Seeking and Finding Wholeness

One of the most severe blows to citizen authority arose out of the 1886 Supreme Court case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. Though the court did not make a ruling on the question of “corporate personhood,” thanks to misleading notes of a clerk, the decision subsequently was used as precedent to hold that a corporation was a “natural person.”

From that point on, the 14th Amendment, enacted to protect rights of freed slaves, was used routinely to grant corporations constitutional “personhood.” Justices have since struck down hundreds of local, state and federal laws enacted to protect people from corporate harm based on this illegitimate premise. Armed with these “rights,” corporations increased control over resources, jobs, commerce, politicians, even judges and the law.

A United States Congressional committee concluded in 1941, “The principal instrument of the concentration of economic power and wealth has been the corporate charter with unlimited power….”

Many U.S.-based corporations are now transnational, but the corrupted charter remains the legal basis for their existence. At ReclaimDemocracy.org, we believe citizens can reassert the convictions of our nation’s founders who struggled successfully to free us from corporate rule in the past. These changes must occur at the most fundamental level — the U.S. Constitution.

Thanks for writing about this issue. This is awesome!

by Megan Wade Antieau

Published April 09, 2009 @ 04:17PM PT

“Personhood” is a status within our legal system that grants a certain standing to the entities it is used to describe. Originally, corporations were understood as “legal” or “artificial persons,” not to be confused with “natural persons.” We needed a way, in our body of law, to make sure that we could keep corporations accountable. If a corporation commits a violation of the law, who do we take to court? By designating the corporation as a single “legal person,” a designated representative could be sent to the court and the corporation dealt with appropriately.

A “natural person,” however, was understood to be not just a convenient framework to handle certain legal business, but to be an actual human person; a human being endowed with those rights so proudly claimed in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the United States Constitution. For the first century after the Constitution was first written, when “person” appeared in that document, it was understood to refer to a human being. And human beings were those who had sovereignty and genuine rights. It was human beings who gave up some of that power and sovereignty to the government to take on certain collective actions, and to aid in the protection of those rights.

Unfortunately, even at that point, the application of the term was already limited. Women were not “persons” with guaranteed rights. Nor were black men. But after great struggle on the part of the abolitionist movement, and after the many difficulties of the Civil War, a great advance was made in the form of the 14th Amendment. Black men were legally established as persons with rights, with guarantees to the equal protection of our laws and to due process in our justice system.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the courthouse. In the period after the 14th Amendment passed, corporations began to bring cases to the Supreme Court, arguing that the amendment was applicable to them: that corporations, as legal persons to whom the laws could be applied, were also natural persons deserving of rights. In the ten years after the amendment was passed, by 1910, hundreds had been brought on behalf of corporations; at most a few dozen were brought on the behalf of freed slaves.

Through hundreds of cases the Supreme Court rejected these appeals. Until one day, they didn’t. Oddly, there were no written or oral arguments taken on the matter. No defense of the decision was ever made. Rather, at the beginning of a case in which they were to determine whether the Santa Clara County could charge certain taxes they had levied against the Southern Pacific Railroad Corporation, the Chief Justice at the time declared before proceedings began that the Court understood corporations to be people, and would act accordingly in the case.

Such an off-handed comment could have gone down in the dark cellars of legal history, an odd remark never to be picked up again except for random scholarly works on a unique case. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the idea was picked up and used as precedent. In Minneapolis and St. Louis Railroad v. Beckwith, in 1889, the Court expanded on the ruling, claiming that both the due process and equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment applied to corporations. Corporate personhood was on its way to becoming thoroughly integrated into our legal system.

From: http://www.change.org/ideas/view/end_corporate_personhood?page=2

Read Megan’s blog here: http://www.change.org/ideas/view/end_corporate_personhood?page=1

This is a censored story in the US of A.

take a look at this book: Censored 2005: The Top 25 Censored Stories – By Peter Phillips, Project Censored – ISBN 1583226559, 9781583226551

You can read the book online for free.

Censored story # 13 is the so called corporate personhood:

http://books.google.com/books?id=-og-GZfAuWcC&pg=PA155&dq=corporate+personhood+court+clerk#v=onepage&q=corporate%20personhood%20court%20clerk&f=false

Psychologist, you can read this here:

13. Corporate Personhood Challenged
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in Top 25 Censored Stories for 2004

It was back in 1886 that a Supreme Court decision (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company) ostensibly led to corporate personhood and free speech rights, thereby guaranteeing protections under the 1st and 14th amendments. However, according to Thom Hartmann, the relatively mundane court case never actually granted these personhood rights to corporations. In fact, Chief Justice Morrison Waite wrote, “We avoided meeting the Constitutional question in the decision.” Yet, when writing up the case summary -that has no legal status-the Court reporter, a former railroad president named J.C. Bancroft Davis, declared: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a state to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” But the Court had made no such legal determination. It was the clerk’s opinion and misrepresentation of the case in the headnote upon which current claims of corporate personhood and free speech entitlements now rests.

In 1978, however, the Supreme Court further entrenched the idea of corporate personhood by deciding that corporations were entitled to the free speech right to give money to political causes – linking free speech with financial clout. Interestingly, in a dissent to the decision, Chief Justice William Rehnquist pointed out the flawed 1886 precedent and criticized its interpretation over the years saying, “This Court decided at an early date, with neither argument nor discussion, that a business corporation is a ‘person’ entitled to the protection of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

But more recently, in December 2002, Porter Township, Pennsylvania unanimously passed an ordinance denying corporate claims to personhood. The Township is the first and only local government in the United States to deny these civil and constitutional rights to corporations. Porter Township and neighboring Rush Township have laws that govern the local dumping of Pittsburgh-generated sludge by charging the dumping companies a “tipping fee.” In 2000, Synagro Corporation, one of the largest dumping companies in the nation, sued Rush Township, claiming that as a corporate citizen, the Township violated Synagro’s 14th amendment rights. In response, Porter Township, passed its precedent-setting ordinance claiming that the dumping company, or any corporation within its jurisdiction, may not wield personhood and free speech privileges.

A more high-profile challenge to corporate personhood involves a lawsuit against Nike and its claims on third-world labor practices. In 1998, Nike CEO Phil Knight wrote a New York Times op-ed piece responding to criticisms of Nike’s Asian labor practices. As was widely reported in the mainstream press in mid-April of this year, San Francisco consumer advocate Marc Kasky filed a lawsuit against Nike believing the company misled the public about its labor practices. Nike, however, claims that the First Amendment protects Nike’s statements, making it irrelevant whether the statements are true or false.

In May 2002, the California Supreme Court ruled against Nike saying its statements were commercial speech, and can therefore be regulated by the Federal Trade Commission. This ruling, writes Justice Joyce L. Kennard, “means only that when a business enterprise, to promote and defend its sales and profits, makes factual representations about its own product or its own operations, it must speak truthfully.”

On April 26, 2003, the Ottawa Citizen provided some pro-Nike coverage of the current case against Nike saying, “The case began some years ago when anti-globalizers accused Nike of exploiting workers at its factories abroad. The Nike-bashing was unrelenting, and the company fought back.” Hartmann’s article also notes The New York Times’ editorial support for Nike saying, “In a real democracy, even the people you disagree with get to have their say.” That’s true says Hartmann, but Nike is not a person-it’s a corporation.

By the release of Censored 2004, the Nike case will probably be a settled issue. It is likely that Porter Township’s ordinance will be challenged in higher courts in the near future. However, Hartmann’s research and writings show that the legality on which corporate claims to personhood and free speech rights rests is dubious.

UPDATE BY JIM HIGHTOWER: Anyone seeking to preserve America’s fragile democracy must first understand the scope and magnitude of the powers aligned against it. We live in an age in which corporations have been enthroned and corruption in high places has enabled power and wealth to be aggregated into an increasingly smaller number of hands. As citizens concerned with the future of human rights in a democratic republic, it’s vital that we now speak up and spread the word about “Corporate Personhood,” which lies at the heart of the challenge facing us today.

On April 23, 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Nike v. Kasky, the Nike Corporation’s appeal of an April 2002 California Supreme Court ruling. In Kasky v. Nike, the California court rejected claims by Nike’s lawyers that the First Amendment immunized Nike from being sued under state consumer protection laws (for allegedly misrepresenting facts in a public relations campaign). The U.S. Supreme Court (where the case is Nike Inc, et al. v. Marc Kasky since Nike is the party appealing) likely will issue a ruling by late June on the Constitutional issue of whether Nike can claim exemption from the California law under the First Amendment. The Court will not consider the merits of the original lawsuit, in which Mr. Kasky sued Nike for deceptive practices.

The story in the Hightower Lowdown received no additional coverage by mainstream media sources. However, the Nike v. Kasky case has generated a substantial amount of interest, although the opinions are predictable. As of May 25, 2003, four of the five largest U.S. newspapers had editorialized on behalf of the Nike Corporation. Though all five had received submissions from nationally published writers, none had published dissenting commentaries. The Rocky Mountain News (#27-Denver) was alone among the top-50 papers in allowing space for a dissent to their pro-Nike editorial. The Sacramento Bee (ranked #31) thus far is the only paper to critique Nike’s “free speech” claims in an editorial (while arguing that the Supreme Court should dismiss Kasky’s suit on other grounds).

For more information go to:

ReclaimDemocracy.org (P.O. Box 532, Boulder, CO 80306; 303-402-0105;
http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org)
Program on Corporations Law and Democracy (P.O. Box 246, South Yarmouth, MA
02664; 508-398-1145; http://www.poclad.org)
Alliance for Democracy (760 Main Street, Waltham, MA 02451; 781-894-1179;
http://www.thealliancefordemocracy.org

Source: http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/13-corporate-personhood-challenged/

More censored stories:
2004: http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/y-2004
2005: http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/y-2005
2006: http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/y-2006
2007: http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/y-2007
2008: http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/y-2008
2009: http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/y-2009

@Psychologist
Thanks for your comment, isn’t it amazing how people (like women and black people) were not considered persons.. and now legal entities such as a corporation are considered persons along with being considered businesses? I think businesses do need benefits and must have rights but also must have responsibilities and we can’t just achieved this by considering them legal persons. Personhood should be reserved to living people.

@Psychologist Too
@Liberal

Thanks guys, such great info!!
Thanks for visiting seeking wholeness!