people like me and public officials who believe in democracy as rabble-driven advocates of no growth and no jobs. The Chamber also labeled as ‘anti-agriculture’ residents who supported our ordinance.”

And then the corporate public relations (PR) machine turned itself on. Linzey says, “Our work made the cover of the Chamber’s monthly Advocate for Pennsylvania Business, with an article titled ‘There’s No Business Like No-Bizness in Wayne Township’ and a graphic of the township surrounded by barbed wire.”[7]

Nonetheless, remembering former Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’Neill’s comment, “All politics is local,” there’s little doubt that the best strategy is to start where we humans live, town by town, city by city, county by county. Corporations may have corrupted many of our political processes, but you and I still retain the right to vote. The ballot box has the potential to be the great leveler, the remedy of past errors and current inequalities.

Changing State Laws

When enough local communities have passed laws denying corporate personhood, eventually a corporation will challenge one of these laws and it’ll end up before the Supreme Court. This could be a golden opportunity for the court to rectify the error made by reporter J. C. Bancroft Davis in his headnote for the 1886 Santa Clara case. If the Court were to rule that the Founders didn’t intend to give corporations human protections under the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment, step one would be finished.

But if the Court rules that the new anti–corporate personhood laws are unconstitutional, it will be necessary to move up the ladder and amend the state and federal constitutions. To support that effort, you’ll also find ready-to-use draft amendments at http://www.thomhartmann.com.

I’ve spoken with a number of attorneys, constitutional scholars, and a few politicians about all this, and most agree that starting on a local level is probably best. But most also suggest that people should concurrently begin the process of amending state constitutions because corporate charters are issued and controlled by—in virtually all cases—the states themselves.

Making Change Happen

Taking on the conventional wisdom and a hierarchical power structure is no small or easy task. The Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements tell us how true social change happens: from the bottom up. The Supreme Court, for example, doesn’t just go out and right social or legal wrongs. Instead legislatures pass laws, and people challenge those laws. When the challenges have worked their way up through the courts, they end up before the Supreme Court, which then has an opportunity to rule on the laws in the context of their relationship to the Constitution.

For humans to take back control of our governments by undoing corporate personhood, we’ll have to begin with the governments that are the closest and most accessible to us. It’s almost impossible for you or me to go to Washington, D.C., and have a meeting with our senator or representative—most of us usually can’t even get them on the phone unless we’re a big contributor. But most of us can meet with our city council members or show up at their meetings. Lobbying within the local community is both easy and effective. Local politicians are the closest to—and generally the most responsive—to the people they represent.

When enough local communities have passed ordinances that directly challenge corporate personhood, state legislatures will begin to notice. As with the issues of slavery, women’s suffrage, and Prohibition (among others), when local communities take actions that are followed by states, eventually the federal government will get on board.

An Opportunity for the Supreme Court to Now Right a Wrong

These new laws will surely meet with lawsuits, which will bring the question back to the courts. Just as the railroads themselves sought change in the courts, ordinary citizens across the land are standing up and saying, “This is not what we want.” It may take decades, as it did to create the wrong in the first place, but eventually the movement will lead to explicit legislation, or an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, or to the Supreme Court’s reversing the Santa Clara precedent as it has reversed so many other error-filled cases over the years.

The ultimate change would be to clarify that the Fourteenth Amendment’s reference to “persons” meant “natural persons” with what Locke and Jefferson called our natural rights as human persons.

The result could be a new flowering of freedom, democracy, and economic opportunity in America and around the world.

Notes

Arizona Statute, I-29 (definitions).2. Frontier Pacific Insurance Co. v. Federal Trade Commission, 98-713 (1998).3. Comments by Thomas Linzey, published as “Turning the Tables on Pennsylvania Agricorporations” in Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy, ed. Dean Ritz (South Yarmouth, MA: POCLAD/Apex Press: 2001).4. Gene Mellott, from an interview with the author, December 2001.5. Thomas Linzey, personal communication with the author.6. See note 4 above.7. See note 3 above. (not not CC)

Corp Personhood 28th amend

√ First Amendment Right Not to Speak, Negative Speech Rights and Commercial Speech Rights

√ Fourth Amendment Search and Seizure Rights

√ Fifth Amendment Takings Rights

09/17/2009

Sonia Sotomayor and the Corporate Personhood

Showdown? Sixth Circuit OKs New Cigarette Warning Label

Should McDonald’s & Monsanto Have the Same Rights as People? A Debate on Corporate Personhood

TRANSCRIPT

Jailing Climate Deniers

We the People Amendment (HJR48) Introduced in 114th Congress

Representatives Nolan and Pocan Introduce 'We the People' Amendment

Article V Constitutional Convention Could be Nearing

ALEC Behind the Scenes of the Balanced Budget Push

Jeffersonian Project Used to Lobby for BBA

States lawmakers and local elected officials urge for federal constitutional amendment

LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST

DIGEST KEY

BILL TEXT

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:

SECTION 1.

SEC. 2.

Corporate Personhood in the Fast Lane: Jonathan Frieman, Citizen, Takes a Stand

Kasky v. Nike — Do Corporations Have a Right to Lie?

Contents

Introduction

Facts, Reporting and Items Offering Competing Views

Arguments Against Nike’s Claimed “Right to Lie”

Arguments for Nike or for Corporations to enjoy Bill of Rights Protections

Commentaries Not Explicitly Advocating for Either Party

Legal Briefs for Marc Kasky

Legal Briefs for Nike

Nike Inc.’s Briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court

Amici Briefs

Kasky vs. Nike Inc: Court Decisions and Documents

A Few Significant Court Cases in the Evolution of “Commercial Speech”

gOing Deeper: Articles, Briefs & Books

Corporation-as-carpool dispute curbed

Move to Amend Wins Big at the Ballot Box: Americans Fed Up with Big Money and Undue Corporate Influence

Attachments