Am I wrong or was it progressive's pursuit of "sueability" for corporations that led to personhood?

[newtothegame]

Not trying to stir shit up, but just curious, as I think we're seeing the "Part Deux" of this in us progressive's desire for healthcare reform. Our push for healthcare reform actually led to an even bigger handout to insurance companies and a potentially worse situation than if we'd done nothing at all.

Just a chance to perhaps learn from history and approach these situations differently, as the other side seems to outmaneuver us sometimes.

[derby378]

1. I thought it was the pursuit of 15th Amendment protections, myself

This site may be of help:

http://www.thecorporation.com

[valerief]

2. I thought a court clerk wrote down the opposite of a judge's ruling and

corporation personhood was birthed.

[newtothegame]

4. Seriously? That would be frickin' crazy, I've never heard that.

I'd like to use the jaw-dropping smiley here but can't find it :)

[valerief]

9. You can research this.

http://www.change.org/ideas/view_idea/end_corporate_personhood

An 1886 Supreme Court clerk's headnotes misreading (Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad) applied the 14th Amendment to corporations, extending to them all the rights, but none of the responsibilities, of human persons. The result has been the steady erosion of our democracy since then, and the consequent rise of the corporate state, which is primarily responsible for the military-corporate-media-academic complex, the expansion of the often brutal U.S. global empire (including the IMF, WTO, and World Bank) with its protecting militarism, and the destruction of our only planet's environment, all in the service of corporate capital's endless lust for power and profits. Corporate personhood is at the core of all of our problems. Ending it is the start of the way back to humane civilization.

[newtothegame]

14. Fair enough, but that's probably not the best source.

Any site that makes a statement as broad as "Corporate personhood is at the core of all of our problems," whether I personally believe that's true or not, is not a site I would want to cite when making an argument.

[valerief]

15. But it cites the case. You can research the case. Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad.

[newtothegame]

20. Thanks!!

:hi:

[clear eye]

30. I disagree w/ Hartmann (a major promoter of this origin theory)

b/c an argument by Alexander Hamilton during the debate over the creation of a Nat'l Bank came first. Hartmann doesn't like an origin that starts w/ a founding father even though only Hamilton promoted it. Washington let it pass b/c he was convinced of the necessity of a nat'l bank for the new country, and the financing had to come from private sources.

This from Wikipedia (notice it is footnoted):

Hamilton, who, unlike his fellow cabinet members, hailed from New York, quickly set about laying to rest the arguments of those who claimed incorporation of the bank unconstitutional. While Hamilton's rebuttals were many and varied, chief among them were these two:

• What the government could do for a person (incorporate), it could not refuse to do for an "artificial person", a business. And the Bank of the United States, being privately owned and not a government agency, was a business. "Thus...unquestionably incident to sovereign power to erect corporations to that of the United States, in relation to the objects entrusted to the management of the government."
  
• Any government by its very nature was sovereign "and includes by force of the term a right to attainment of the ends...which are not precluded by restrictions & exceptions specified in the constitution...(6)

Jefferson, Madison, and the rest, Hamilton pointed out, had looked upon the creation of the Bank of the United States (and the excise tax that went with it) as an end rather than a means to an end.

The underlining is mine. Notice the opposition by Jefferson, who in today's political classifications would be called a progressive, or at least a liberal. The concept definitely did NOT start w/ us.

[FormerDittoHead]

24. Wait. A corporation suing another corporation? What happened to those damn "progressives"..? n/t

[phasma ex machina]

21. +1

[laughingliberal]

7. It was not the opposite of the judges ruling. The court, in deliberating the case, did not rule on

corporate personhood.

[valerief]

10. You're right. I was trying to recall it from memory. The court reporter's headnote reading was

misleading and I guess in subsequent cases it's been cited that corporations are persons.

Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad

[laughingliberal]

18. Correct nt

[Cronus Protagonist]

8. You are correct

That is close to the way it went down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern_Pacific_Railroad

A passing remark
The decisions reached by the Supreme Court are promulgated to the legal community by way of books called United States Reports. Preceding every case entry is a headnote, a short summary in which a court reporter summarizes the opinion as well as outlining the main facts and arguments. For example, in U.S. v. Detroit Timber and Lumber (1905), headnotes are defined as "not the work of the Court, but are simply the work of the Reporter, giving his understanding of the decision, prepared for the convenience of the profession."<5>

The court reporter, J.C. Bancroft Davis, wrote the following as part of the headnote for the case:

"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 the opinion that it does."<6>

In other words, corporations enjoyed the same rights under the Fourteenth Amendment as did natural persons.<7> However, this issue is absent from the court's opinion itself.

Before publication in United States Reports, Davis wrote a letter to Chief Justice Morrison Waite, dated May 26, 1886, to make sure his headnote was correct:

Dear Chief Justice, I have a memorandum in the California Cases Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific &c As follows. In opening the Court stated that it did not wish to hear argument on the question whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to such corporations as are parties in these suits. All the Judges were of the opinion that it does.<8>

Waite replied:

I think your mem. in the California Railroad Tax cases expresses with sufficient accuracy what was said before the argument began. I leave it with you to determine whether anything need be said about it in the report inasmuch as we avoided meeting the constitutional question in the decision.<9>

[ljm2002]

13. More on J.C. Bancroft Davis:

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.C._Bancroft_Davis

Acting as court reporter in the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case, Davis is a key figure in the corporate personhood debate. Journalists have since cited Davis's prior position as president of Newburgh and New York Railway as evidence of a conflict of interest in the corporate personhood interpretation of the ruling.

[marmar]

3. No, it was corporate lawyers trying to exploit the 14th amendment and trying to equate.....

..... the corporations' "plight" to that of newly freed slaves.

[noiretextatique]

16. but were they progressive lawyers?

:sarcasm:

[AllyCat]

5. So what we should learn is to sit down, shut up, and be happy we have what we have?

Seriously? No. I don't think pushing for real reform was a bad thing. Handing over our power as an electorate to corporations and believing the lies without critical thinking is more to blame than any of this.

[newtothegame]

6. Agreed, that's why I said we could possibly learn how to "approach these situations differently."

I'm not arguing that I have the answer. I'm arguing that these are two pretty big backfires in history that we ought not just merely accept, but learn from. We're smart people; there's got to be a way to approach these issues without opening up doors to have the whole thing flipped around and reversed on us. :hi:

[valerief]

11. So how do you put the 800 lb. gorilla back into the cage? nt

[AllyCat]

12. Guess I don't thnk it is anything WE did. The problem is the corporations run the country

not us. The politicians, by and large, don't even listen to us. They know who really gets them elected. The corporate owned media doesn't help as they frame our best arguments and the pols run with it. "Government run health care" was the term I heard over and over again. That wasn't our term, but theirs. No matter how we called it, they misled and lied. That's what they do. Public financing of campaigns would go a long way towards changing the game.

[valerief]

17. Pols are corporate agents. nt

[clear eye]

28. Didn't happen that way--read some of the other comments. n/t

[clear eye]

19. You're wrong. It started w/ Alexander Hamilton's creation of the

first U.S. nat'l bank, ancestor to the Federal Reserve. Look up Federal Reserve on wikipedia and go to its history and the section on the arguments Hamilton used to get its enabling legislation enacted. Jefferson, who would be considered a progressive in today's language, opposed it.

[clear eye]

27. Self-delete.

[Caliman73]

22. No, it was not progressives seeking to sue, that led to corporate personhood

The debate around "corporate personhood" came to this country with the British and stayed on after they left. Corporations had always been chartered and limited by the states and had always been looking for ways to escape those limitations. Being afforded the rights of a "person" was a way for corporations to be able to maintain property, to lobby the government for redress of grievances, and other legal rights regardless of changes in the ownership of the corporation. It was almost always the states or local governments who wanted to sue corporations for tax reasons not progressive groups. What led to the power of current corporations is the same thing that led to the current problem with the health care reform issue. MONEY. Plain and simple. Corporations have money, lots and lots of money. With that money, they purchase influence, and they get their agenda met.

Corporate personhood and HCR are not backfires on progressive actions at all. They are the natural results of big companies wanting to become even bigger, richer, and more powerful. We are not "outmaneuvered" because of our tactics. We are out muscled and out spent because the people with money and power use it ruthlessly to get what they want.

[CrispyQ]

23. Until corporate personhood is addressed, we'll never again have a government

of, by & for the people. There's just no way the People can compete with corporations. Corporations feel no pain, the don't need clean water, clean air, healthy food. They can't be put in prison, they can change their citizenship easily, they can absorb other corporations or break off part of themselves & create new entities & they don't die. They are the perfect vehicle for the elite to accumulate wealth & power, with little consequence for their actions.

Here is a great site with a ton of info on corporate personhood: http://reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/

Thom Hartmann also has a book on the topic. It's a bit dry, but he covers how the corporations use the Constitution & the Bill of Rights to claim "unequal protection" over the People.

Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights by Thom Hartmann
http://www.amazon.com/Unequal-Protection-Corporate-Dominance-Rights/dp/1605095710/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262038657&sr=8-1

Of the things that Obama has done right, appointing Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, possibly tops the list. Read this article:

Sotomayor Issues Challenge to a Century of Corporate Law
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125314088285517643.html

snip...

WASHINGTON -- In her maiden Supreme Court appearance last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a provocative comment that probed the foundations of corporate law.

During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with... a creature of state law with human characteristics."

~more at link

I can't believe this post has unrecs! What the fuck?

[newtothegame]

25. Crispy, great post and I appreciate the sources.

The unrecc feature is what it is :) I don't think the Powers That Be have any interest in eliminating it, regardless of the many passionate arguments against it from many users. They're kind of in their own world. Happy DU'ing :)

ed for sp

[clear eye]

26. People are probably reacting to the misinformation in the OP about a liberal source. n/t

[WonderGrunion]

29. Corporations aren't people until they can be jailed and executed

for any crimes they commit. I support "true" corporate personage.