By Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap
Published July 1, 2011

Editor’s note: ReclaimDemocracy.org is a member of the Move to Amend coalition. We’re thrilled that our original home base of Boulder, CO is now among the communities driving localopposition to corporate personhood.

In the year and a half since the Citizens United decision, Americans from all walks of life have become concerned about corporate dominance of our government and our society as a whole. In Citizens United v. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court (in an act of outrageous judicial activism) gutted existing campaign finance laws by ruling that corporations, wealthy individuals, and other entities can spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns.

Throughout the country people have responded by organizing against “corporate personhood,” a court-created precedent that illegitimately gives corporations rights that were intended for human beings.

The movement is flowering not in the halls of Congress, but at the local level, where all real social movements start. Every day Americans experience the devastation caused by unaccountable corporations. Thanks to the hard work of local organizers, Boulder, CO could become the next community to officially join this growing effort. Councilmember Macon Cowles is proposing to place a measure on the November ballot, giving Boulder voters the opportunity to support an amendment to the U. S. Constitution abolishing corporate personhood and declaring that money is not speech.

At the forefront of this movement is Move to Amend, a national coalition of hundreds of organizations and over 113,000 individuals (and counting). Move to Amend is committed to building a grassroots movement to abolish corporate personhood, to hold corporations accountable to the public, and ultimately to fulfill the promise of an American democratic republic.

Boulder is not alone in this fight, nor is it the first community to consider such a resolution. In April, voters in Madison and Dane County, WI overwhelmingly approved measures calling for an end to corporate personhood and the legal status of money as speech by 84% and 78% respectively. Similar resolutions have been passed in nearly thirty other cities and counties. Resolutions have also been introduced in the state legislatures of both Vermont and Washington.

Despite the momentum, Move to Amend organizers know this won’t be an easy fight. Corporate America controls traditional media, and has invested heavily in politicians, lobbyists, and extremist groups to oppose our efforts. We can’t expect Congress to act, nor can we depend on the courts to solve a problem of their own making. We draw our strategy and inspiration from the great social movements of history.

The abolition of slavery, the struggle for women’s suffrage, trade unions, and the civil rights movement all started with grassroots organizing. The ruling elites denounced these movements as un-American, and they will make the same accusation against this effort. Others claimed that those movements went “too far,” and were unrealistic. Thankfully, folks before us did not quit or give up. They gained traction with solid strategy, unwavering commitment, and moral authority.

Move To Amend proudly identifies with this tradition of engaged citizen participation. Building momentum with local organizing and resolutions is our best chance of driving a constitutional amendment into Congress. Recent events in Boulder provide an example of this strategy in practice. Months of education, organizing, and advocacy by Boulder Move to Amend empowered Councilman Cowles to provide political leadership and prepared the community to respond.

Awareness of corporate personhood in Boulder is now higher than ever before. It is widely viewed as a mainstream issue, having earned the support of local Democratic Party leaders. Answering critics of the measure, Boulder County Democratic Party Chairperson Dan Gould recently told the Daily Camera that corporate personhood is an issue that must be addressed locally. “This is as important as municipalization, this is as important as school bonds,” he said. “This is immediate.”

Move to Amend is gaining momentum rapidly in communities throughout the country precisely because the problems of corporate power are most evident locally. Developers seeking special favors pour money into elections. Big polluters avoid investigations and litigation by hiding behind their illegitimate “rights.” Bad employers lie to the public about unfair labor practices with no legal consequences. People see it every day. They get it and they’re ready to fight back. Move to Amend is here to help them do that with a strategy for long-term success.

Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap serves on the Executive Committee Move to Amend . She is Field Organizing Coordinator for the campaign. She can be reached at  kaitlin@MoveToAmend.org

April 13, 2011

Fort Bragg, California, Madison, Wisconsin, and Dane County, Wisconsin all recently passed resolutions calling for amending the U.S. Constitution to revoke corporate personhood. In Fort Bragg, the resolution was passed by a vote of City Council, with all members present voting in favor (one member in opposition was not present). See a video testimony here. The Fort Bragg success is the first step of a local effort to get all Mendocino County communities to pass similar resolutions and then press for county-level action.

In Wisconsin’s capital, Madison and in Dane County (which contains Madison), the resolutions were subject to citizen vote and passed overwhelmingly, gaining 84% of the vote in Madison and 78% in the county. The city referendum calls for amending the Constitution to clarify “only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights.”

The Madison resolution reads: Shall the City of Madison adopt the following resolution:

RESOLVED, the City of Madison, Wisconsin, calls for reclaiming democracy from the corrupting effects of undue corporate influence by amending the United States Constitution to establish that:

1. Only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights, and
2. Money is not speech, and therefore regulating political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting political speech.

Dane County residents approved this resolution: “Should the US Constitution be amended to establish that regulating political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting freedom of speech, by stating that only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights?”

Last fall, South Central Wisconsin Move to Amend collected over 15,000 signatures to place the Madison language on the ballot via citizen initiative. They fell short of the requirement, but convinced Madison City Council to place the question on the ballot as a referendum. Congratulations to our allies in Wisconsin!

If you’re ready to help spread this organizing process to your community, on May 3rd Move to Amend holds its monthly Local Action Webinar and the topic will be “Passing Community Resolutions.” Register (free) here. Also, check out the Move to Amend map of towns and cities that have passed resolutions or ordinances against corporate personhood.

While language for ballot questions necessarily is brief, for votes by elected bodies, more thorough resolutions may be useful to get your educational message out. See, for example, language used by ReclaimDemocracy.org members to pass a resolution in the diverse city of Richmond, CA earlier this spring.

By ReclaimDemocracy.org staff and volunteers

On April 20, 2010, the ACLU announced a significant shift in its absolutist “money = speech” stance when it comes to investing in political candidates and parties. The ACLU board voted 36-30 to approve “reasonable limits on campaign contributions to candidates” and spending limits as a condition of voluntary public financing.

We applaud this step forward, but the board failed to address the glaring need to reform its advocacy for granting corporations the status of human beings and bestowing Bill of Rights protections upon them. We’ve collected 4000 endorsements and have been copied on more than 100 letters by individuals to the ACLU on this topic, but it wasn’t until early 2010 that media (NY Sun) started reporting on the internal debate we’ve been working to provoke for so long.

In the wake of the Citizens United v FEC decision, we updated a letter we first wrote and submitted to the ACLU during the 2003 Nike v Kasky Supreme Court battle, when the ACLU supported Nike Inc.’s arguments for a corporate right to lie. Unfortunately, nothing has changed on this front. The ACLU submitted a brief  to the Supreme Court in Citizens United, arguing to overturn decades-old precedent limiting the power of corporations to spend company funds in efforts to elect or defeat specific candidates.

Dear ACLU Board of Directors,

For 90 years the work done by the American Civil Liberties Union has been of immeasurable value in protecting and extending freedom and democracy. Perhaps your greatest contribution has been in advocacy of First Amendment rights. Few people realize the crucial role the ACLU has played in establishing the free speech protections many Americans mistakenly believe have existed since our nation’s founding.

The ACLU’s current position of advocating “free speech rights” for corporations is ironic, given your historic role. Your position is undermining democracy rather than strengthening it. We ask you, the leaders of the ACLU, to rethink your support of corporate “free speech,” as evidenced by the ACLU of Northern California’s amicus brief in Citizens United v FEC.

We believe citizens will never realize the promise of democracy unless we can assert our right to control the activities of the enormous, unaccountable institutions we know as corporations. These institutions have no voice, but they have become instruments by which the powerful few drown out the voices of many citizens.

In an amicus brief supporting corporate political speech in an earlier case (Kasky v. Nike), the Northern California ACLU cites a Supreme Court precedent: “The First Amendment presupposes that the freedom to speak one’s mind is not only an aspect of individual liberty – and thus a good unto itself – but also is essential to the common quest for truth and the vitality of society as a whole.”

Just whose “mind” is referenced in the case of a corporation? Given the counter-Constitutional history of corporate personification, it’s easy to forget the commercial corporation has no voice and has but one purpose–to maximize profits. By necessity all corporate communication is commercial. Corporate executives are under a legal obligation to adhere to that purpose regardless of their personal inclinations to act for the greater good.

The ACLU has claimed supporting corporate “free speech” is merely acting in support of democratic principles: “If the American people are to be the masters of their fate and of their elected government, they must be well-informed and have access to all information, ideas and points of view.” The Supreme Court used similar language in 1978 (First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti) to assert broadly construed corporate speech rights. But even then the Court noted, “corporations are wealthy and powerful and their views may drown out other points of view,” and if it could be established “that corporate advocacy threatened imminently to undermine democratic processes, thereby denigrating rather than serving First Amendment interests, these arguments would merit our consideration.” Can any reasonable person deny that runaway corporate power now is undermining democracy?

As justices White, Brennan and Marshall pointed out in their dissent to Bellotti, the threat to First Amendment interests already was clear: “the special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only the economy but also the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.” They recognized restricting corporate communication was necessary because “The State need not permit its own creation to consume it.”

Perhaps corporate power over the democratic process was not so obvious to some observers 30 years ago, but today it is unmistakable. By 1990 even the majority of the Supreme Court conceded, in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (overruled in Citizens United v FEC), “the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.” Today corporations have their lawyers in Congressional committee rooms drafting legislation.

The problem goes much deeper than political corruption. In asserting corporate “rights,” the ACLU is not really shielding private parties from government repression. The large corporation is itself a governing institution. As John Kenneth Gailbraith observed, the tradition of private enterprise serves “to disguise the essentially public character of the great corporation, including its private exercise of what is in fact a public power.”

If we allow a limited number of corporations to control the bulk of public communication, the forum for political debate will be one in which the publishers and those who can afford to advertise can choose to amplify ideas they find amenable (and then shepherd them into law via the conversion of money into political power). But when it comes to ideas threatening corporate power, corporations simply will (and already do) exercise their First Amendment “right” not to speak.

The ACLU has claimed denying speech “rights” to business corporations would also threaten the rights of the ACLU, other public interest groups and media entities. Yet the Supreme Court has been able to distinguish between general business corporations, non-profit advocacy groups and media companies. The Court stated explicitly in its rulings, including FEC v. Massachusetts Citizens for Life, that it can do so. Indeed it has declared such distinctions necessary to the basic functioning of democracy. In FEC v. MCFL the Court laid out the reason for protecting the speech of advocacy groups above that of business entities: “MCFL was formed to disseminate political ideas, not to amass capital.”

Unfortunately, the Court has not seen fit to follow through with its reasoning and reverse its decision in Bellotti. To be consistent with its founding purpose of ensuring individual rights and liberties, the ACLU should be working to secure such a reversal rather than helping corporations encroach still further on the democratic process.

We understand your reservations about the ACLU supporting any legislative limits on the First Amendment. Therefore, we invite you to join our call to amend the Constitution to clarify that the Bill of Rights is intended to apply to living beings, not their artificial creations.

Sincerely, (More than 4000 individuals and 90 organizations endorsing as of December, 2009. We no longer are gathering endorsements)

See more  background and statements from the ACLU on this issue.

More on Corporate Personhood

National coordinated campaigns unite to revoke corporate personhood, corporate “free speech,” and secure citizens’ rights

Last updated Feb 2, 2010

BOZEMAN, MT – The Supreme Court has dropped the pretense of impartially interpreting the Constitution in favor of unabashed activism on behalf of corporate power, overruling decades-old precedent that limits corporate power over elections.

The Court enshrined corporations — an entity unmentioned in the U.S. Constitution — with the political rights of human beings, overturning settled law that distinguishes between corporate and individual expenditures in elections.

In response, two citizen coalitions have emerged with the explicit mission of overruling the Supreme Court via amending the Constitution. ReclaimDemocracy.org is among more than one dozen citizen groups that have joined forces to advance Move to Amend, a call to amend the Constitution to revoke the Court’s illegitimate creation of “corporate personhood,” as well as establishing a constitutional Right to Vote and safeguarding local democracy.

A more narrowly-focused coalition has emerged specifically to overrule the Court’s invention of corporate “political free speech.” The groups, Voter Action, Public Citizen, the Center for Corporate Policy, and the American Independent Business Alliance, also unveiled a new website to launch their campaign: FreeSpeechForPeople.org.

Their goal is to amend the Constitution to make clear that corporations are not people entitled to free speech rights under the First Amendment. A bill may be introduced in Congress as early as today.

Please take immediate action

Use the tools provided on the websites above to spread word in every manner possible. Ask your elected officials to get on board at every level of government.

We’ve provided primers to help you write effective letters to the editor and to spread word via talk radio (or download this pdf to get both on one double-sided sheet to distribute at local events). And don’t forget social media!

Also go to news websites and make comments to articles or commentaries with links to ReclaimDemocracy.org. Move To Amend or Free Speech For People, drawing people to the broader issues and the amendment campaign.

We are ready to help you with editing (send drafts here). Please point people to ReclaimDemocracy.org’s online resources for educational material or to support the effort financially. It’s time to fund the Democracy Movement at the level of national political campaigns and launch a major media presence!

Please help make the Supreme Court’s overreach the dawn of a movement for real change to Reclaim Democracy! Your efforts can help turn this attack on democracy into a pivotal moment in American History.

To read the Court’s opinions and a see a roundup of some of the best reporting and analysis of the ruling, click here

More of our pre-decision reporting is here.

Read more on the underlying issue of Corporate Personhood