Journal Journal: We've Been Railroaded 25
This utter nonsense has let to all sorts of problems. Walmart, for example, once stopped local communities from fighting its predatory business practices with laws designed to keep it from ruining local businesses, claiming these communities were illegally discriminating against it. Nike claimed it was allowed to lie to its customers because of freedom of speech, though the Supreme Court dismissed its appeal. This ludicrous fiction of corporate personhood has been used to justify all manner of blatant silliness.
In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that campaign contributions by corporations, which ordinarily would be considered bribes or at least undue influence, count as freedom of speech and are therefore protected by the 1st Amendment. Oddly enough, Rehnquist wrote the dissenting opinion, in which he stated that the Court had made a mistake granting corporations the rights of people in the first place.
He was right, of course, except for one thing: the Court never did any such thing.
In 1886, in the case of Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, the Supreme court supposedly issued a decision granting the rights of full personhood under the 14th amendment to corporations. This landmark "decision" has been used as legal precedent for all the foolishness which followed. However, if you read the actual text of the decision, the Court never actually ruled on the matter in a legally binding way. Apparently, before pronouncing the official ruling, one of the justices said something which the Court Clerk, who happened to be a former president of a railroad company, interpreted as meaning that corporations are persons, and refused to hear argument on the matter. The actual ruling doesn't even address the question.
So this incredibly important legal precedent was written into the not at all legally binding summary of the case by a clerk who was a former railroad president. We've been railroaded.
Thom Hartmann wrote about this in his book "Unequal Protection," in which he gives a detailed account of how corporations have hijacked our human rights and used them to justify all sorts of practices which are not equal at all.
So why bring this up now? Because if this interpretation is correct, it changes everything. We've just witnessed the blatant theft of the last shreds of what was left of our democracy (a fact so obvious at this point I won't bother to belabor it) by the corporatocracy. Corporations have obviously accrued far too much power. Nearly everyone, on all sides of the political arena, can clearly see that at this point. It might just be possible to get bipartisan support for a movement to strip these behemoths of their constitutional rights and start discriminating against them in earnest. There might just be a legal loophole which would allow this to happen.
Of course, it would depend on having a reasonable Supreme Court. This seems unlikely, but there is one chance. It is possible that the administration will appoint judges on the basis of religion rather than politics as such, judges who are so incredibly reactionary that they oppose granting rights to people, let alone corporations. This would be horrible news in every respect except one -- that they might possibly be convinced to overturn this insane "precedent" and declare corporations to be non-persons.
The wonderful thing about such a movement is that it need not be national in scope. Individual counties and towns can pass laws stripping corporations of their rights, as Porter Township in Pennsylvania did in 2002. The constitutionality of the law then has to be challenged by a corporation. I'm sure people in my area would get behind such a law, and a series of such cases would put the issue in the national spotlight.
One can hope, anyway...