Corporate Personhood
The Basics
"Corporate personhood" is the legal doctrine that corporations are
persons and therefore are entitled to all legal protections and rights afforded
to human beings. The precedent for this view was set in the 1886 Santa Clara
County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad Supreme Court case, in which a railroad
company successfully argued that by using incorrect language, the Fourteenth
Ammendment, which was written to free the slaves, effectively "freed"
corporations as well. (Technically, the Supreme Court did not make this ruling,
but in a bizarre twist, the effect was such that it did. For more details, see
Thom Hartmann's
Unequal Protection.) By
granting corporations rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, it gave them free
speech; specifically, it made it legal for corporations to lobby politicians and
contribute to political campaigns. It gave them the right to privacy;
corporations can now turn back government officials who wish to inspect
corporate facilities for violations of environmental and other laws. It also
made it illegal for local governments to protect their local economies by
encouraging small businesses by imposing taxes on foreign or out-of-state
companies. In essence, by placing corporations, who have tremendous wealth and
live forever, on the same level as human beings, who are infinitely more
vulnerable and whom the government was originally intended to protect, corporate
personhood has undermined democracy in a tragic way.
Corporate
Rule
This is an outline of a workshop given by David Cobb at the 2003 National Campus
Greens Convention. In the talk, he describes the influence of corporations
beginning with the age of colonialism in England. He walks his audience through
the years as the American colonies sought to free themselves of not just English
governments, but of English corporations as well, how the Constitution was
initially designed to prevent corporations from gaining control, and how those
efforts were eventually thwarted by a single court ruling. Mr. Cobb is seeking
the 2004 Green Party nomination for president and currently serves as General
Counsel for the National Green Party.
Unequal
Protection, by Thom Hartmann
In this book, Hartmann outlines the history of corporate personhood. He walks
the reader through the United States' initial stages, demonstrating how the
founding fathers intended corporations to be handled in this country, and the
oppression of colonists by English corporations such as the East India Company
was a primary impetus behind the American Revolution. He then shows how the
protections given to human beings in the first century of American government
were usurped by corporations in the 1886 Supreme Court case Santa Clara
County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, and that corporate personhood did not,
in fact, follow directly from the ruling of the court. Hartmann outlines how the
case gave corporations all rights guaranteed to humans, especially those in the
Bill of Rights, including the right to free speech (i.e. campaign contributions)
and privacy, and how those rights allowed corporations to undermine democracy in
the most fundamental of ways, resulting in quality of life degradation for
people not only in this country, but around the world as well. Lastly, the
author suggests ways to fix corporate personhood through organizing and
litigation on both the local and national level.
