The Supreme Court Sold Out Our Democracy -- How to Fight the Corporate Takeover of Our Elections

[marmar]

from AlterNet:



.....(snip).....

Joshua Holland: Now, although it's been with us for a very long time, it wasn’t until the 1980s that corporate starting breaking it out with increasing frequency. Can you give us just a couple of examples of where corporations asserted these constitutional rights?

Thom Hartmann: Sure. In short form, in 1874 I believe it was, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution were passed to free the slaves. The 14th Amendment says that everybody has equal rights under the law.

I think it was clear to the authors, and pretty much to everybody, that they were talking about human beings -- natural persons. But in the 1880s, a decade later, the railroad corporations, which, as a result of the Civil Warm were the largest corporations in America, started bringing a series of cases before the Supreme Court ... they all started in the 9th Circuit Court in California under Judge Steven J. Field, asserting that because the word "natural" does not exist in the 14th Amendment, that corporations should be considered persons.

JH: Now let me just interrupt you here. If I were to go down to a law school and get out the kind of textbook that maybe a first-year law student would read, it would say that the courts had in fact decided that in the case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. Is that right?

TH: When I first wrote Unequal Protection --the first edition came out I think in 2000 or thereabouts -- I was invited to the Vermont Law School to give a talk on it, and I spoke to about 300 law students, professors and history teachers. And I said raise your hand if you know that in 1886, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, corporations were given the rights of persons under the reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution? And pretty much everybody in the room raised their hand and I think the few who didn't just hadn't gotten to that point in their studies. And then I proceeded over the course of the next hour to demolish it basically by reading from the case.

There was a case before the Supreme Court in the 1980s, called First National Bank of Boston v. Belotti, which was one of the first cases in the modern era that really gave corporations the right to participate in political elections. Massachusetts had this law that said corporations could only give money to ballot initiatives that effected their businesses. But the case involved a ballot initiative to regulate gay marriage, and the banks had no rights to spend money on that -- the stockholders' money. And the First National Bank of Boston had broken that law. The Attorney General sued them and won in Massachusetts, and it was taken to the Supreme Court. And in that case, Justice Renquist -- who, regardless of what you think of him, was one of the most brilliant jurists of our time -- wrote a dissent in Boston v. Belotti. And in that dissent -- what I'm giving you is my bad paraphrasing of it -- Renquist said, "Back in 1886, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, this Court, without the benefit of public debate or discourse, decided that corporations have equal rights under the 14th Amendment." Then he went on to say how he thought that it was a wrongly decided case. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/books/148608/the_supreme_court_sold_out_our_democracy_--_how_to_fight_the_corporate_takeover_of_our_elections/?page=1

[Doctor_J]

1. Whew! That was a long-winded treatise for not much payoff

It's basically the same thing Thom rehashes on his show 2-3 times every week. Here is the punch line (Thom):

I think eventually the pain is going to get so bad that the average American is going to say "Now I understand!" We have a long history in this country of people figuring out that something's wrong, and then figuring out how to fix it. So I'm very optimistic actually.

Very optimistic that the pain will get so bad as to be intolerable? Kind of an oxymoron, and also discounts the Beck factor

There are a lot of people who are trying to solve this problem today. And one of the solutions has been legislative, for example trying to just deal with the First Amendment right of free speech stuff, that was addressed in Citizens United. But I think that that's very dangerous, because it doesn't address the real issue of corporate power. It doesn't address the corporations using the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the 14th Amendment. Similarly, there's a movement by some very well intentioned progressives to amend the Constitution, to specifically say corporations don't have First Amendment free speech rights. And I think that that's dangerous also. Because it not only leaves intact the Fourth, Fifth and 14 Amendment rights that corporations are claiming ... and arguably Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendment rights ... but it implicitly recognizes them.

Soooo.... a lot of hard work is going into something that's really a small part of the problem

And so I believe that the only way to address this is to amend the Constitution clearly and explicitly to say that the 14th Amendment was intended to free slaves who are natural persons ... and that only natural persons, human beings, have rights under the Bill of Rights, and that corporations are merely the creation of governments. Because they are. They are legal fictions, and they have only those rights and privileges that the individual states decide to give them.

I think if we don't do the whole thing, if we only do it part way, we might end up, at least over a short period of time, worse off than we were, even though we'll think that we had a victory.

Thom's been saying this on the radio for months. I don't really see much progress though.

I fear the Hedges pessimistic view is more reality-based than Thom's rosy one.

[snot]

2. One concern I've got about anti-corporate efforts

is to make sure we don't fixate too narrowly on "corporations." E.g., if we just got a law passed that said, corporations shall not be considered to be "people" for purposes of fundamental rights, or whatever, the rich/powerful will simply find another form that's not called "corporation."

It really needs to cover ALL forms of organization that in any way shield senior management from personal liability for the consequences of actions or omissions attributable to the organization.

[KansDem]

3. The best approach would be to simply declare energy, education, health, environment, and defense...

...as "national security concerns" and take them out of private hands.

Let "corporations" stick to peddling pizzas, CDs, lipstick, and running shoes.

What ever made us think that a few powerful CEOs, acting in secret for the benefit of investors, had the best interests of this country at heart?