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Los Angeles City Council Calls for End to 'Corporate Personhood'
LOS ANGELES - At a packed City Council meeting that included remarks from a man in a top hat with fake money tucked in the pocket of his suit, Los Angeles lawmakers Tuesday called for more regulations on how much corporations can spend on political campaigns.
The vote in support of state and federal legislation that would end so-called "corporate personhood” is largely symbolic. But anti-corporate activist Mary Beth Fielder, who spoke in favor of the resolution, called it “a symbol that’s going to be heard around the world.”
The council resolution includes support for a constitutional amendment that would assert that corporations are not entitled to constitutional rights, and that spending money is not a form of free speech.
City Council President Eric Garcetti, the resolution's sponsor, said such actions are necessary because “big special interest money” is behind much of the gridlock in Washington.
He blamed a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, which rolled back legal restrictions on corporate spending on the grounds that political speech by a business entity should receive the same 1st Amendment protections that people do. It allows corporations and other groups to spend unlimited money on behalf of candidates, although limits on how much they can contribute directly to candidates remain.
“The flood of money since Citizens United is literally drowning out our voices,” said Garcetti, who is running for mayor in 2013. “If we’re going to be moving forward in this country, we need less special interest money in the political process.”
Councilman Richard Alarcon, who also supported the resolution, said corporations are “trying to take over every aspect of our lives.”
“Corporations are at the wheel of America,” Alarcon said. “And they are driving us to destruction.”
Corporations, of course, are frequent contributors in Los Angeles elections, and each of the council members who spoke in favor of the resolution have been the beneficiaries of such spending. Since 2007, for example, Alarcon has received nearly $5,000 in campaign donations from three corporations and their political action committees: Clear Channel, Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures.
Around 100 people showed up to support the resolution, including members of Occupy L.A. There was only one dissenter, a man dressed in jest like the mogul from Monopoly. He was there to represent the wealthy, he said, before pleading with the council: "Please don't vote for this."
City Councilman, Bill Rosendahl, spoke at a news conference speaks about his support of the resolution:
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30 Comments so far
Show AllSurprising! Is this for real?
Manysummits
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The SCOTUS decision deeming corporations to be persons only applies to their bribery activities. If a corporation is convicted,neither the corporation or its officers or employees can be jailed, whereas if any other class of person is convicted they go to jail.
We need a constitutional amendment proclaiming a corps un-personhood. Till that time tax them like individuals and see how long they would want to be a person.
MOVE TO AMMEND
LEARN MORE
http://movetoamend.org/learn-more
Corporations own the store. If you want them to go out of business, the best way is to stop buying what they are selling.
yes, the only votes you cast that matters are the votes you cast in the marketplace evey time you spend money.
Honestly.
I get so damn tired of the "vote with your dollars" nonsense.
The truly baffling part is you often hear it from people with no money.
Consumer spending drives 70% of the US economy. Collectively, we have the power to bring down the corporations. A general consumer strike, coupled with a general workers' strike - even for one day - would send shock waves through corporate boardrooms.
Yup. Boycott the "worst of the worst." ..........................................................................................................................................
People are beginning to see that the ONLY hope for our country, and the world as we know it, is the abolition of corporate personhood. ..........................................................................................................................................
Among other things, it would: ..........................................................................................................................................
eliminate corporate lobbying; ..........................................................................................................................................
greatly reduce military spending and for-profit wars; ..........................................................................................................................................
help eliminate health insurance; ..........................................................................................................................................
increase budgets for education and health care; ..........................................................................................................................................
greatly reduce privatization of our resources and infrastructure; ..........................................................................................................................................
eliminate corporate-owned elections and expose corrupt legislators; ..........................................................................................................................................
give our country and the world back to the PEOPLE. ..........................................................................................................................................
A Corporation is not a Person.
Isn't Vermont or New Jersey Legislature already passing a resolution saying that corporations aren't persons?
If enough towns and State governments pass these resolutions, it'll at least show where we stand on the issue. And might help to get all of Congress to address the situation.
Yes, Vermont - first in so many progressive causes - is the first state to float a resolution asking Congress to initiate the amendment process to eliminate corporate personhood.
Writing as a resident of the city of Los Angeles and a constituent of Councilman Bill Rosendahl; I am pleased and wary at the same time. Corporate personhood has become a Pandora's Box of corruption that any late Roman Republic era Optimate would recognize and admire. Just as the politicians of that time and place railed against the swamp their nascent Empire politics had become with one hand, they dispense and accepted said denarii with the other. Flash forward to now and one can not help feeling the same way with the Los Angeles City Council, especially when one takes into consideration the way they had the Los Angeles Police Department drive off Occupy LA once they realized it was not a temporary photo opportunity. Similar apprehensions apply here. For the moment, I hope Move to Amend takes this small victory and maximizes it for all it is worth.
Deserves all of our interest and support.
End the insanity of Corporate Personhood, forever!
Privatization is THEFT!
Deregulation is CORRUPTION!
Corporate Personhood is A WEAPON AGAINST WE THE PEOPLE!
Occupy K Street: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/occupy-d-c-coverage
for the first years of the California Republic's history lobbying was actually illegal.
If corporations are persons, then they are entitled to equal protection under the law.
In particular, the 14th Amendment precludes slavery.
Slavery is when a person is owned.
Corporations are slaves if they are persons and must be freed.
Free the corporations from their masters!
I mean, if they're persons and all. I'm all about rights for every person.
14th Amendment
"it forbids states from denying any person "life, liberty or property, without due process of law" or to "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”"
It took me a minute to figure out your comment - that corporations are slaves to their shareholders. A corporation gets due process when it opposes a shareholder derivative action but, as a practical matter, it just gets progressively more perverse when you compare corporate actions, or freedoms, to the concept of liberty for a natural person. .........................................................................................................................................
With few exceptions (e.g., contracts), the legal fiction of corporate personhood perverts the rule of law and the values that formed the basis for our Constitution. The Conlaw professor in chief should be forced to explain why he hasn't addressed the issue of corporate personhood, and he should be forced to either abolish corporate personhood or defend it.
The devil in the details re. the 14-th amendment is that IT has
been made use of by the Courts to "discover" that corporations
shall be persons, and that corporation-persons shall not be
denied " ... the equal protection of the laws." In your argument
the 14-th amendment should be applied to free corporation-
persons from their owners (shareholders?). The "develish"
side of that coin is that the 14-th amendment was used in the
arguments to MAKE corporations to be owned "persons",
that is to say slaves, in the first place. We can't get ahead of
men -- who take it as their profession to USE law to serve their
masters -- just by our making legalistic arguments. We can't win
playing by their rules. "Oh what a tangled web they weave ...."
The Roberts majority opinion in the Citizens United case is a good example of a tangled web of legalistic gobbledygook.
Actually, the decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad [1886] simply asserted that corporations are persons for the purposes of the 14th amendment, and that obiter dictum (said in passing) statement was used as precedent in future court decisions - even though obiter dictum has no legal precedential value.
I don't believe it was said in passing. This wasn't at all handled in the written decision, rather as a basis for hearing the appeal to begin with. I'm not sure at all how from a legal standpoint it could be held that personhood would apply in one amendment "but not any other" when the 14th makes reference to applying ALL of the laws of the US, amendments or otherwise, to all people (or in this case "people").
This is the text of what the court unanimously agreed applied to corporations in order merely to hear the case on appeal at all: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
I'll add that two other railroad cases were amended to this decision on the same basis.
(I'm not saying I agree with the decision, but there's a lot of denial on the left that this happened at all and we need to correct that. Putting fingers in the ears and closing the eyes isn't going to make this go away.)
Wrong again. As another poster correctly noted, the statement in the REPORTED version of the Santa Clara case contains a sentence that is obiter dictum. ...............................................................................................................................
This dictum was inserted by the Court reporter and was not part of the actual Court opinion of Justice Harlan. It is a mere assertion, an assertion without proof, and didn't even come from an actual opinion or from an actual SCt Justice. It didn't even come from a lower court of any kind. It was a purely gratuitous remark by a Court reporter. Perhaps you are the one in denial. ...................................................................................................................................
Keep trying and denying, actualtroll.
You are severely uneducated even in the basic facts of this matter.
I am not a "troll", I make sensible, provable statements about this matter and you muddy the waters with non-facts.
In no way was the unanimous decision by the court to hear the appeal of the tax case on 14th Amendment-related grounds (based in an 1875 law intended to aid southern blacks!) an insertion by anyone of anything. The case had been decided on the merits of California tax law by the state Supreme Court against Santa Clara and the SCOTUS heard an appeal on the case BASED ONLY IN GIVING 14TH AMENDMENT RIGHTS TO THE CORPORATION. NO CORPORATE PERSONHOOD, NO APPEAL.
I keep telling you I don't agree with the decision but let's leave the fantasy world in which you'd like to believe something else happened. Right wingers do the same thing with the income tax amendment, pretending that Ohio "wasn't really" a state at the time so the amendment "wasn't really" ratified.
The fact is that corporate personhood does not appear anywhere in Justice Harlan's opinion.
So rant incoherently on that "basic fact."
"Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person." - David Korten, When Corporations Rule the World (former Professor of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business)
Philiphoko - I could stop buying from corporations, but I don't buy armaments and like things upon which our economy really runs and has run for 50 years. What I buy and whom I buy from pales in comparison and most of them are decent enough.
The only people NOT calling for an end to corporate personhood are the people in Congress, who plan on pocketing millions of dollars in the very near future. That's why we need to vote NO INCUMBENTS in 2012, and get these crooks out of office no matter how much money they pocket and spend.
NOBODY represents we the people. NOBODY keeps their campaign promises. NOBODY protects civil liberties and economic justice.
VOTE NOBODY FOR PRESIDENT 2012 http://nobodyforpresident.org/
If corporations are people I suppose we could see United Healthcare,Exxon Mobil ,AIG, Citicorp or Goldman Sachs run for President. They already run the country to the extent they pay very low taxes and are subject to less regulation than they deserve. According to the Republican Party only people are supposed to pay taxes and be regulated. If corporations are people Texas will probably execute one of them sometime soon.
In my post of Dec. 7, I was not intending to specify exactly how SCOTUS first
admitted and later sustained what I'll term a "corporation with a personality",
which by virtue of it's person-likeness has both the benefits and the burdens
of the 14-th amendment attached to its-self. Robert Riversong's post brought
back to my mind that SCOTUS tortured both judicial procedure and common
sense, all of which I take to have been done SO AS TO REACH CERTAIN INTENDED RESULT, which was more power to big businesses; those
already were corporations just because that form gave them power. Power
to the corporataion, and more power to the corporation-person ! Just as
SCOTUS decided to "make it so".
I did intend to bring more attention to judicial activism turned toward the
rightists' opinions. Such activism is working to REDUCE the status of the
homo-sapiens-people, and to MAGNIFY the status of "bigness"-power-
people. It all amounts to a power-grab; the Supreme Court has long
been at the center of it, and with more recent assistance by congress.
Thomas Jefferson foresaw the danger : That the Constitution might
thereby be made " ... a mere thing of wax in the hands of the Judiciary,
which they may twist and shape into any form they please." He foresaw
danger also in justices' life tenure. My source for above quotation is
http://www.poclad.org/?pg=By_What_Authority&show=b100427.txt
Beware of the "pyramid of power".