[GPSCC-chat] Corporate Personhood Abolition From Three Points Of View

[John Thielking]

Hello again,
 
I called WILPF in Boston and found out that WILPF was in fact a co-founder of Move To Amend, as MTA claims on their web site. This fact is not noted on any WILPF web site that I can see. WILPF has some docs on their web site relating to abolishing corporate personhood that were put there before they signed up with MTA.  One of those docs is located here:
http://www.wilpf.org/docs/ccp/corp/ACP/What_Could_Change.pdf
 
The doc describes what could change if MTA was adopted.  I have pasted it below with my critiques in bold.  At the end there is an additional comment by Ralph Nader, the one I was looking for for awhile about what his position is on this.  See below.
 
Sincerely,
 
John Thielking
 
What Could Change if Corporate Personhood were Abolished?
WILPF’s Campaign to Abolish Corporate Personhood is about the question of who’s in charge.
If We the People are sovereign, we must control the government. Corporations are created and
chartered by the government which, acting on behalf of We the People, gives corporations
privileges, not rights. Neither the government, without the consent of the governed, nor
corporations have the right to rule over the people. Since corporations have gained the legal
status of persons, corporations have accumulated rights and become rulers — in other words,
they can tell the government what to do.
Corporate legal personhood was wrongly given — not by We the People, but by nine Supreme
Court judges in 1886. Corporate personhood is bad for democracy, people, and the planet
because it has allowed an artificial entity to legally relegate people to subhuman status. We the
People have the sovereign right — indeed, duty — to abolish corporate personhood.
When corporate personhood is abolished, here are some actions We the People can take that are
currently “beyond our authority”:
	1. Prohibit all political activity by corporations — stop all corporate political donations and all corporate lobbying. These activities are currently legal because “corporate persons” are protected under the First Amendment.
The first amendment protections would not change under Move To Amend proposal (see section 3). Campaign financing by corporations could be restricted by section 2 alone, without resorting to using section 1 of MTA.

2. Prevent corporate mergers and prohibit corporations from owning stock in other
corporations. Regulation of these activities was overturned because “corporate persons” are protected under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Doing away with due process will bring legal anarchy like you have never seen before. Might makes right will be the theme of the day and big corporations will have Uber Rights while the little people and little corps have nothing. 

3. Inspect for environmental or health violations without a warrant or prior notice. The Fourth
Amendment protects “corporate persons” from search without a warrant, protecting
corporate polluters from concerned citizens and regulatory agencies.

The health dept can get a secret warrant to inspect my restaurant under current rules. I'm fine with that. Laws should be passed to make it a crime/felony/jail time to tip off a big polluter about a warrant. Doing that doesn't violate due process. In a recent case, the Supreme Court ruled that although businesses have 4th amendment protections against warrantless searches, this conflict essentially amounts to a procedural technicality since they also ruled that such warrants may be issued without having probable cause that a violation of law exists. See http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv2n4/v2n4-2.pdf for the full story.

	1. Revoke corporate charters by popular referendum. This is now illegal because “corporate persons” are entitled to equal protection and due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. Mob rule should be illegal. Might makes right will replace due process if MTA section 1 passes.

5. Prohibit the erection of cell phone towers and chain stores from doing business in your town,
county, and state. Civil rights legislation and the Fourteenth Amendment are used to ensure
that “corporate persons” have an equal opportunity to be part of our communities. The 14thamendment should be used to insure that small businesses have an equal opportunity to be part of the Internet and that the rights to reuse web sites' content is regulated the same way as the content of books in the library --- insuring free exchange of ideas and a robust commerce and fair competition. Abolishing 14thamendment protections nullifies arguments such as this. Don't kill off the 99% while passing laws that are targeting only the 1%.
6. Stop advertising for tobacco, guns, and other dangerous products. “Corporate persons” are
entitled to free speech under the First Amendment, with “commercial speech” increasingly
protected by the federal courts. This is good. Small businesses will be hurt if this principle is overturned. Just because I make a profit off of advertising hosted on my site should not mean that I am subjected to any less freedom of speech than the homeless man holding a sign on a street corner.  The SEC regulations on the other hand should not be overturned by this principle because other things are at stake besides freedom of speech in those cases.  
7. Levy differential taxes for corporations and restrict their size. The Fourteenth Amendment
protects “corporate persons” from unfair discrimination (although they don’t complain
when they get big tax breaks). Small businesses will be unfairly discriminated against and Might Makes Right will rule the day if this principle is overturned. 
8. Require labeling of genetically modified foods. This is currently prevented because the First Amendment protects the right of “corporate persons” NOT to speak. Corporations currently have no 5thamendment rights. Make your argument in court under the fifth amendment along the lines of Freedom Of Information Act request precedent and publish your own list of products produced by corps that are genetically modified. See http://www.theusconstitution.org/page_module.php?id=28&mid=69 for the scoop on a recent Supreme Court ruling against ATT vs the Freedom Of Information Act. While it is true that this particular case would not even be possible to bring up with a straight face in a pre Citizens United world, the case was still treated as a joke. If Congress would have the balls to regulate GMOs this would not even be an issue. We need section 2 and 3 of MTA, not section 1 to accomplish this.
If corporate personhood were abolished, none of these things would change automatically.
New laws could be written and old laws could be challenged in court to eliminate the kinds of
protections that have enabled “corporate persons” to amass so much wealth and power.

If these principles are overturned, corporations will acquire Uber Rights, Might Makes Right will rule the day and small businesses will be unfairly competed against and put out of business. The power of corporations will increase like never before. 

Remember: judge-made law is not democracy! We the People have the power to change this.

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
1213 Race Street • Philadelphia, PA 19107 • 215.563.7110 • www.wilpf.org



Ralph Nader said the following about this:

Equality of constitutional rights plus an inequality of legislated and de facto powers leads inevitably to the supremacy of artificial over real persons. And now the ultimate irony: Corporate entities have the constitutional right, says the Supreme Court, to patent living beings such as genetically engineered cattle, pigs, chickens and, perhaps someday, humanoids.
This is not to say that corporations should have only the legal rights emanating from state charters that create them. What is required, however, is a constitutional presumption favoring the individual over the corporation.
To establish this presumption, we need a constitutional amendment that declares that corporations are not persons and that they are only entitled to statutory protections conferred by legislatures and through referendums. Only then will the Constitution become the exclusive preserve of those whom the Framers sought to protect: real people.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Nader/Corps_Not_Persons_RNR.html 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cagreens.org/pipermail/sosfbay-discuss_lists.cagreens.org/attachments/20111215/70f3e684/attachment.html>