“Corporations
are people, my friend.” Mitt Romney at Iowa State
Corporations
are obviously not people. But Romney is accurate in the sense that
corporations have hijacked most of the rights of people while evading the
responsibilities. An important part of the social justice agenda is
democratizing corporations. This means we must radically change the laws
so people can be in charge of corporations. We must strip them of
corporate personhood and cut them down to size so democracy can work.
People are taking action so democracy can regulate the size, scope and
actions of corporations.
One of the
most basic roles of society is to protect the people from harm. The
massive size of many international corporations makes democratic control over
them nearly impossible.
Corporate
crime is widespread. The New York Times, ProPublica and others have
revealed Wall Street giants like JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and
Goldman Sachs have been charged with fraud many times only to get off by paying
hundreds of millions. Professors at University of Virginia
Corporate
abuse is even more widespread. For example, Corporate Accountability
International named six to its Corporate Hall of Shame, including: Koch
Industries for spending over $50 million to fund climate change denial;
Monsanto for mass producing cancer causing chemicals; Chevron for dumping more
than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon; Exxon Mobil
for being the worst polluter; Blackwater (now Xe) for killing unarmed Iraqi
civilians and hiring paramilitaries; and Halliburton, the nation’s leading war
profiteer.
Justice
demands we make sure corporations do not harm people. Democracy must
require that they operate for the common good.
In order to
cut corporations down to size, the people must strip corporations of the
special artificial legal protections they have created for themselves.
The story
of how corporations took the full rights of legal persons in one of the great
perverse tragedies in legal history. Corporations have worked the courts
mercilessly since 1819 to take a wide variety of constitutional rights that
were designed to cover only people. For example, the Fourteenth Amendment
was passed in 1868 to make sure all citizens, particularly freed slaves and
people of color, had full rights. There was no mention of protecting
corporations. But corporations jumped on this opportunity resulting in a
questionable Supreme Court decision that granted them legal personhood.
At roughly the same time, the Supreme Court approved “separate but equal” racial
segregation. Thus in thirty years, African Americans lost their legal
personhood, while corporations acquired theirs.
Corporations
now claim: 1st amendment free speech rights to advertise and
influence elections: 4th amendment search and seizure rights to
resist subpoenas and challenges to their criminal actions; 5th amendment
rights to due process; 14th amendment rights to due process
where corporations took the rights of former slaves and used them for corporate
protection; plus rights under the Commerce and Contracts clauses of the
constitution.
The most
recent corporate judicial takeover of constitutional rights is the 2010 Supreme
Court decision in Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission.
The court ruled that corporations are protected by the First Amendment so they
can use their money to influence elections.
Because of
the bad Supreme Court decisions, it takes a constitutional amendment by the
people to change the laws back. An amendment requires two-thirds of both
houses of Congress to agree then three-quarters of the states must vote to
ratify. This will take real work. But despite the growing size and
unrestricted power of corporations, people are fighting back.
Dozens of
groups are working to reverse Citizens United and restore limits on corporate
election advocacy. In January 2011, groups delivered petitions signed by
over 750,000 people calling on Congress to amend the Constitution and reverse
the decision. More than 350 local events were held in late January 2012
to challenge the Citizens United decision.
Groups
challenging this injustice include Code Pink, Common Cause, Free Speech for
People, Moveon.org, Move to Amend, National Lawyers Guild, POCLAD, Public
Citizen, People for American Way, The Center for Media and Democracy, and
Women’s League for Peace and Freedom.
Many groups
are asking for a broad constitutional amendment that makes it clear that
corporations are not people and should not be given any constitutional
rights. Representatives Ted Deutsch of Florida, Jim McGovern of
Massachusetts and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont have sponsored bills in
Congress to start the process for a constitutional amendment to make it clear
that corporations are not people, are not entitled to the rights of people, and
cannot contribute to political campaigns.
There are
also many energetic actions at the state level. People for the American Way
Massive
corporations now rule the earth. But they are recent arrivals which can
and should be dispatched. It is time for people to again take
control. The legal fiction of corporate personhood and the constitutional
rights taken by corporations must cease. Join the efforts to cut them
down to size and restore the right of the people to govern.
Bill
Quigley is Associate Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law
professor at Loyola University New
Orleans Haiti Haiti
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