“The U.S. is a great place to be a corporation but increasingly a desperate place to live and work.”
- A member of Occupy Boston, challenging Mitt Romney on his statement that corporations are persons
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the controversial Supreme Court case decided by a narrow majority of 5 justices in 2010, may have the consequence of uniting citizens across the country at the local level – in opposition to the ruling. “Occupy the Courts” actions, sponsored by Move to Amend and other groups including various Occupy sites, are being planned to mark the 2-year anniversary of the decision which allows corporations to spend unlimited amounts to influence elections. Move to Amend is a non-partisan national coalition working to abolish corporate personhood. To date, over 80 protests are planned at courthouses, including the U.S. Supreme Court nationwide on January 20th. The Salem-based group, Marion Polk Move to Amend, is working with affiliates in Portland to plan an Occupy the Courts event at Pioneer Square as well as an event in Salem on the 21st in collaboration with Occupy groups around the state.
Marion Polk Move to Amend (M.P.M.T.A.) is a local affiliate of the national group which is working at the local level to get initiatives passed in cities, counties and states to assert that corporations are not people and money is not the same as speech. The ultimate goal is to amend the constitution, which members of Move to Amend believe will not happen without a groundswell of popular support. The strategy is to work on the local level through the ballot initiative process bypassing traditional media, Congress and the courts which are increasingly owned and controlled by the 1% in members’ eyes. According to a Washington Post poll in Feb. 2010, 80% of citizens, in the wake of the Citizens United decision, believe that corporations have too much power. As a result the essential democratic function of checks and balances has been overwhelmed by huge corporations with vastly greater resources than are available to private citizens. Of the world’s largest economies, 51 are now corporations according to Institute for Policy Studies.
Move to Amend has 113,000 members in hundreds of grassroots affiliates across the country. Resolutions have been proposed in nearly 50 cities and passed by large margins in Boulder, Colorado and Missoula, Montana as well as in Madison and Dane County, Wisconsin. On January 4th, New York City became the latest large metropolitan area to approve a resolution that only living persons – not corporations – are endowed with constitutional rights through its city council. The Los Angeles city council unanimously passed a similar resolution in December. The Mayor of Portland, Sam Adams, has made a proposal to introduce a similar resolution. Though non-binding, the resolutions are a vehicle for the citizens to have their voices heard. “Outrage needs a vehicle – this is where we start,” stated Bob Wieckowski, on Democracy Now. Wieckowski is a California Assembly member who recently sponsored a resolution opposing Citizens United in California.
Locally, MPMTA, which has approximately 80 members and growing, has been collecting signatures at rallies as well as libraries and other venues in order to show support for the resolution, which states in part: A corporation is not a person and can be regulated; Money is not speech and can be regulated; Nothing contained in this amendment shall be construed to abridge the freedom of the press. The goal is to get the city council to refer the resolution to the November ballot. Several hundred signatures have been gathered to date.
Rich Harisay, co-founder with Kerry Topel of Marion Polk Move to Amend, thinks that the current dysfunction in our national political body as well as unemployment, lack of affordable health care and loss of homes to foreclosures can be traced back to corporate personhood. Ask any person on the street to describe whatever problem they are experiencing in the current economy and it can be traced back to this Harisay says. “Nothing can be fixed until we address that.”
Amendments are also being introduced on a federal level by legislators including Representative Schrader from the 5th Congressional District. Harisay thinks that though this a good sign, indicating a growing awareness, all of the amendments introduced thus far by legislators are problematic. Either they delegate power to Congress (“How’s that working for us?” asks Harisay) or they exclude nonprofits. Citizens United in the original case was a non-profit, as are PACS or political action groups, through which corporations and unions can make contributions to political campaigns. Harisay says any amendment should be simple and clear to be effective and should “mandate, not delegate.”
Harisay believes that while the accumulation of rights meant for people by corporations has allowed them to have inordinate power it is also their Achilles heel because the process is constitutionally unsound. If an amendment can be passed eventually, things will not change overnight but it will level the playing field. “They can’t come back at us with tons of money. Now they are allowed to use bare knuckles in the ring but we have 50-ounce gloves.”
The Citizens United case was originally about a narrow question: Could “Citizens United,” a right-wing group, air an hour-long attack video on Hilary Clinton on cable TV On Demand during the 2008 election season? The Supreme Court said: We are interested in a larger question: Can we wipe away all restrictions on corporate spending on elections so long as there are not direct contributions to candidates?
“They decided what the questions should be even though it wasn’t the original question in the case,” states Rob Weissman of Public Citizen on Democracy Now. The decision that resulted was: “Corporations have a constitutional First Amendment right to spend whatever they want to influence the outcome of elections.”
This endowment of corporations with civil rights has created a Frankenstein monster or “corporatocracy” according to Kerry Topel, co-founder with Harisay and chair of Marion Polk Move to Amend. A corporatocracy is a pejorative term implying an imbalance between the 1% who own and manage large corporations and the rest of us or We the People, the 99%. Such a society values GNP and profit above human values such as a clean environment and affordable health care.
History: How did this happen?
Our American Revolution was founded on rebellion against unfair practices by a corporation, the East India Company, and oppressive government (the British monarchy and the Constitution did not mention corporations.) Corporations were originally set up as legal factions in order to do business: to own property, engage in contracts and sue or be sued. Gradually they accumulated privileges granted to them over time by state legislatures who were afraid to lose business to states with fewer restrictions. These included limited liability for shareholders, virtual location and perpetual existence. “You and I are going to die; corporations will never die,” says Harisay.
The Citizens United decision is the culmination of 30 years of court rulings claiming more and more civil liberties in the Bill of Rights for corporations in addition to the privileges granted by the states. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) is the case seen as pivotal to establishing the precedent upon which corporate personhood was built. According to some constitutional scholars and writers such as Thom Hartman, author of Unequal Protection, this decision/opinion was hurried through, by-passing the usual process of judicial review by judges who were allied with the powerful railroad interests of the time. Until 1886, corporations were not considered persons.
The judges decided that the 14th Amendment, which forbids a State to deny any person equal protection of the laws, applies to corporations. “We are all of the opinion that it does.” The 14th amendment was passed after the Civil War to grant black males equal protection under the law. But the wealthy 10% saw it as a way to consolidate their power. Of the 14th- Amendment cases brought before the Supreme Court in the 20 years after the amendment was passed, only 12 were brought by African Americans. 288 dealt with corporations.
In addition to 14th-Amendment and 1st-Amendment rights, the courts have also granted corporations 4th-Amendment rights protecting them from unreasonable search and seizure as well as 6th-Amendment rights to a jury trial in criminal cases and a 7th-Amendment right to a jury trial in civil cases. The 4th-Amendment protections allow corporations to evade environmental and worker safety regulations by weakening the ability of the government to make surprise inspections. The 6th- and 7th-Amendment rights set up a situation where ordinary people are pitted against multi-billion dollar corporations and the citizens mostly lose, according to Riki Ott. Ott is a survivor of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and director of Ultimate Civics, an organization “working to reinstate the primacy of human rights over corporate rights.”
The situation we are in now was foreseen by Thomas Jefferson almost 200 years ago. In Dartmouth v. Woodward 1819, the Supreme Court ruled that a corporate charter is a contract giving a corporation standing in the Constitution and rendering it less subject to government control. Jefferson warned of the slippery slope set up by this decision and noted that consolidation of power would necessarily lead to corruption. ”The engine of consolidation will be the federal judiciary; the two other branches (executive and legislative) the corrupting and corrupted instruments,” predicted Thomas Jefferson in 1821.
John Gear, a local attorney and member of ACLU, says that he supports Move to Amend, though ACLU has no official position on corporate personhood. ACLU was formed in 1920 to protect the rights of citizens from intrusions of government.
Gear, who does not speak for ACLU, states that he sees the amendment as the only solution to the abuses of the current Supreme Court who have carried the metaphor of corporate personhood too far, which has allowed corporate interests to control the government.
The Northern California ACLU, which filed an amicus brief, supported the narrow case before the court in Citizens United before the court introduced and ruled on the broader issue of corporate personhood. Gear says that the second part of MPMTA’s proposed amendment asserting that money does not equal speech is problematic, however. (Buckley v. Valeo 1976 was the Supreme Court ruling that said money is equivalent to speech. This ruling expanded the First Amendment protections to include financial contributions to candidates of parties.) Though Move to Amend thinks this ruling is problematic, Gear thinks the rule is valid and warns that we should not let any of our rights be compromised. Groups like MTA, for instance, would not want to limit their ability to make a promotional video or cut off an option to pay people to gather signatures.
Gear’s position is that “money enables speech”, and we would not want to abolish that. Gear states that the solution is “more speech, not less.” It’s not a simple solution, but publically financed elections would go a long way towards solving the problem: “Corporations want a weak government because government is a source of power opposing them through regulations that protect the public but affect their bottom line. They hate that. By failing to fund our own elections, we let the people who are most opposed to government have the biggest role in deciding who gets into government. Exxon would not let its competitor, say Shell Oil, sit on its board of directors… yet that is essentially what happens now through corporate influence on elections.”
“We have to get back to having people in charge of the system. The solution to corporations having too much power is publically financed elections, not restrictions on speech,” said Gear.
Though a constitutional amendment is a big project, Move to Amend and similar groups are counting on the grassroots efforts and point to the Civil Rights and Women’s Suffrage movements in our history. “It will take a long time but we will win,” says Robert Weissman of Public Citizen.
“Human rights begin… in small places, close to home… [in] the world of the individual person, the neighborhood… school… factory… office.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt
To get involved: Marion Polk Move to Amend is holding its next general meeting on Monday, the 16th of January at 6:30 at the IKE Box, 299 Cottage St. NE, at Chemeketa in Salem. For more information on MPMTA, as well as Occupy the Courts actions in Salem and Portland, contact …
