Crusade to Abolish Corporate Personhood
Thought people who had seen "The Corporation" might find the following of interest:
I recently heard a talk given by David Cobb (ran for U.S. president on the Green Party in 2004) called "Creating Democracy and Challenging Corporate Rule". It was pretty interesting, and David is quite passionate about his crusade to abolish corporate personhood.
Here are some excerpts from the talk he gave just to give you the flavor of it:
"All 13 of our original colonies were corporations that were created as colonies by the King of England. The land already existed, but it took a corporate charter to create the colonies. The Massachusetts Bay Trading Colony and the Virginia Company were for-profit corporations which subjugated people to take resources back to the king and shareholders. The king had the authority to rule and gave charters to them to govern certain areas, but he could not physically govern all of these territories. To solve this problem, he created Royal Governors (CEOs) to represent him and vested his authority in them. In the 1750s and 1760s the people who later became revolutionaries first wrote begging letters to the king, which were sniveling and groveling. We need to find out how they were able to stop boot-licking and put some steel in their backbones. How did they find the courage? What kind of conversation did they have? They were able to look past the "divine right" of the king and tell the most powerful military to get out. This led them to become people who had some self-respect and who could throw out kings and unaccountable Royal Governors (CEOs) and reject the divine right of Kings. We sell ourselves short to ask for more socially responsible corporations; we need to raise our aspirations, not beg."
"Our political consciousness-raising is necessary for us to understand US history and our legal system. A helpful book for us is Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Currently our judicial system and our government are legalizing corporate oppression over us through corporate personhood. The environmental regulatory agencies serve to regulate environmentalists. If you give power to the people, they will create a movement of resistance. If people have the authority to design the world, we will have a different world. We need to learn the history of resistance; the abolitionist movement with the Underground Railroad had direct action, political strategy, legal strategy, and media strategy. America has progressed through ordinary people joining together. We are inspired by historic social movements that recognized the necessity of altering fundamental power relationships. We recognize that amending the Constitution to restore the power of the people over corporations will not be easy, but we know correcting the Supreme Court is imperative to the progress of our nation. Our movement to amend is now 130,000 people strong and we will figure out how to come to terms with illegal corporate personhood and end corporate constitutional rights."
Obviously, this movement was kind of kick-started by the fairly recent Supreme Court ruling known as "Citizens United v. FEC". From a brochure he handed out:
"In Citizens United v. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the wealthy elite against the interests of the American people. Corporations can now spend unlimited money to buy our elections. The Court has legalized corporate bribery of our elected officials.
Once again, the Court relied on the illegitimate doctrine of Corporate Personhood in order to justify this profoundly undemocratic decision. If you were already disgusted by the fact that over $5 billion dollars was spent in the 2008 election, watch out. The floodgates are now wide open!"
Here are some web sites he mentioned:
http://www.duhc.org/
http://movetoamend.org/
http://october2011.org/
Lets intensively research Cold Fusion NOW! http://bit.ly/hBBwtP