Corporate Personhood

Let’s get something straight, corporations are not mentioned at all in the United States Constitution. They are not mentioned in any of it’s Amendments. Corporations are not mentioned in the Bill of Rights. These documents were intended to provide for and to protect people.  Actual people.

The founding fathers were in fact more than familiar with the concept of the Government (in this case the King of England) acting in the financial best interests of well monied importers instead of that of their own subjects. It was the willingness of King George to exploit their seeming dependence on sustenance from abroad that formed the basis of taxation without representation and led to populist uprisings like the Boston Tea Party and eventually the American Revolution. The Continental Congress was not convened to go to bat for the British East India Company.

Corporations are not people, the public never voted them such. Congress never amended the Constitution to make them so. Yet via series of court decisions not supported by any legislation establishing their constitutionality corporations experience protections established in the Bill of Rights.

The heinous implications of corporate personhood are perhaps best summed up by Thom Hartman in his book ‘Unequal Protection’…

Under our current agreements, the new corporate person is instantly endowed with many of the rights and protections of personhood.  It’s neither male nor female, doesn’t breathe or eat, can’t be enslaved, can’t give birth, can live forever, doesn’t fear prison, and can’t be executed if found guilty of misdoings.  It can cut off parts of itself and turn them into new “persons,” and can change its identity in a day, and can have simultaneous residence in many different nations.  It is not a human but a creation of humans.  Nonetheless, the new corporation gets many of the Constitutional protections America’s founders gave humans in the Bill of Rights to protect them against governments or other potential oppressors:
•Free speech, including freedom to influence legislation
•Protection from searches, as if their belongings were intensely personal
•Fifth Amendment protections against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, even when a clear crime has been committed;
•The shield of the nation’s due process and anti-discrimination laws
•The benefit of the Constitutional Amendments that freed the slaves and gave them equal protection under the law.