Corporate Personhood

from VoteNader.org

In 1886 the Supreme Court, in the case of in the pivotal case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, was interpreted to have ruled that corporations were “persons”—before women were considered persons under the 14th amendment to have the right to vote.

Ever since, corporations have enjoyed most of the same constitutional rights granted to real people.

But corporations are not humans. They don’t vote. They don’t have children. They don’t die in Iraq.

The people who work for the corporations are of course real people, but the corporate “entity” should never be given equal constitutional rights to real human beings.

Even Business Week magazine, in a 2000 editorial, declared that “corporations should get out of politics.”

We cannot have equal justice under law between real people and corporations like Exxon Mobil.

Multinational corporations can be in 1000 places around the world at the same time obstructing governments, states, buying and renting politicians, and going to Washington to get bailed out by taxpayers.

Congress did not legislate corporate personhood. The courts performed this jolting display of runaway activism all by themselves.

The courts destroyed the semblance of equal protection under law because there is no way even an individual billionaire can approximate the raw power of these large corporations with their privileged immunities, and their control over technology, capital and labor.

Nader/Gonzalez will work to end corporate personhood.

Nader/Gonzalez will work to subordinate the artificial corporate entity to the constitutional sovereignty of the people.

Right now it is the reverse. The sovereignty of the people is subordinated to the sovereignty of the giant multinational corporations.

But the constitution still reads, “we the people”, not we the corporations.

Corporations were chartered in the early nineteenth century by state governments to be our servants, not our masters.

They are now are masters.

Time to restore the supremacy of real people.
References:

* Unequal Protection by Thom Hartmann
* Taming the Giant Corporation
* The Corporation
* Center for Corporate Policy
* Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy