Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It (4 page)

Women are equal and may vote just as men vote.

The poor can vote, even if they don’t have money for a poll tax.

Millions of men and women who have lived eighteen, nineteen, and twenty years, old enough to die for their country in war, may not be barred from voting.

We can, if we, the people, choose to do so, enact progressive income taxes and not place the tax burden only on middle-class and working families.

We elect the individuals who serve in the U.S. Senate, rather than watch from the sidelines while corporate-dominated political bosses appoint them.

Not one of these principles was established without Americans working for and winning constitutional amendments.

Now we need to work together again, to campaign for a fundamental proposition, encourage a national conversation, and force votes in towns and cities, state legislatures, and Congress, so that people and our representatives state where they stand on this question of our time: Must the American people cede our rights and our government to global corporations? I hope this book will show why this question is so important and how Americans can succeed in restoring our free republic, with equality for all.

Finally, a word about nomenclature. I am not “anticorporate,” and this book is not “anticorporate,” whatever that means. When I refer to “corporations” and “corporate power” and the like, I am talking about large, global or transnational corporations. Size matters. Complexity and power matter. Whether corporations operate in the economic sphere without dominating the political sphere matters.

Thousands and thousands of corporations in America are just like the corporation I set up for my law firm and just like the kinds of corporations that you may have set up or worked in. They are convenient legal structures for businesses to make economic activity more efficient, productive, flexible, and, we hope, profitable (to be sure, I am not “antiprofit” either).

If I am “anti” anything, I am opposed to any force that takes God-given rights away from people and threatens one of the most remarkable runs of democracy and republican government in the history of humanity. Today that force is the combination of massive and insufficiently controlled global corporations. To succeed in making government of the people real in our generation, we will need to restore our right and duty to check, balance, and restrain that power.

In 1838, a quarter-century before he became the nation’s sixteenth president, a twenty-nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln stepped up to speak at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois. He spoke about what was to become the cause of his life: the preservation of that great American contribution to the human story, government of, for, and by the people. He insisted that the success or failure of the American experiment was up to us. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
¹

Lincoln’s generation of Americans, and every generation since, has faced daunting questions of whether “destruction be our lot,” and we certainly have our share today. Most people can point to a host of complex and related reasons for rising anxiety about our future. Global and national environmental crises seem relentless and increasingly related to energy, economic, military, and food crises. Our unsustainable debt and budgets—national, state, local, family, personal—seem beyond control, reflecting an economy that has not generated significant wage growth in a
generation. We have been locked in faraway wars for more than a decade, at war in one form or another for a half-century. Despite our victory over totalitarian communism, we spend more on our military than all other countries combined. We, the descendants of republicans with great suspicion about standing armies, now maintain a costly military empire across more than one hundred countries. On top of all of this and more, too many people now doubt that we are, in fact, a government of the people, and they no longer believe in their hearts that democracy works or that our government responds to what the people want.

We can point to an array of causes, and we can point fingers at each other, but the root of many of these related problems is our collective failure to do what generations of Americans before us did: choose to take responsibility as citizens to manage and control corporate power in our nation. We have lost sight of the implications of the astonishing global wealth and power of transnational corporations. The goals of these corporations do not concern what is best for people, the nation, and the globe.
²
The agenda of the largest corporations will never be the agenda of the American family and the American community. Yet the corporate agenda is now the dominant policy agenda at home and across the world.

Citizens United
v.
Federal Election Commission

In 2010, in
Citizens United
v.
Federal Election Commission,
the U.S. Supreme Court proclaimed that the American people are not permitted to determine how much control corporations may have over elections and lawmakers. The Court, in a 5-4 decision, struck down as unconstitutional a federal election law designed to prevent corporations from dominating the outcome of elections. This law was the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (also known
as McCain-Feingold, after its Republican and Democratic sponsors). The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act banned “electioneering” spending by corporations—and only corporations—for or against specific candidates within sixty days of a federal election. The law was intended to prevent corporations from bypassing a longstanding prohibition on corporate political contributions to candidates, passed in 1907.

The case is called
Citizens United
because a Virginia nonprofit corporation by that name sued the Federal Election Commission to challenge the corporate spending restriction in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. Citizens United, the corporation, wished to use its corporate money and donations from for-profit corporations to make and distribute what the Court described as a “feature-length advertisement” against Hillary Clinton, who was running for president when the case began. Further, Citizens United sought to do this within the sixty-day period before an election when the law restricted corporate spending on electioneering activity. According to Citizens United, the law violated the First Amendment right of free speech because it prevented Citizens United, a not-for-profit corporation, from engaging in “electioneering activity” and for-profit corporations from contributing to Citizens United’s electioneering activity.

Of course, people are free to make a feature-length advertisement attacking a powerful senator running for president, if that’s what people wish to do. Nor is anything wrong with people pooling their money to do the same thing. That’s essential for political participation. People contribute all the time to organizations, associations, political parties, political action committees and other political committees. At first blush, the background to the case seemed to warrant concern about government restrictions on the free ability of people to pool resources to advocate views.

The Court majority in
Citizens United
was not content to leave the case at first blush. Instead, they saw an opportunity to make new law and to throw out a century of law they thought too restrictive of corporations. In the end, they effectively proclaimed that
all
corporations have a right to spend unlimited money in any American election—federal, state, local, judicial.

The Supreme Court had rejected this argument only a few years earlier, when Justices William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor were still on the Court. In 2003, in the case of
McCon-nell
v.
Federal Election Commission,
the Court ruled that the very same corporate spending provision in the McCain-Feingold law did
not
violate the First Amendment. In
McConnell,
the Court agreed that Congress may make different election spending rules for corporations than for people. The Court in
McConnell
followed the 1990 case of
Michigan Chamber of Commerce
v.
Austin,
in which another majority of the Court had ruled that corporate money, aggregated with advantages that come from the government, is not the same as people’s money pooled together. Corporate spending in elections can be restricted because government creates the advantages for corporations to make them effective in the economic sphere, and the same advantages pose dangers in the political sphere.

Now in
Citizens United,
the Court, with the additions of a new chief justice, John Roberts, and a new justice, Samuel Alito, threw out
McConnell
and
Austin.
The
Citizens United
Court said its earlier decisions were wrong. The Court struck down the McCain-Feingold law as a violation of free speech rights and invited billions of corporate dollars into American elections.