Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It Read Online Free PDF

silenced.
Yes!
The government cannot restrict a “disadvantaged person or class” from speech.
Yes!
All “citizens, or associations of citizens,” must have an unfettered right to get their views about candidates or anything else out to the people.
Of course!
    But wait. Who are these “voices,” “speakers” and “disadvan-taged persons”? They are corporations, particularly global corporations with
trillions
of dollars in revenue and profits. And what was this onerous “ban on speech”? A rather weak law that said corporations may not, within sixty days of an election, spend corporate “general treasury” money to support or attack candidates for federal office. That’s it.
    The Court announced its decision on a cold January day in 2010 when most Americans were anxious about millions of job losses, angered by national debt and massive deficits deepened by corporate bailouts, and worried about our military and global strength overstretched by repeated distant wars while China, Germany, and other economic powerhouses at peace charged ahead. Now the Supreme Court says corporations are “disadvantaged persons” with “rights” that trump and invalidate our laws?
    Since the decision,
Citizens United
has been widely recognized as a notorious and dangerous mistake by the Court. First, the four dissenting justices on the Court, led by eighty-nine-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens, sounded an alarm. Justice Stevens’s ninety-page dissent, among his last work before retiring, may be his greatest legacy.
    Stevens, born and raised in Chicago, had enlisted in the U.S. Navy on December 6, 1941, the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and received the Bronze Star for his service in World War II. He then began a twenty-five-year career as a lawyer and represented numerous corporations in antitrust cases. In 1969, Stevens led the investigation and prosecution of corruptjudges in Illinois and was hailed for his fair, honest, and determined approach. A Republican, he was appointed to the Court by President Gerald Ford in 1975. It would be difficult to find a more honest, moderate, and balanced judge.
    When the justices assembled to announce the
Citizens United
decision, Stevens took the unusual step of reading his dissent aloud from his seat in the Supreme Court’s public chamber. While the reading of the elderly judge at times faltered, his words were unmistakable. Stevens called the Court’s action in
Citizens United
a “radical departure from what has been settled First Amendment law.” He blasted the Court’s conclusion that corporations, “like individuals, contribute to the discussion, debate, and the dissemination of information and ideas that the First Amendment seeks to foster.” Justice Stevens said that “glittering generality” obscured the truth about what
Citizens United
really meant for America, already suffering from undue influence of corporate power. Then Justice Stevens said this:
The Framers [of our Constitution] thus took it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare. Unlike our colleagues [on the Supreme Court], they had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans that they had in mind….
At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few
outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.
    Justice Stevens and his fellow dissenters on the Court were