Liam O'Donoghue

On June 15, Berkeley City Council unanimously supported amendments to the California state and US Constitutions declaring that corporations are not granted the "rights" of natural persons and that expenditure of corporate money is not constitutionally protected free speech.   The resolution asserts that corporations dominate the political process and deny citizens their right to govern through democracy.   Although corporate personhood is a foggy, if not completely unknown, concept for most US citizens, Berkeley's move is the latest victory for a nascent, national movement determined to bring this issue into the public spotlight.

"Corporations are granted similar rights to you and me," Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates said of the legal inequality between "real" individuals and corporate persons, "but they do not have the same responsibilities.   They pay a lower tax rate, they can't be sent to jail for breaking the law, and they have no real obligation beyond maximizing shareholder profit."

In upholding a lower court verdict in the 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company which granted corporations the same, equal protection of laws guaranteed to individuals by the Fourteenth Amendment, the US Supreme Court set the precedent for corporate dominance in the US legal system.   It took about a century of lawsuits for corporations to win all the "rights" accorded to individuals, (it wasn't until 1978 that the Supreme Court decided to protect corporate commercial and political spending as "free speech), but, for corporations, unlike the individuals challenging them, these legal battles are a tax-deductible expense.   Berkeley is the largest municipality to pass a resolution (a formal, but legally non-binding opinion) challenging these constitutional protections so far, but activists in this grassroots movement to abolish corporate personhood are hoping that Berkeley's resolution will spark interest in other communities.

City Council members and community activists from Arcata (CA) which passed a similar resolution on May 19 are already gathering support for an actual law.   Arcata's resolution calls for the issue to be discussed in town hall meetings to gather information that will be used to draft laws or ordinances to prevent corporations from interfering with democracy.   City Council member Dave Meserve explained how Arcata was recently forced to sell timber harvested from a community forest to a subsidiary of Pacific Lumber/Maxxam Corp.   "We're powerless not to do business with them," Meserve said, "because they're the highest bidder, and if we didn't, it would be discrimination.   If we pass an ordinance that enables us not to sell to corporations with bad records, that would leave us free to make the decisions we want."

Although PL/MC has racked up 325 violations of environmental laws since 1999, opposition to the timber giant is even more personal than eco-concerns in Arcata.   In March of 2002, one month after defeating a 20-year incumbent, Arcata's District Attorney Paul Gallegos filed a fraud lawsuit against PL/MC.   Soon after, Pacific Lumber plunged $40,000 into a campaign to recall Gallegos. Representatives of Maxxam denied involvement (HA!), even though the action was totally legal, thanks to the 1978 case of First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, in which the US Supreme Court declared that corporate persons (corporations) have the same free speech rights as natural persons, and can spend unlimited sums of money in the form of ads and campaign contributions.   Although the recall failed, it alerted many residents of Arcata to the threat to democratic sovereignty that corporations pose, even at the local level.  

Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County (DUHC), an organization dedicated to "creating a truly democratic society by provoking a non-violent popular uprising against corporate rule in Humboldt County that can serve as a model for other communities across the US," has organized public forums, helped teachers develop curriculums, and played a role in developing local legislation such as a local ordinance opposing the USA PATRIOT Act.   Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, Director Of DUHC (which includes Green Party Presidential nominee David Cobb on its Steering Committee), cites the Gallegos recall attempt as a perfect example of why allowing corporate campaign donations to be classified as "free speech" is detrimental to reforming the US democratic system. "This is why we can't have meaningful campaign finance reform," she said.   "It's a crisis of jurisdiction."

Global Issue, Local Battles

On July 5, Richard Grossman, of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy, Jan Edwards, who spearheaded the first anti-corporate personhood resolution in Point Arena (CA), and about 50 other community organizers, educators, politicians and activists from around the country converged in Santa Rosa (CA) for a day-long conference on how to effectively mobilize resources to strengthen this movement which has been mostly ignored by the mainstream media.   Those in attendance took careful notes as Pennsylvania lawyer Tom Linzey described the strategies he has used in his victories against corporate factory farms (now known in Orwellian corporate-speak as "advanced" or "progressive(?!)" farms) and waste disposal companies.

Linzey co-founded the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) in 1995, but his work in the legal trenches in the battle against corporate personhood really started in 1997, when the State of Pennsylvania began enforcing a law which nullified the waste-disposal regulations of more than 100 townships.    Linzey soon found himself bombarded with requests from communities who wanted to defend their economies and environments.   The State's decision to exert the legality of its weak waste-disposal law allowed corporations to dispose of sewage sludge by dumping the harmful material (two youths died following exposure) on farms, by classifying it as "fertilizer."   With Linzey's help, these communities began passing stricter ordinances against this devastating pollution, and some of these townships even passed ordinances prohibiting corporations from owning farmland.   Several agribusinesses such as Synagro-WWT, Inc. and PennAg responded with lawsuits, claiming that their constitutional right of due process had been violated.   Licking and Porter, two small townships, then took the historic step of passing laws that declared, "Corporatations shall not be considered to be 'persons' protected by the Constitution of the United States."  

Linzey rallied a coalition including 400 local townships, the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO, and several farmers' and citizens' rights groups to fight the against the corporate waste disposal plan.   At the conference, he beamed while announcing the results of this battle.   "Not a single teaspoon of sewage sludge has been poured onto farmland in any one of these communities since then."

"People working on these issues understand that you can't deal with sprawl, incinerators, toxic waste, etc. without dealing with corporate rights," Linzey said, alluding to the seeming consensus among many of those at the conference who feel that, right now, the immediate goal of this movement needs to be raising pubic awareness.   The Corporation [ITALICS], a Canadian documentary now touring throughout the US, is furthering this goal by packing theatres and offering an ideal venue for groups like San Francisco-based Personhood Inc. to set up tables of literature, brochures, and petitions.   The community dialogue instigated by this movie, and in town hall meetings in places like Arcata and Porter, Pennsylvania, are the key components of a functional democracy according to Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap of DUHC.    "People aren't encouraged to talk to each other about fundamental societal questions," she said.   "But we're trying to build a democratic community through these meetings, because in order for the law to change, culture has to change."

To learn more about how corporations co-opted the Constitution and what you can do to get involved with the anti-corporate personhood movement, check out:

www.DUHC.org and www.celdf.org