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From the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling:

Majority Opinion (Justice Kennedy, joined by Thomas, Roberts, Scalia and Alito)
http://bit.ly/5VdnbB

Dissenting Opinion (Justice Stevens, joined by Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Breyer)
http://bit.ly/5MEPOJ

Other Justices' Dissents or Concurrences
http://bit.ly/6zasOH

Justice Stevens, in dissent, was compelled to state the obvious:

. . . . corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their “personhood” often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of “We the People” by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.

Looking to learn more? Here are some good places to begin:

  1. Corporate Personhood in a Nutshell
  2. History of the Corporation
  3. The Need for Constitutional Reform
  4. Building a Democracy Movement
  5. Reports and Commentary on Citizens United

1. Corporate Personhood in a Nutshell

There are two conceptions of corporate personhood. The first simply bestows upon corporations the ability to engage in many legal actions (e.g. enter into contracts, sue, be sued, etc). This is widely accepted and we do not object to this.

However, corporate personhood also commonly refers to the Supreme Court - created precedent of corporations enjoying constitutional rights that were intended solely for human beings. We believe this form of corporate personhood corrupts our Constitution and must be corrected by amending the Constitution.

Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution ever mention corporations, which were rare entities at our nation’s founding. But thanks to decades of rulings by Justices who molded the law to favor elite interests, corporations today are granted privileges that empower them to deny citizens the right to full self-governance. For example, the Supreme Court has:

  • prohibited routine inspections of corporate property without a warrant or prior permission, even though scheduling such visits may permit a company to hide threats to public health and safety. (Marshall v Barlow’s, 1978)
  • struck down state laws requiring companies to disclose product origins (International Dairy v. Amnestoy, [pdf] 1996), thus creating “negative free speech rights” for corporations and preventing us from knowing what’s in our food.
  • prohibited citizens wanting to defend their local businesses and community from corporate chains encroachment from enacting progressive taxes on chain stores. (Liggett v. Lee, 1933)
  • struck down state laws restricting corporate spending on ballot initiatives and referenda, enabling corporations to block citizen action through what, theoretically, is the purest form of democracy. (First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti).

The notorious 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad is just one in a long series of Supreme Court cases that entrenched "corporate personhood" in law. Justices since have 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 wield ever-increasing control over jobs, natural assets, politicians, even judges and the law.
We believe corporations are not persons and possess only the privileges citizens and their elected representatives willfully grant them. Our Amendment will reverse the Court’s invention of corporate personhood and limit corporations to their proper role: doing business.

2. History of the Corporation

Sourcewatch: Corporate Rights
This page explores the Supreme Court's revolutionary and unconstitutional decision to asserting federal laws cannot limit corporate "speech."
See: http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Portal:Corporate_Rights

Abolish Corporate Personhood
This speech, given by Molly Morgan of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, follows the history of corporate power from the American Revolution to the present, showing how elites have used the Constitution, the Courts and the corporation to quash the rights of We the People.
See: http://www.wilpf.org/docs/ccp/corp/ACP/Personhood_Talk.pdf

The Democracy Crisis
In this PowerPoint presentation, Riki Ott--an Alaska marine biologist who fought Exxon for twenty years after the Valdez oil spill--shows that the spill was not just an ecological crisis, but a manifestation of a democracy crisis.
See: http://ultimatecivics.org/spresent.html

Corporatization: An Internal Clash of Civilizations
The authors write that, "Within the framework of U.S. constitutional law, in which personhood conveys fundamental protections against state action, the dubious doctrine of corporate personhood has allowed corporations to gain constitutional insulation from democratic control of corporate investment in key activities, including electioneering, lobbying, advertising, resource extraction, and manufacturing."
See: http://www.democracysquare.org/files_public/TNIyearb05us.pdf

The "Right" to Harm the Environment
Jan Edwards and Alis Valencia connect corporate personhood to the destruction of the environment, citing specific instances in which corporations used the Bill of Rights to harm the planet and communities.
See: http://www.californiademocracy.org/corporations/resource/environ.pdf

Taking Care of Business
Richard Grossman explains the history of corporate rule and explains how states can use the corporate charter power to abolish illegitimate corporate "rights."
See: http://www.nancho.net/bigbody/chrtink1.html

The Essence of the Corporation
Ben Manski follows the legal history of the corporation from the ancient world to the early days of the Republic in order to understand its essence.
See: http://www.libertytreefdr.org/publications/manski_essence_of_the_corpora...

3. The Need for Constitutional Reform

Significant Cases in the Evolution of Corporate "Rights"
Reclaim Democracy has developed an excellent compendium of 20th century federal court decisions expanding federal protection for corporations.
See: http://reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/

Timeline
This timeline by Jan Edwards lays out the cases that gave corporations the
rights of persons and compares it to the struggles for rights for actual
persons.
See: http://www.californiademocracy.org/corporations/resource/timeline.pdf

Establishing a Constitutional Right to Vote
Don't Americans already have secure voting rights? In a word, no.
See: http://bit.ly/6S1RnQ

Voter Bill of Rights
The Voter Bill of Rights is a document embraced by hundreds of voting rights organizations. It was originally a product of the 2001 Democracy Summer program, following the election debacle of 2000. It was amended for the 2004 and 2008 No Stolen Elections! campaigns.
See: http://www.nomorestolenelections.org/resources/voter_bill_of_rights

Why So Many Good State Laws Are "Unconstitutional"
Corporate anthropologist Jane Anne Morris writes that, "Using the commerce clause, the "free trade" mantra of the time, they decided that states could not ban the manufacture, import, and sale of a substance that obviously many states wanted to ban. In other words [the] . . . . Supreme Court acted as a legislature."
See: http://www.poclad.org/bwa/Spring08.htm#pinkoleo

Municipal Government and Local Democracy
As provided by CELDF, J. Allen Smith informed us in 1907 that, "The powerful corporate interests engaged in the exploitation of municipal franchises are securely entrenched behind a series of constitutional and legal checks on the majority which makes it extremely difficult for public opinion to exercise any effective control over them."
See: http://www.celdf.org/HomeRule/JAllenSmithMunicipalGovernment/tabid/227/D...

Why Regulation Alone Won't Work
Regulatory agencies are often controlled by the industries they were formed to regulate. There is even a term for the phenomenon-- "regulatory capture." And a captured regulatory agency that serves the interests of the corporations that are supposed to regulate--with the power of the government behind them-- is very often worse than no regulation whatsoever. Corporate anthropologist Jane Anne Morris describes the history, and suggests what to do about it.
See: http://www.poclad.org/bwa/fall98.htm

4. Building a Democracy Movement

Extending Democracy
In this video, Ben Manski, Diane Farsetta and Kevin Alexander Gray join the Progressive Magazine in addressing the challenge of extending democracy in the United States:
See: http://www.democracysquare.org/publications/video_extending_democracy

How and Why the People of Humboldt County Defended Local Democracy
Katilin Sopoci-Belknap, co-campaign manager the Measure T initiative banning corporate money in local elections, speaks at a community forum about the history of corporate power and how corporations hijacked the ability of communities to govern and defend themselves against abuse.
http://votelocalcontrol.org/sopoci-belknap.htm

5. Reports and Commentary on Citizens United

Justices Turn Minor Movie Into Blockbuster Case by Adam Liptak

Money Grubbers by Rick Hasen

The Pinocchio Project by Dahlia Lithwick

Corporations Have No Business in Elections by Monica Youn