So there’s been a lot of noise recently about ending corporate personhood.
You can check out Public Citizen’s “Don’t get rolled” campaign for more info, or you can check out MoveToAmend.org.
The idea is, that since the Koch Brothers fought the legal case of Citizen’s United vs the FEC and won, and since the conservative majority on the supreme court said that Corporations should have unlimited free speech, laws limiting corporate influence in our elections that helped to slightly unfuck our elections system, going all the way back to President Teddy Roosevelt, has been overturned.
Now, Move To Amend wants to amend the constitution to state clearly, once and for all, that Corporations are NOT PEOLE. I think that this would be a great step forwards for progress, and an essential one as we move forwards through this next century. If we don’t end corporate personhood, our nation may not be around another century.
But I also think it’s not likely to happen without a hell of a lot more people getting off their ass and making a stink about it at town hall meetings with their congresspeople, challenging their congresspeople- both democrats and republicans- to either support this movement or face primary challengers, to support this movement or face electoral challengers.
But there’s a legalistic approach we can take while that movement is building. TAKE THINGS TO THEIR LOGICAL EXTREME.
Vaclav Havel would often, in his plays, take some nugget of absurdity thrown down my Czechoslovakia’s communist government, and using logic, take that absurdity to it’s logical ends, in which things would break down into surreality. I propose that we do exactly this.
If corporations are people, fine. They’re people. But let’s explore what that really means:
If a corporation is a person, it cannot be owned by anyone. Owning another person is slaveholding, which is specifically banned by the 13th amendment.
Just as we’ve decided that Corporations are protected by the 1st amendment, they must be protected by all the other amendments as well. Like the 13th amendment, which states:
“Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
Why are we allowing law abiding corporations to be sold into slavery? And who is doing this selling? WALL STREET. Every day... well, every weekday, people down on wall street sell shares of ownership in the corporate people we all know and love. Wall Street is nothing but a slave trading pit! It’s really time we put an end to the slave trade once and for all! Close down wall street!
If it’s illegal for a person to own another person, it’s certainly illegal for GE or Verizon to own so many other people. GE owns people like GE Electric, GE Energy, GE engineering, and Verizon owns people like MTV and Comedy Central. It’s time to set all of these slaves free! Nobody can own anybody else! End slavery! Free the corporations!
When executive boards dictate new business plans, spending a corporate person’s money for them, anti-slavery orgs should be suing on behalf of the poor corporation! This is akin to elder abuse! Where did GE sign over it’s power of Attorney to these people to start making financial decisions on his behalf? I want to see GE’s signature on the legal documents giving these people the power of attorney! If GE didn’t sign, then these people are fraudulently managing GE’s finances! It doesn’t matter that they do such a good job that GE actually makes money on it’s taxes. What matters is the LAW. And these people may be acting illegally.
Lastly, there’s the slaveowners themselves. Most CEOs are majority shareholders, I mean slaveowners. And thus they are the most guilty of slaveholding, and should be arrested and jailed.
FREE THE CORPORATIONS!
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