Occupying Corporations: How to Cut Corporate Power

By Bill Quigley  

Bill is a human rights lawyer who
teaches at Loyola University New Orleans and works with
the Center for Constitutional Rights.  A version of
this article with full sources is available. You can
reach Bill at [log in to unmask]

"Corporations are people, my friend." Mitt Romney at
Iowa State Fair

Corporations are obviously not people.  But Romney is
accurate in the sense that corporations have hijacked
most of the rights of people while evading the
responsibilities. An important part of the social
justice agenda is democratizing corporations.  This
means we must radically change the laws so people can
be in charge of corporations.  We must strip them of
corporate personhood and cut them down to size so
democracy can work.  People are taking action so
democracy can regulate the size, scope and actions of
corporations.

One of the most basic roles of society is to protect
the people from harm.  The massive size of many
international corporations makes democratic control
over them nearly impossible.

Corporate crime is widespread.  The New York Times,
ProPublica and others have revealed Wall Street giants
like JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman
Sachs have been charged with fraud many times only to
get off by paying hundreds of millions.  Professors at
University of Virginia have documented hundreds of
corporations which have been found guilty or pled
guilty in federal courts.

Corporate abuse is even more widespread.  For example,
Corporate Accountability International named six to its
Corporate Hall of Shame, including: Koch Industries for
spending over $50 million to fund climate change
denial; Monsanto for mass producing cancer causing
chemicals; Chevron for dumping more than 18 billion
gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon;
Exxon Mobil for being the worst polluter; Blackwater
(now Xe) for killing unarmed Iraqi civilians and hiring
paramilitaries; and Halliburton, the nation's leading
war profiteer.

Making corporations responsible to democracy of the
people is challenging considering Wal-Mart, the world's
biggest corporation, does more business itself annually
than all but two dozen of the two hundred plus
countries in the world.   Without dramatic changes, how
can we expect people in small or even big countries to
force corporations like Wal-Mart, Royal Dutch Shell,
Exxon Mobil, BP, Toyota or Chevron to live by the same
rules all the people have to?

Justice demands we make sure corporations do not harm
people.  Democracy must require that they operate for
the common good.

In order to cut corporations down to size, the people
must strip corporations of the special artificial legal
protections they have created for themselves.

The story of how corporations took the full rights of
legal persons in one of the great perverse tragedies in
legal history. Corporations have worked the courts
mercilessly since 1819 to take a wide variety of
constitutional rights that were designed to cover only
people.  For example, the Fourteenth Amendment was
passed in 1868 to make sure all citizens, particularly
freed slaves and people of color, had full rights. 
There was no mention of protecting corporations. But
corporations jumped on this opportunity resulting in a
questionable Supreme Court decision that granted them
legal personhood.  At roughly the same time, the
Supreme Court approved "separate but equal" racial
segregation.  Thus in thirty years, African Americans
lost their legal personhood, while corporations
acquired theirs.

Corporations now claim: 1st amendment free speech
rights to advertise and influence elections: 4th
amendment search and seizure rights to resist subpoenas
and challenges to their criminal actions; 5th amendment
rights to due process; 14th amendment rights to due
process where corporations took the rights of former
slaves and used them for corporate protection; plus
rights under the Commerce and Contracts clauses of the
constitution.

The most recent corporate judicial takeover of
constitutional rights is the 2010 Supreme Court
decision in Citizens United versus the Federal Election
Commission.  The court ruled that corporations are
protected by the First Amendment so they can use their
money to influence elections.

Because of the bad Supreme Court decisions, it takes a
constitutional amendment by the people to change the
laws back.  An amendment requires two-thirds of both
houses of Congress to agree then three-quarters of the
states must vote to ratify.  This will take real work. 
But despite the growing size and unrestricted power of
corporations, people are fighting back.

Dozens of groups are working to reverse Citizens United
and restore limits on corporate election advocacy.  In
January 2011, groups delivered petitions signed by over
750,000 people calling on Congress to amend the
Constitution and reverse the decision.  More than 350
local events were held in late January 2012 to
challenge the Citizens United decision.

Groups challenging this injustice include Code Pink,
Common Cause, Free Speech for People, Moveon.org, Move
to Amend, National Lawyers Guild, POCLAD, Public
Citizen, People for American Way, The Center for Media
and Democracy, and Women's League for Peace and
Freedom.

Many groups are asking for a broad constitutional
amendment that makes it clear that corporations are not
people and should not be given any constitutional
rights.  Representatives Ted Deutsch of Florida, Jim
McGovern of Massachusetts and Senator Bernie Sanders of
Vermont have sponsored bills in Congress to start the
process for a constitutional amendment to make it clear
that corporations are not people, are not entitled to
the rights of people, and cannot contribute to
political campaigns.

There are also many energetic actions at the state
level.  People for the American Way list organizational
efforts in nearly all 50 states to end corporate
influence in elections or amend the constitution.

Massive corporations now rule the earth.  But they are
recent arrivals which can and should be dispatched.  It
is time for people to again take control.  The legal
fiction of corporate personhood and the constitutional
rights taken by corporations must cease.  Join the
efforts to cut them down to size and restore the right
of the people to govern.

___________________________________________

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