The Wal-Martization of American Rights: When is a Corporation a Person? All the

[Guest guest]

The Wal-Martization of American Rights: When is a Corporation a

Person? All the Time Now. An Interview with Thom Hartmann on

" Corporate Personhood. " Have Americans Become Second Class Citizens,

As Corporations Seize the Bill of Rights?

 

 

http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/01/int05004.html

 

 

January 28, 2005

SEND THIS PAGE TO A FRIEND

 

 

Fight Ignorance:

Read BuzzFlash

click for more

 

Support our efforts, get . . .

 

 

 

 

 

Is Wal-Mart a Person? Thom Hartmann Tells Why It Is--Kind of--But Not

Really

 

...corporations are asserting that they...should stand

side-by-side with humans in having access to the Bill of Rights. Nike

asserted...that these corporations have First Amendment rights of free

speech. Dow Chemical...asserted it has Fourth Amendment privacy rights

and could refuse to allow the EPA to do surprise inspections of its

facilities. J.C. Penney asserted...that it had a Fourteenth Amendment

right to be free from discrimination -- the Fourteenth Amendment was

passed to free the slaves after the Civil War -- and that communities

that were trying to keep out chain stores were practicing illegal

discrimination. Tobacco and asbestos companies asserted that they had

Fifth Amendment rights to keep secret what they knew about the dangers

of their products.

 

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

 

Thom Hartmann is a familiar name to regular BuzzFlash readers, thanks

to his contribution of monthly book reviews. He also hosts a

syndicated radio talk show, heard on radio stations from coast to

coast, the Sirius Satellite Radio system, on CRN, and on

RadioPower.org. As the author of Unequal Protection: The Rise of

Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights, he has given us a

history lesson in how corporations have insinuated themselves into the

U.S. Constitution and claimed for themselves the rights that were

meant for living, breathing human beings. Here Thom Hartmann answers

our questions about personhood, rights, constitutional history and big

business as it impacts politics and each and every American.

 

* * *

 

BuzzFlash: Let's start with the basic premise of Unequal Protection.

In essence, what is " corporate personhood " in terms of current

American law?

 

Thom Hartmann: " Corporate personhood " is the notion that a corporation

has the rights of a person under the constitution.

 

Prior to the founding of this nation, with the exception of a brief

period in Greece, the history of the previous 7000 years of what we

called " civilization " was that one of three types of rulers were the

sole holders of rights. Society was ruled by either warlord kings;

theocratic popes, mullahs or variations thereof; or the very rich. And

they ruled both by virtue of their personal wealth, power, or

knowledge of a god's will, and because they represented a ruling

institution (the kingdom, church, or either land or a corporation).

 

Largely through the power of their institutions, they were the sole

holders of " rights, " and all the non-institutional humans -- the

serfs, common people, and even the very tiny precursor of the middle

class, the mercantilists and guildsmen -- had only " privileges, " which

could be revoked more-or-less at will by the holders of the rights.

 

The extraordinary experiment that was the basis of American democracy

in a constitutionally limited republic was to flip this pyramid upside

down. The Founders of this republic said in the Declaration of

Independence, and the Framers of the Constitution proclaimed in the

preamble to the Constitution, that humans -- " all men " to quote the

Declaration, " We the People " to quote the Constitution -- were the

sole holders of rights from that point forward.

 

This was firmly nailed into the Constitution by the addition of the

Bill of Rights, which gave humans a huge club they could use to beat

back government if it ever were to become oppressive.

 

Thus, with the founding of America, for the first time, only humans

could hold rights. Institutions -- churches, civic groups,

corporations, clubs, even government itself -- held only privileges.

Of course, you'd want government -- that is, We the People through our

elected representatives -- to control the privileges of institutions

like corporations. And that's what we did. For example, to prevent

kingdom-like accumulations of wealth that could, as Jefferson noted,

" threaten the state " itself, corporations in the first hundred or so

years of this nation couldn't exist longer than 40 years, and then had

to be dissolved. Their first purpose had to be to serve the public,

and their second purpose to make money. Their books and all their

activities had to be fully open and available to inspection by We the

People. Their officers and directors could be held personally liable

for crimes committed by the corporation.

 

This held as a legal doctrine until the end of the 1800s, and even

after that largely held until the Reagan Revolution, when corporations

began reaching back to an obscure headnote written by a corrupt

Supreme Court clerk in an otherwise obscure railroad tax case in 1886.

 

But today corporations are asserting that they -- and only they --

should stand side-by-side with humans in having access to the Bill of

Rights. Nike asserted before the Supreme Court last year, as Sinclair

Broadcasting did in a press release last month, that these

corporations have First Amendment rights of free speech. Dow Chemical

in a case it took to the Supreme Court asserted it has Fourth

Amendment privacy rights and could refuse to allow the EPA to do

surprise inspections of its facilities. J.C. Penney asserted before

the Supreme Court that it had a Fourteenth Amendment right to be free

from discrimination -- the Fourteenth Amendment was passed to free the

slaves after the Civil War -- and that communities that were trying to

keep out chain stores were practicing illegal discrimination. Tobacco

and asbestos companies asserted that they had Fifth Amendment rights

to keep secret what they knew about the dangers of their products.

With the exception of the Nike case, all of these attempts to obtain

human rights for corporations were successful, and now they wield this

huge club against government that was meant to protect relatively

helpless and fragile human beings.

 

BuzzFlash: You overturn some interesting misconceptions about the

Boston Tea Party. Can you explain what the Boston Tea Party was really

about and what it shows about the revolutionaries' attitudes toward

large multinational commercial enterprises that were intertwined with

the British government?

 

Thom Hartmann: Sure. This was a particularly fascinating one for me.

When I started writing Unequal Protection, it was the result of having

spent about four years reading the letters and personal writings of

Thomas Jefferson. I wanted to talk about the Founders' and the

Framers' vision for this new nation they were bringing into being. And

Jefferson noted a few times " that incident in the Boston harbor, "

which triggered the general insurrections in Boston, the Boston

Massacre, and the whole chain of events that led to the Declaration of

Independence.

 

It wasn't called the Boston Tea Party until the 1830s, after Jefferson

had died. Anyhow, I wanted to know more about it, so I went off in

search of a good book on the topic.

What I found was there were really no good modern books in print, at

least that I could find, examining the Tea Party. Most were just

children's books, and terribly inaccurate. Part of this was probably

because the participants had all sworn a 50-year oath of silence, and

none survived to tell the tale but one. Which is what led me to find,

rather serendipitously in an obscure antiquarian bookstore, a copy of

" Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party with a Memoir of George R.T.

Hewes, a Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots Who Drowned the Tea

in Boston Harbor in 1773, " printed in Oswego, New York by S. S. Bliss

in 1834.

 

In this book, Hewes, who was a teenager at the time of the Tea Party

(which he named in 1834), tells that the whole point of this

million-dollar (in today's terms) act of vandalism was to protest a

tax cut -- a corporate tax break -- that the British had given to the

East India Company, which would allow it to unfairly compete with and

wipe out the thousands of small entrepreneurial tea importers and tea

shops that dotted the colonies.

 

I'd thought I remembered from school that the Tea Act of 1773 was a

tax increase, so I had to check the Encyclopedia Britannica, which,

sure enough, said that the Tea Act was a tax cut. So what the

colonists were protesting was the principle of taxation without

representation, but what they meant was what today would be termed

" tax breaks for multinational corporations while the average person

gets screwed. "

 

Anyhow, I was so transfixed by Hewes' account, which had remained

hidden since 1834 -- the book was apparently published by a little

local press in his hometown -- that I reprinted a good chunk of it,

which is still eminently and brilliantly readable, in Unequal Protection.

 

As Hewes noted:

 

" The [East India] Company, however, received permission to

transport tea, free of all duty [tax], from Great Britain to America… "

allowing it to wipe out its small competitors and take over the tea

business in all of America. " Hence, it was no longer the small vessels

of private merchants, who went to vend tea for their own account in

the ports of the colonies, but, on the contrary, ships of an enormous

burthen, that transported immense quantities of this commodity, which

by the aid of the public authority, might, as they supposed, easily be

landed, and amassed in suitable magazines.

 

Accordingly the Company sent its agents at Boston, New York, and

Philadelphia, six hundred chests of tea, and a proportionate number to

Charleston, and other maritime cities of the American continent. The

colonies were now arrived at the decisive moment when they must cast

the dye, and determine their course…

 

It was a real shock to me to discover that the event that kicked over

the first domino leading directly to the American Revolution was a

direct-action protest against multinational corporate power, and that

discovery, along with the really incredible discovery I made when I

read that 1886 tax case that supposedly gave corporations human

rights, led me to change the scope and title of the book from one

about Jefferson -- I later wrote that one -- and instead into a book

about the history of corporate power in America.

 

BuzzFlash: What changed after the Revolution? You date the rise of

" corporate personhood " to the post Civil-War era and the 14th

Amendment. Can you briefly explain?

 

Thom Hartmann: Well, I've described how corporations were held on a

short leash by the states after the Revolution. And they largely

stayed that way until after the Civil War. During the Civil War,

Lincoln had lifted many limitations on corporate size and behavior in

order to get more war materials. He also hugely subsidized the

railroads to expand across America, to transport munitions and

soldiers. By the late 19th century, over 180 million acres of American

land had been given, free and clear, to the railroads for their

expansion. They'd become the largest and most powerful corporations --

both in terms of wealth and in terms of their ability to control

transportation -- that America had ever seen. They completely

transformed the face of America, and transformed our politics as well.

So it was in this environment that the railroads began to try to

influence or corrupt government to enhance their own power and profits.

 

But government fought back. When Santa Clara County sued the Southern

Pacific Railroad, that was the beginning of the end. It was actually a

tax case, about whether the railroad had to pay property tax on the

fence posts it owned along the right-of-way of its railroad through

Santa Clara County, on the terms of the County's assessor or the State

of California's assessor. The railroad argued that by having different

tax rates in different states, they were being discriminated against

under the 14th Amendment. This was, by the way, an argument the

railroads had brought before the Supreme Court many times. It had

always previously been rebuffed, sometimes in strong terms.

 

For example, in 1873, one of the first Supreme Court rulings on the

Fourteenth Amendment, which had passed only five years earlier,

Justice Samuel F. Miller minced no words in chastising the railroads

for trying to claim the rights of human beings.

The fourteenth amendment's " one pervading purpose, " he wrote in the

majority opinion, " was the freedom of the slave race, the security and

firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the

newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppression of those who had

formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him. "

 

But in the 1886 case, we are told by over a hundred years' worth of

history books and law books, the Supreme Court decided that

corporations were, in fact, persons, and entitled to human rights,

including the right of equal protection under the law -- freedom from

discrimination.

 

What was really amazing to me was that when I went down to the old

Vermont State Supreme Court law library here in Vermont, and read an

original copy of the Court's proceedings in the 1886 " Santa Clara

County v. Southern Pacific Railroad " case, the Justices actually said

no such thing. In fact, the decision says, at its end, that because

they could find a California state law that covered the case " it is

not necessary to consider any other questions " such as the

constitutionality of the railroad's claim to personhood.

 

But in the headnote to the case -- a commentary written by the clerk,

which is NOT legally binding, it's just a commentary to help out law

students and whatnot, summarizing the case -- the Court's clerk wrote:

" The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the

clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth 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. "

 

That discovery -- that we'd been operating for over 100 years on an

incorrect headnote -- led me to discover that the clerk, J.C. Bancroft

Davis, was a former corrupt official of the U.S. Grant administration

and the former president of a railroad, and in collusion with another

corrupt Supreme Court Justice, Stephen Field, who had been told by the

railroads that if they'd help him get this through they'd sponsor him

for the presidency.

 

I later discovered that the folks who run POCLAD -- the Program on

Corporations, Law, and Democracy -- had already figured this out, and

that there had been an obscure article written about it in the 1960s

in the Vanderbilt Law Review, but it was, for me, like running down a

detective mystery. So that was when the foundations for corporate

power were laid in the United States, and they were laid on the basis

of a lie.

 

BuzzFlash: Okay, if the " business of America is business, " what is

wrong with corporations having human rights?

 

Thom Hartmann: Well, when Calvin Coolidge said, " The business of

America is business and the chief ideal of the American people is

idealism, " he was being a bit disingenuous. This was during the

so-called Roaring '20s, and Coolidge and the Republicans were by then

completely captured by the huge corporate interests and empires that

had arisen in America during the Robber Baron era that preceded him.

 

The business of America, according to most of the founders (Hamilton

probably would have disagreed), was human rights for humans,

democracy, and limits on BOTH government power and ALL other forms of

institutional power, from church power to corporate power.

 

A corporation today can have an infinite lifespan. It doesn't fear

death. It doesn't fear pain or incarceration. It doesn't need fresh

water to drink or clean air to breathe. It doesn't need health care or

retirement. It can own others of its own kind. It can change

citizenship in a day. It can tear off a part of itself and create a

new corporation in an hour. It can amass virtually infinite wealth

without that wealth ever having to pass through probate or being

subject to estate/inheritance taxes.

 

This is exactly why the Founders, Framers, and early state governments

explicitly limited corporate power. And as corporations rose in power,

after having corrupted the Supreme Court and then the Congress, and

then the Presidency (starting, big time, with Grant), this is why

American Presidents began sounding alarm bells.

 

President Thomas Jefferson said, " I hope we shall crush in its birth

the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to

challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to

the laws of our country. " Jefferson even went so far as to suggest

that banning monopolies in commerce should be written into the Bill of

Rights. In 1787 when James Madison sent the first draft of the new

Constitution to him, Jefferson noted in a letter that he would " insist

on annexing a bill of rights to the new Constitution, i.e. a bill

wherein the Government shall declare that, 1. Religion shall be free;

2. Printing presses free; 3. Trials by jury preserved in all cases; 4.

No monopolies in commerce; 5. No standing army. "

 

President James Madison said, " There is an evil which ought to be

guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the

capacity of holding it in perpetuity by…corporations. The power of all

corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth

acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses. "

 

President Andrew Jackson said, " In this point of the case the question

is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to

govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or

whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly

exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions. "

 

President Martin Van Buren said, " I am more than ever convinced of the

dangers to which the free and unbiased exercise of political opinion

-- the only sure foundation and safeguard of republican government --

would be exposed by any further increase of the already overgrown

influence of corporate authorities. "

 

President Grover Cleveland, after the Santa Clara County case was

decided, said, " As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we

discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while

the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death

beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully

restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are

fast becoming the people's masters. "

 

President Theodore Roosevelt said, " I again recommend a law

prohibiting all corporations from contributing to the campaign

expenses of any party.… Let individuals contribute as they desire; but

let us prohibit in effective fashion all corporations from making

contributions for any political purpose, directly or indirectly. "

Teddy Roosevelt added, " The fortunes amassed through corporate

organization are now so large, and vest such power in those that wield

them, as to make it a matter of necessity to give to the sovereign --

that is, to the Government, which represents the people as a whole --

some effective power of supervision over their corporate use. In order

to insure a healthy social and industrial life, every big corporation

should be held responsible by, and be accountable to, some sovereign

strong enough to control its conduct. " And in April of 1906, Teddy

Roosevelt went even further, saying, " Behind the ostensible government

sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and

acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this

invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt

business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship

of the day. "

 

Theodore Roosevelt could have been speaking for the Founders when he

said, " We stand for the rights of property, but we stand even more for

the rights of man. …We will protect the rights of the wealthy man, but

we maintain that he holds his wealth subject to the general right of

the community to regulate its business use as the public welfare

requires. "

 

Franklin Roosevelt talked about the corporate " royalty " that had

resulted from the changes in corporate law in the late 1800s, adding:

 

" It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of

these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for

control over government itself. They created a new despotism and

wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. ...And as a result the

average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man....

 

" A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost

complete control over other people's property, other people's money,

other people's labor -- other people's lives. For too many of us life

was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow

the pursuit of happiness.

 

" Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could

appeal only to the organized power of government....

 

" Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no

half-and-half affair....

 

" These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the

institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek

to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions

requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to

hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they

forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for. "

 

Dwight D. Eisenhower said, " In the councils of government, we must

guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought

or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the

disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must

never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or

democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. "

 

It's not like this battle between democracy and the cancer of

corporate personhood has happened in secret. Presidents and patriots

have been warning us of it -- loudly -- since the very creation of our

nation.

 

BuzzFlash: Part 3 of your book deals with the unequal consequences of

granting corporations rights originally reserved to American citizens.

Chapter 18, in that part, covers one of our favorite BuzzFlash topics,

the media. How does the rise of " corporate personhood " affect the media?

 

Thom Hartmann: The media in America are almost entirely now -- with

the exception of the web -- corporate owned and operated. As a result

of this, and the incredible consolidation brought about by Reagan

suspending enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and Clinton's

signing the Telecommunications Act, we have corporations that are

mandated by law to act first and foremost in their own self-interest

and in the interest of profitability. That interest is often in

conflict with the historic mission of the Fourth Estate to inform the

public. Thus, today the " free press " that Jefferson spoke so

eloquently about is largely gone in our television, radio, and newspapers.

 

As I mentioned earlier, corporations like Sinclair Broadcasting are

asserting their supposed rights as persons, their rights under the

Bill of Rights, to fight back against citizens and government efforts

to constrain them or force them to serve the public interest before

serving themselves.

 

Ultimately, this is neither good for the media -- which is being

increasingly discredited -- nor is it good for our republic and the

idea of democracy, which requires an educated and informed citizenry

to operate properly. When, for example, about 70 percent of the people

who voted for Bush did so because, in part, they thought that Iraq and

Hussein had something to do with 9/11 and that weapons of mass

destruction were found in that nation -- when neither of these things

is true -- speaks volumes to the terrible job the corporate media is

doing in fulfilling any obligation to inform Americans.

 

Over the short term, this works to the profit of media corporations

who are embraced by politicians like Bush, and who then return to Bush

both approbation and contributions which work to his benefit. But over

the long term, if unchecked, it could mean the death of democracy in

America.

 

Of all the forms of concentrated corporate power in America that are

harming our citizens, concentrated corporate media power is the most

pernicious, for this simple reason.

 

BuzzFlash: You have a chapter in Part 3 on " Unequal Protection from

Risk. " But, obviously, Bush disagrees with you and believes tort

lawyers file frivolous suits against corporations who should

voluntarily monitor their risk. Why am I as an individual legally

responsible for my behavior but Bush is saying that a corporation

shouldn't be in many cases?

 

Thom Hartmann: This is one of the great flaws in the concept of

corporate personhood. How can you have an institution asserting the

rights of humanity without having either the physical frailties or the

social responsibilities of humans?

 

Corporations, by their form, have no social conscience. Because their

first obligation is -- by law -- to enhance profit, they are not

committed to a community or a nation, or even to the basic humanity of

the rest of us. And they can't be held to account by threat of the

loss of freedom, as can humans.

 

This type of situation demonstrates the absurdity of corporate

personhood. As Delphin M. Delmas, the man who argued Santa Clara

County's side of that case against the Southern Pacific Railroad

before the Supreme Court said in his arguments:

 

" The shield behind which [the Southern Pacific Railroad] attacks

the Constitution and laws of California is the Fourteenth Amendment.

It argues that the amendment guarantees to every person within the

jurisdiction of the State the equal protection of the laws; that a

corporation is a person; that, therefore, it must receive the same

protection as that accorded to all other persons in like circumstances. …

 

" To my mind, the fallacy, if I may be permitted so to term it, of

the argument lies in the assumption that corporations are entitled to

be governed by the laws that are applicable to natural persons. ...

 

" When the law says, `Any person being of sound mind and of the age

of discretion may make a will,' or `any person having arrived at the

age of majority may marry,' I presume the most ardent advocate of

equality of protection would hardly contend that corporations must

enjoy the right of testamentary disposition or of contracting matrimony. "

 

The Fourteenth Amendment, Delmas said, was written to free human

beings, not corporations.

 

" Wherever man is found within the confines of this Union, whatever

his race, religion, or color, be he Caucasian, African, or Mongolian,

be he Christian, infidel, or idolater, be he white, black, or

copper-colored, he may take shelter under this great law as under a

shield against individual oppression in any form, individual injustice

in any shape. It is a protection to all men because they are men,

members of the same great family, children of the same omnipotent Creator.

 

" In its comprehensive words I find written by the hand of a nation

of sixty millions in the firmament of imperishable law the sentiment

uttered more than a hundred years ago by the philosopher of Geneva,

and re-echoed in this country by the authors of the Declaration of the

Thirteen Colonies, proclaim to the world the equality of man....

 

" Its mission was to raise the humble, the down-trodden, and the

oppressed to the level of the most exalted upon the broad plane of

humanity -– to make man the equal of man; but not to make the creature

of the State -– the bodiless, soulless, and mystic creature called a

corporation -– the equal of the creature of God.…

 

" Therefore, I venture to repeat that the Fourteenth Amendment does

not command equality between human beings and corporations... "

 

Delmas, whose other legacy is that he single-handedly (and without a

fee) saved California's last redwood forests, made a brilliant

argument before the Supreme Court. And, in the ultimate irony, the

Court agreed with Delmas, but today we ignore the ruling itself and

instead rely on a non-legal headnote that was published two years

later, just after the Chief Justice had died and could no longer

refute it.

 

BuzzFlash: Is there any relationship between your theory and the

increasing dominance of corporations in the political electoral

process? Heck, the recent coronation could have just as well been the

Super-Bowl in terms of corporate sponsorship. We're just waiting for

Bush to sell corporate naming rights to the White House.

 

Thom Hartmann: There's a direct thread here. Before the era of

corporate personhood, the consensus was that corporations can't vote

and therefore have no role in electoral politics. Corporate

personhood, although it hasn't yet given corporations the right to

vote, turned that on its head.

 

It's interesting that in one of the most recent cases decided by the

Supreme Court expanding corporate personhood, Chief Justice Rehnquist

dissented. The case was First National Bank of Boston versus Bellotti,

in 1978, and the bank was asserting that, as a " person, " it had the

right of " free speech " to interfere in politics. This was the case

that kicked wide the door to corporations corrupting our political

process in the last twenty-five years, and has led directly to the

corporate capture and manipulation of Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, and

Dubya as well as the majority of both houses of Congress, the

Republican Party, and the DLC wing of the Democratic Party.

 

In opening his dissent, Rehnquist said: " This Court decided at an

early date, with neither argument nor discussion, that a business

corporation is a " person " entitled to the protection of the Equal

Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Santa Clara County v.

Southern Pacific R. Co., 118 U.S. 394, 396 (1886). "

 

This makes it pretty clear that neither Rehnquist nor his clerks

actually read the Santa Clara case, but, as has been done for over a

hundred years, were relying on the headnote. But, to his credit,

Rehnquist disagreed with the headnote, saying:

 

" Early in our history, Mr. Chief Justice Marshall described the

status of a corporation in the eyes of federal law: 'A corporation is

an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in

contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses

only those properties which the charter of creation confers upon it,

either expressly, or as incidental to its very existence. These are

such as are supposed best calculated to effect the object for which it

was created.' " Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 4 Wheat. 518, 636 (1819).

 

Rehnquist then added, brilliantly in my opinion:

 

" The appellants herein either were created by the Commonwealth or

were admitted into the Commonwealth only for the limited purposes

described in their charters and regulated by [435 U.S. 765, 824] state

law. 2 Since it cannot be disputed that the mere creation of a

corporation does not invest it with all the liberties enjoyed by

natural persons, United States v. White, 322 U.S. 694, 698 -701 (1944)

(corporations do not enjoy the privilege against self-incrimination),

our inquiry must seek to determine which constitutional protections

are " incidental to its very existence. " Dartmouth College, supra, at 636.

 

" The free flow of information is in no way diminished by the

Commonwealth's decision to permit the operation of business

corporations with limited rights of political expression. All natural

persons, who owe their existence to a higher sovereign than the

Commonwealth, remain as free as before to engage in political activity. "

 

In this dissent, Rehnquist demonstrated the difference between a

classical conservative, as he is, and the new corporatists who call

themselves conservatives. Interestingly, this interview would probably

be just as interesting and agreeable to readers of the website of

William F. Buckley Jr. as it is to the readers of BuzzFlash. This is

an issue on which both classic conservatives and classic liberals agree.

 

BuzzFlash: In Part 4 of Unequal Protection, you have chapters on a

" New Entrepeneurial Boom " and " A Democratic Marketplace. " Can you

briefly explain what these concepts mean?

 

Thom Hartmann: History tells us that when corporate power is

unrestrained, and corporations grow so large that the largest among

them come to control and then stifle the marketplace, the result is

the corruption of democracy followed by economic collapse. We saw it

in the serial tax-cuts and deregulation of the Harding, Coolidge, and

Hoover administrations, which led directly to the Great Depression.

And we're seeing it writ large today, with the same consequences.

Democracy is under assault and America is becoming impoverished.

 

The breakup of AT & T was the last significant enforcement of the

Sherman Anti-Trust Act, pushed back in the late 1970s. The result was

an explosion of innovation as both the research division of AT & T and

the " Baby Bells " became relatively autonomous. It paved the way for

competition in the industry, dramatically lowered prices for

consumers, and, interestingly, over a relatively short period of time

actually increased shareholder value for former AT & T stockholders.

 

There are only a handful -- probably fewer than five hundred --

corporations that abuse or assert corporate personhood in the United

States. Yet the harm they do to our economy and our republic is

enormous. If they were denied personhood, we could root corruption out

of government, get corporations out of politics, and make America safe

and hospitable for entrepreneurs and small- and medium-sized

businesses again, leading to an explosion in economic activity. And

both the stockholders and the employees of these mega-corporations

would benefit -- along with the rest of us -- if they were broken back

down in size to where they were before the merger mania that Reagan

allowed.

 

BuzzFlash: Okay, let me toss out two corporate names and see if you

can free associate any " corporate personhood " issues with them:

Wal-Mart and Monsanto?

 

Thom Hartmann: Neither has argued personhood issues before the Supreme

Court or in other venues, to the best of my knowledge, but both make

extensive use of the precedent of others who have. One of the reasons

it's so hard for communities to fight against big-box retailers has to

do with personhood rights against discrimination and of free speech to

influence politicians and communities. And chemical and

genetic-engineering companies, of course, make use of the benefits of

personhood precedents for the reasons mentioned earlier.

 

BuzzFlash: Finally, you begin the Introduction to your book with a

lovely quotation by Anne Frank: " It's really a wonder that I haven't

dropped all my ideals, because they seem absurd and impossible to

carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still

believe people are good at heart. " Why did you begin Unequal

Protection with that quotation?

 

Thom Hartmann: Because this is a huge issue, and a huge " force " on the

other side of it. Corporations have, once again, become the " economic

royalists " that FDR talked about in 1936. They've seized control of

most of our media, most of our government, and most of the details of

our daily lives.

 

Yet I still believe that we can return America to the ideals of

democracy on which it was founded. I believe that because it's burned

into our DNA as Americans. Even though we haven't always been true to

the ideals of our founding, we've always held those ideals high. And I

believe that as more and more Americans find out about this issue --

and the movement to revoke corporate personhood is growing rapidly --

we will rise up and take back our nation.

 

There are some really great groups working on this, and working on it

very hard. There's www.reclaimdemocracy.org, www.celdf.org,

www.poclad.org, www.wilpf.org, and www.thealliancefordemocracy.org.

There's a pile of information on this topic on my website at

http://www.thomhartmann.com/.

 

Plug " corporate personhood " into a search engine and you'll see that

there's a broad movement to roll it back, and this movement is

accomplishing many very important goals -- such as over 100

communities in Pennsylvania that have now, with the help of the

Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, passed laws saying that

they won't recognize corporations as persons. There are movements in

states from Vermont to California to pass resolutions denying

corporate personhood. So I have great hope and I'm not willing to lose

faith in my ideals, or those of my nation. Because, in spite of

everything, I agree with Anne Frank that people -- real, human persons

-- are good at heart.

 

BuzzFlash: Thank you for bringing the issue to us.

 

Thom Hartmann: You're welcome.

 

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

 

* * *

 

Resources:

 

Unequal protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of

Human Rights, by Thom Hartmann (A BuzzFlash Premium)

 

Thom Hartmann bio: http://www.thomhartmann.com/showbio.shtml

 

www.reclaimdemocracy.org

 

www.celdf.org

 

www.poclad.org

 

www.wilpf.org

 

www.thealliancefordemocracy.org