Yes or no, will you pledge to abolish corporate personhood?

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. …..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.

The U.S. Constitution, which defines our nation of popular sovereignty, boldly begins with three simple words, written large, "We the People." These three famous words convey responsibility equally to all people to make our own laws.

But "We the People" have never included all the people. Those in power always try to maintain power. Initially, only land-owning white men voted. It took a century, the Civil War and three constitutional amendments to abolish slavery and let black men vote. The 19th Amendment ratified in 1920 let women vote. In the 1960s, amendments eliminated poll taxes to protect poor, mostly black voters, and allowed Washington DC voters to participate in presidential elections. In 1971, the 26th Amendment established a consistent national minimum voting age.

But as soon as freed male slaves were allowed to vote, the wealthiest white men created a better way to maintain control. Starting in the 1880s, ironically using the 14th Amendment, one of the Reconstruction Amendments that abolished the legal fiction that a person was property, corporate attorneys convinced a few judges (who were previously corporate attorneys) to create corporate personhood, the legal fiction that property is a person. This gave corporations, which are non-human, artificial legal entities for owning property, some of the rights intended for freed slaves. Toiling another century, more attorneys convinced more judges to expand corporate rights to add protections from the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments. (Legislators who were elected through the largesse of corporations shoulder the blame for allowing these decisions to stand.)

Today, corporate personhood is fully mature, giving corporations all the rights necessary to combine with their wealth to control our governance. Using modern media and marketing science, voters are persuaded which candidates to elect. With gifts, campaign contributions and no spending limits on lobbyists, lawmakers are influenced. "We the People" are not in control; instead, non-humans dominate the process of making laws that control humans!

Don't be fooled into believing that corporations are controlled by humans. Although corporations were initially created centuries ago by lawmakers for the purpose of serving the public good, they now must obey legal obligations to strive for profit, not public good. Corporations are not human, they simply don't share our morality or mortality and they have no business participating in the process of making laws that govern people. Democracy embodies the ideal of one person, one vote, but corporations have hijacked democracy by diminishing the power of all our votes below the influence of their wealth.

To gain control, humans must ban corporations from politics using a constitutional amendment that abolishes corporate personhood. Corporations serve a vital function in our society; they allow capital to be combined to accomplish amazing things. They drive our glorious way of life and prosperity. We must provide corporations with the rights and tools they need to thrive while serving the public good; we can do that without letting them participate in our law making process. But they'll use their persuasive powers to disagree. They'll vilify candidates who promise to limit corporate influence. We must be strong and ignore their deluge of ads and pundits, and only vote for candidates who put "We the People" above "We the Corporations."

If you believe in America's ideals for democracy, that all people are created equal and have an inalienable right to govern themselves, then you have a civic obligation to understand how corporate personhood nullifies democracy. Corporate personhood is an insidious and undeniable threat to our democracy. We've allowed corporations to get their powerful tendrils so deep into every facet of our society that we can no longer do anything without corporate approval. So until we abolish corporate personhood, we are slaves and corporations are our masters.