TruthToTell Jan 2: MOVE-TO-AMEND: The Case Against Corporate Personhood – AUDIO BELOW

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Back in early November TruthToTell brought you a great conversation with David Cobb, former Green Party Presidential candidate and national spokesperson for MoveToAmend – the strengthening effort to remove the designation of personhood from corporate entities in the United States. That corporate personhood has seriously damaged this republic is clear in any analysis of this nation’s economic, political and social history and the deference courts have paid to corporations regarding the Bill of Rightsand a myriad of other claims that compete with real persons.

This week, we are presenting both an encore of that discussion and the remainder of the hour with MTA Minnesota Coordinator,Nathan John Ness and two of his colleagues with an update on MoveToAmend’s current wok in light of the Occupy movement and their symbiotic relationship.

Here’s a bit of what we used to announce that show last month:

What do we mean by corporate personhood – and why is this not a good thing?

In 1819, the Supreme Court, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, recognized corporations as having the same rights as natural persons for the purpose of entering into contracts and enforcing those contracts. Later, in 1886, the Court’s Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision (118 U.S. 394 [1886]) recognized corporations as persons for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment (states must provide equal protection under the law to all people within their jurisdiction).

Those two rulings have thus provided the century-old underpinnings for a number of subsequent decisions equating corporations with real people, two of the most recent being Buckley v. Valeo, which equates campaign finance with free speech – a true precedent in its own right – followed by last year’s 5-4 Citizens United (Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission) ruling, yanking all restrictions on corporate (and union) campaign monies and allowing unlimited dollars to flow directly to support or defeat candidates, just not to the campaigns themselves.

The 2010 elections demonstrated starkly the fallout from all of these rulings on the make-up of Congress, especially the reversal of the Democratic House majority to Republicans, and of several governorships and state legislative bodies. The best examples of the latter are Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Florida, and the passage of truly onerous, anti-worker, anti-teacher legislation. Corporate personhood gave life and power to the Koch brothers’ wealth as the primary financing tool of both the Tea Party entities and specific electoral contests in those states.

TTT’s ANDY DRISCOLL and MICHELLE ALIMORADI engage local and national advocates on the role of corporations and Move to Amend.