In a recent article in Truthdig, Christopher Ketcham reports on Vermont State Senator Virginia Lyons’ introduction of a resolution for passage in the Vermont Legislature.<\/a> The resolution would amend the United States Constitution to provide that corporations are not persons under the laws of the United States. This in response to the Citizen\u2019s United<\/em> Supreme Court decision that gave corporations as \u201cpersons,\u201d accorded the right to free speech under the first amendment, the right spend unlimited money to influence elections.<\/p>\n According to Ketcham, \u201cthe language in the Lyons resolution is unabashed.\u201d It states that: \u201cThe profits and institutional survival of large corporations are often in direct conflict with the essential needs and rights of human beings.\u201d<\/p>\n He quotes from the resolution, which, according to his sources, has a good chance of passing the Vermont legislature:<\/p>\n \u201cDemocratically elected governments\u201d are rendered \u201cineffective in protecting their citizens against corporate harm to the environment, health, workers, independent business, and local and regional economies.\u201d The resolution goes on to note that \u201clarge corporations own most of America\u2019s mass media and employ those media to loudly express the corporate political agenda and to convince Americans that the primary role of human beings is that of consumer rather than sovereign citizens with democratic rights and responsibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n Denouncing this situation as an \u201cintolerable societal reality,\u201d the document concludes that the \u201conly way\u201d toward a solution is the amendment of the Constitution \u201cto define persons as human beings.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Justice Stevens, in his dissent to the Citizen\u2019s United <\/em>decision, had this to say:<\/p>\n 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 that they had in mind. (37)<\/em><\/p>\n At bottom, the Court\u2019s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.\u00a0 It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics. (90)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The science fiction qualities of the corporate super-person<\/strong><\/p>\n To help underscore the dangerous consequences of the Citizen\u2019s United<\/em> decision, Ketcham describes the \u201cweird metaphysics\u201d of corporate personhood, which is at the heart of the decision. His characterization has the tone of a science fiction novel:<\/p>\n This astonishing fictional \u201cperson,\u201d accorded all the rights of a human, can split off pieces of itself to form new fictional persons, can marry many other similar persons in a process called a merger, is immortal, can change its name and identity overnight, and can aggregate gigantic streams of capital with which it somehow has the right to speak. Strangely enough, the corporate person, who has neither soul nor body, is at the same time owned by many other persons called shareholders who buy and sell its parts every day\u2014it is owned, in fact, much the way a slave is owned.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He goes on to define the reality in which we now live\u2014one in which corporations enjoy the protections accorded individuals in the Bill of Rights but immunity from the often times destructive consequences of their actions. According to Ketcham,\u00a0this fictional corporate person is one who can:<\/p>\n shut down whole communities by driving out business, can spread cancers in the air and water, can destroy fisheries or lay waste to forests, and do all of this with a degree of impunity provided under the vaunted protections of the Bill of Rights. The best-known and most insidious of these rights is that which allows the corporation under the First Amendment to speak freely using money\u2014yet another twist of metaphysics masquerading as law, and one that has not gone unnoticed by the highest jurists in the land. . .<\/p>\n Mere humans are arrayed against a dangerous automaton army, the army of the fictional corporate super-persons that deploy power with real-world consequences. If corporate hegemony is rightly understood as the overarching threat to world democracy today\u2014the threat from which all other threats derive when governments stand captured by corporatocracies\u2014then it is the absurdist legality of corporate personhood that serves as the functional lever of that hegemony.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Vermont will be the first state to introduce at the legislative level a statement of principles that corporations are not persons and do not have constitutional rights. Ketcham quotes constitutional lawyer David Cobb who helped draft the resolution, \u201cThis is how a movement gets started. It\u2019s the beginning of a revolutionary action completely and totally within the legal framework.\u201d<\/p>\n According to a February, 2010 ABC News poll, 8 in 10 respondents oppose the <\/a>Citizens United<\/a><\/em> decision<\/a>.\u00a0Overturning Citizen\u2019s United<\/em> by way of a constitutional amendment may be the one single act that can restore democracy to the United States.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a recent article in Truthdig, Christopher Ketcham reports on Vermont State Senator Virginia Lyons’ introduction of a resolution for passage in the Vermont<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7017,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[572,273,573],"tags":[398,2508],"yoast_head":"\n