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

not alone. President Obama called the decision a “strike at the heart of democracy.” Others, such as Maryland Congresswoman Donna Edwards, called
Citizens United
the worst case since the Supreme Court ruled in the 1856 case of
Dred Scott
v.
Sanford
that African Americans could not be citizens. Republican Senator John McCain said he was “disappointed,” and conservative Tea Party activists went further. A founder of the Tea Party said, “I have a problem with that. It just allows them to feed the machine. Corporations are not like people. Corporations exist forever; people don’t. Our founding fathers never wanted them; these behemoth organizations that never die…. It puts the people at a tremendous disadvantage.” 3
    Polls showed that more than 75 percent of Independents, Republicans, and Democrats alike rejected the decision. People formed groups such as Free Speech for People and Move to Amend to launch a constitutional amendment campaign to overturn the decision and corporate rights, and more than a million Americans quickly signed petitions calling on Congress to send an amendment to the States for ratification. Several amendment bills were introduced in the House and Senate, and resolutions condemning the decision and calling for a constitutional amendment were introduced in towns, cities, and state across the country.
    Why this reaction? Most Americans understand the fundamental truth that corporations are not people and that large corporations already have far too much power in America. The real people are not buying the metaphors sprinkled throughout
Citizens United
and know that corporations are not “speakers” or “disadvantaged persons.” Corporate money is not a “voice.”
    Roots of
Citizens United:
Earth Day 1970
    If so many understood at once the crisis that
Citizens United
poses for America, how did it happen? To answer that question, we need to go back to the 1970s and the formation of the organized corporate campaign to put American democracy on a leash. First came a wave of engaged citizens and responsive government; then came the corporate reaction.
Citizens United
could not have happened without the deliberate drive for corporate power and rights that began more than three decades ago. 4
    After a century of industrialization, Americans had by 1970 had enough of corporations using our rivers, air, oceans, and land as sewers and dumps, leaving most people and communities with the costs and giving the profits to shareholders. One day in April 1970, twenty million Americans of every age and political party came out into the streets and the parks to celebrate the first Earth Day. They demanded a better balance between corporations and people and better stewardship of our land, water, and air. Look at the photos from this first Earth Day and you will see families with children, men in suits and ties and neatly dressed women, working- and middle-class Americans, people of all ages and races.
    These millions continued a longstanding American principle of guarding against concentrated corporate power that might overwhelm the larger interests of the nation. This nonpartisan tradition goes back not only to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, not only to Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, but to the founding of America. James Madison, a chief architect of the Constitution, wrote in the early 1800s that “incorporated Companies with proper limitations and guards, may in particular cases, be useful; but they are at best a necessary evil only.” 5 Always willing to be more colorful, Thomas Jefferson said that he hoped to “crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which darealready to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” 6
    In the 1830s, President Andrew Jackson and his allies battled against the partisan activity of the Second Bank of the United States, a corporation. Jackson pressed the urgent question of “whether the