3041 Corporate Personhood: The Undermining of Our Democracy
Sponsor: The Pacific NW Chapter of UUs for a
Just Economic Community
Thom Hartmann, author of Unequal Protection: The Rise
of Corporate Dominance and the Theft
of Human Rights  ,
drew frequent applause in presenting the American history
class you never took.
Starting with the founding in 1600 of “the world’s
first transnational company” and an entirely new view
of the Boston Tea Party, through the writing of the Constitution
and Bill of Rights, Hartmann highlighted the wisdom of the
founding fathers, the prescience of several presidents, and
the mistake that gave corporations equal status with humans.
In discovering a little-known first-person account of the
Boston Tea Party, Hartmann described an act of vandalism aimed
to prevent a corporation from “pulling a Wal-Mart,”
as he described the event of 1773.
In 1767 there was a great recession and the British East
India Company was overextended. Because the Company had always
viewed the colonies as markets, it “persuaded”
the British government (King George himself was a stockholder)
to pass the Tea Act of ’73, which lowered the tax on
the Company’s tea and even gave the Company a rebate
amounting to $400 million (in today’s dollars). Most
important, it also criminalized tea trade by anyone else,
punishable by death.
Killing competition and limiting their tea choices to the
“house brand” was what sparked the Boston Tea
party and convinced such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson to
get behind the idea of breaking with Great Britain.
When it came to writing a Constitution for the resulting
new nation, Hartmann said, the founders looked to John Locke
and the Iroquois nation and other native tribes—Locke
for the God-given, inalienable rights of every person and
the Iroquois for the idea that the power to govern comes from
the governed.
The result was that the Constitution does not grant rights
of governance—it limits the privileges of government,
tells what government should, can, and must do and certain
things it must never do.
Thomas Jefferson, who was in Paris while the Constitution
was created, argued that the document was inadequate without
spelling out the natural rights of the new country’s
citizens and protecting them from overreaching governments
and commercial monopolies like the East India Company. He
fought hard for inclusion of “commerce free from monopolies,”
but because the states already had laws tightly constraining
corporations, he lost that battle. The state laws were tough;
for example, they made corporate efforts to influence government
a felony.
In 1886 came Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad
Corp., the U.S. Supreme Court case used ever since to
grant and expand corporations’ rights as persons.
The Bill of Rights, according to Jefferson, was supposed
to be “the club that people used to beat back the power
of corporations,” Hartmann said. This ruling was the
point when the club was handed back. Later rulings, based
on this one, have held that money equals free speech, effectively
nullifying those state laws restricting corporate interference
in the political process. Today corporations can claim the
right of privacy but people lose that right when they go to
work for them.
“They can look at your bodily fluids, your keystrokes,
your phone conversations,” Hartmann said. “Nike
has even argued that, because the right to freedom of speech
gives a person the right to lie, a corporation has that right,
too.
“The argument on personhood used in the Santa Clara
County case,” he said, “was that the 14th Amendment
granted rights to slaves, saying any person born or naturalized
here is a citizen with all rights. Because the amendment didn’t
distinguish between natural and artificial persons, as the
English Constitution did, the railroad claimed it was a person,
too.”
But the actual case didn’t rule on that argument at
all, Hartmann said.
“I read the case, and it’s all about taxing fence
posts. So I’m reading ‘fence posts…fence
posts…’ pages and pages about fence posts all
the way to the end. And there, at the very end it says of
the other arguments made in the case, ‘the
court did not rule’ on them.
“The court did not rule on the argument of corporate
personhood! But at the top of the document, in the ‘headnotes’
written by the clerk of the court to summarize the case, it
says the court ruled in the case that ‘corporations
are persons.’ Headnotes have no legal status but they
are like Lawyer Cliff’s Notes and often that’s
all lawyers read.
“So it was a mistake!” Hartmann shouted. “A
hundred-and-twenty years of law based on a mistake!”
And because some 30 cases have quoted that case, it is now
law.
“What can we do?” he asked. “Mendocino,
California, passed a resolution saying corporations don’t
have the rights of persons. Communities in Pennsylvania and
other towns and counties did the same. Passing ordinances
that educate and wake people up have no legal consequences
so your town can’t be sued by corporations and go bankrupt.
Web sites Hartmann mentioned:
Unequalprotection.com
Commondreams.org
Reported for the Web by Kathy Rawle, edited by Margy
Levine Young; Web Design by Julie Albanese
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