Resolution Calling to Amend the Constitution Banning
Corporate Personhood Introduced in Vermont 

By Christopher Ketcham 
AlterNet 
Posted on January 22, 2011, Printed on January 24, 2011 

http://www.alternet.org/story/149620/

A year ago today, the Supreme Court issued its bizarre
Citizens United decision, allowing unlimited corporate
spending in elections as a form of 'free speech' for the
corporate 'person.' Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for
the dissent, had the task of recalling the majority to planet
earth and basic common sense.

"Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings,
no thoughts, no desires," wrote Stevens. "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."

Fortunately, movements are afoot to reverse a century of
accumulated powers and protections granted to corporations by
wacky judicial decisions.

In Vermont, state senator Virginia Lyons on Friday  presented
an anti-corporate personhood resolution for passage in the
Vermont legislature. The resolution, the first of its kind,
proposes "an amendment to the United States Constitution ...
which provides that corporations are not persons under the
laws of the United States."  Sources in the state house say
it has a good chance of passing. This same body of lawmakers,
after all, once voted to impeach George W. Bush, and is known
for its anti-corporate legislation. Last year the Vermont
senate became the first state legislature to weigh in on the
future of a nuclear power plant, voting to shut down a
poison-leeching plant run by Entergy Inc. Lyons' Senate voted
26-4 to do it, demonstrating the level of political will of
the state's politicians to stand up to corporate power.

The language in the Lyons resolution is unabashed. "The
profits and institutional survival of large corporations are
often in direct conflict with the essential needs and rights
of human beings," it states, noting that corporations "have
used their so-called rights to successfully seek the judicial
reversal of democratically enacted laws.'

Thus the unfolding of the obvious: 'democratically elected
governments' are rendered 'ineffective in protecting their
citizens against corporate harm to the environment, health,
workers, independent business, and local and regional
economies." The resolution goes on to note that "large
corporations own most of America's mass media and employ
those media to loudly express the corporate political agenda
and to convince Americans that the primary role of human
beings is that of consumer rather than sovereign citizens
with democratic rights and responsibilities."

Denouncing this situation as an "intolerable societal
reality," the document concludes that the "only way" toward a
solution is the amendment of the Constitution "to define
persons as human beings.'

Constitutional lawyer David Cobb, the 2004 Green Party
presidential candidate, recently traveled to Vermont to help
draft the resolution. Cobb says it is an historic document.
"This is the first state to introduce at the legislative
level a statement of principles that corporations are not
persons and do not have constitutional rights," he told
AlterNet. "This is how a movement gets started. It's the
beginning of a revolutionary action completely and totally
within the legal framework."

Such an amendment would be the 28th time we have corrected
our founding document to reflect political reality and social
change. In other words, we've done it 27 times before in
answer to the call of history, and we can do it again. There
is a groundswell of support: 76 percent of Americans,
according to a recent ABC News poll, said they opposed the
Citizens United decision.

The Total Weirdness of Corporate Personhood

The corporate person is the product of some plainly weird
metaphysics. This astonishing fictional "person," accorded
all the rights of a human, can split off pieces of itself to
form new fictional persons, can marry many other similar
persons in a process called a merger, is immortal, can change
its name and identity overnight, and can aggregate gigantic
streams of capital with which it somehow has the right to
speak. Strangely enough, the corporate person, who has
neither soul nor body, is at the same time owned by many
other persons called shareholders who buy and sell its parts
every day -- it is owned, in fact, much the way a slave is
owned.

Additionally, the many-limbed, mercurial, shape-changing god-
person-as-chattel can connive to murder wretched fleshy
mortal persons and not be hanged by the neck or electrocuted
in a chair or go to jail for life as punishment. Instead the
corporate person pays out a paltry sum and goes about his or
her blithe business as if no murder was committed, no crime
accomplished. The corporate person can shut down whole
communities by driving out business, can spread cancers in
the air and water, can destroy fisheries or lay waste to
forests, and do all of this with a degree of impunity
provided under the vaunted protections of the Bill of Rights.
The best-known and most insidious of these rights is that
which allows the corporation under the First Amendment to
speak freely using money -- yet another twist of metaphysics
masquerading as law, and one that has not gone unnoticed by
the highest jurists in the land.

The "useful legal fictions," launched into society as
creatures of commerce and ostensibly at the beck and call of
their creators, have freed themselves to wreak havoc on the
people they were designed to help. Mere humans are arrayed
against a dangerous automaton army, the army of the fictional
corporate super-persons that deploy power with real-world
consequences. If corporate hegemony is rightly understood as
the overarching threat to world democracy today -- the threat
from which all other threats derive when governments stand
captured by corporatocracies -- then it is the absurdist
legality of corporate personhood that serves as the
functional lever of that hegemony. In this epochal battle for
the future of planet earth, the humans against the
corporations, the survival of the humans will depend on a
dramatic legal assault, with nothing less than the murder of
corporate personhood as the goal.

[Christopher Ketcham has written for Vanity Fair, Harper's,
the Nation, Mother Jones, and many other publications. He can
be contacted at [log in to unmask]]

(c) 2011 Independent Media Institute. 

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