Democracy vs. Corporations — Round 2

It has to start somewhere.

As reported by Christopher Ketcham at Alternet and on Democracy Now: On the eve of the first anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s shameful and terrain-changing Citizens United decision, a call has come from the Vermont Legislature to restore a measure of political balance through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning “corporate personhood.”

This is encouraging news, coupled with recent calls for an investigation into whether Justices Thomas and Scalia should have recused themselves from that case in the first place (which would have almost certainly altered the outcome).

You can see the full text of the resolution through this link, but here are some key excerpts:

Whereas, the Court in Citizens has created a new and unequal playing field between human beings and corporations with respect to campaign financing, negating over a century of precedent prohibiting corporate contributions to federal election campaigns dating to the Tillman Act of 1907, and

…

Whereas, corporations are not and have never been human beings and therefore are rightfully subservient to human beings and the governments that are their creators, and

Whereas, the profits and institutional survival of large corporations are often in direct conflict with the essential needs and rights of human beings, and

Whereas, large corporations have used their so-called rights to successfully seek the judicial reversal of democratically enacted laws passed at the municipal, state, and federal levels aimed at curbing corporate abuse, and

Whereas, these judicial decisions have rendered democratically elected governments ineffective in protecting their citizens against corporate harm to the environment, health, workers, independent business, and local and regional economies,

…

the only way to reverse this intolerable societal reality is to amend the United States Constitution to define persons as human beings and not corporations…