Supreme Court Overturns Campaign Limits

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government may not limit spending by corporations or other organizations to political candidates. The majority said, "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech." With today's Court decision, the floodgates of corporate money have been opened and from now on we actual citizens will be drowned in a flood of corporate propaganda. So much for democracy as practiced in the United States.

Besides the interesting question of how an "association of citizens" might be "jailed", the more important question is how a "citizen" is defined by the Constitution.

Regarding freedom of speech, the First Amendment states:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances".

A "citizen" is defined by the Constitution in the Fourteenth Amendment as such:

"Section 1. 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".

Now the question is how did a corporation become a person or a citizen and therefore have the rights of citizenship?

Quoting from David Korten's The Post-Corporate World, Life After Capitalism (pp.185-6):

In 1886, . . . in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the legal rights and protections the Constitution affords to any person. Because the Constitution makes no mention of corporations, it is a fairly clear case of the Court's taking it upon itself to rewrite the Constitution.
          Far more remarkable, however, is that the doctrine of corporate personhood, which subsequently became a cornerstone of corporate law, was introduced into this 1886 decision without argument. According to the official case record, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced before the beginning of argument in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that,  "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does."

The court reporter duly entered into the summary record of the Court's findings that

"The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws".

 

Thus, by the decision of a single Supreme Court Justice, without argument of any type, and without a vote of the full Court, a corporation became a person, hence, a citizen of the United States, presumably with all the rights of citizenship. Even more preposterous, this decision has never been questioned or brought back to the full Court for reconsideration.

 

The Decade of the Triple Zeros

Goodbye to “The Triple Zeros” decade of the 2000’s. I grade Foreign Policy a Big 0 because of two senseless and unending wars as well as Al-Caeda, still threatening the U.S., is now scattered from the Philippines to Africa. I give our Economic Policies a Big 0 since we began the decade in the black for the first time in decades, but ended with the Big Recession and the largest budget deficit in history. The third Big 0 goes to our Environmental Policies, or lack thereof. My first two great-grandchildren, born in 2009, very likely will face a world of rising waters, rising temperatures, rising debt and rising violence. My hope is that, by some miracle of human understanding and change, the decade of the 2000 teens may begin a reversal of these patterns of impending disasters.