PEORIA -- Here's an event worth attending. From a news release:
David Cobb, former presidential candidate for the Green Party and now the national spokesperson for the Move to Amend organization will speak at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 21 in Peoria Heights at the Forest Park Nature Center, 809 Forest Park Drive.
His topic will be “Creating Democracy and Challenging Corporate Rule.”
The US Supreme Court decision of January, 2010, Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission, gave virtually unlimited power for corporate financing in all governmental elections. Cobb, an attorney and organizer for the Move to Amend coalition, will first provide historical background then offer a proposal to abolish the concept of ‘corporate personhood’ and re-establish a government of, by and for the people.
Corporate Personhood commonly refers to court-created precedent that gives corporations constitutional rights intended soley for human beings.
Although the Founding Fathers never intended to give away the rights of its citizens to big business, beginning in 1886 the US Supreme Court did exactly that. Their January, 2010 ruling confirmed and extended 14th Amendment protections to all corporations, providing them legal justification to inject AS MUCH MONEY AS THEY CHOOSE into local, state and Federal elections.
Move to Amend is a national coalition dedicated to reversing this ruling by establishing a constitutional amendment that gives corporations privileges, not rights. By reducing corporate influence in government, the citizens of the United States will have increased influence on politicians, and big business will have much less. Their website is www.MoveToAmend.org.
David Cobb is on a state wide tour en route to an August 24 – 28 Pro-Democracy rally in Madison, Wisconsin. That website is www.democracyconvention.org. Cobb will be Alton on August 20, Peoria August 21, Champaign on August 22, and Chicago August 23, speaking to interested groups.
The Peoria tour is sponsored by the Heart of Illinois Sierra Club, whose members understand that environmental decisions are unfairly subjected to corporate influence at all levels of government. The value of America’s rich natural resources belong to the citizens who should make the tough decisions about how their allocation, not by big business. Their website is www.illinois.sierraclub.org/hoi.
For more information please call David Pittman, 309-676-5237, dvdpttmn@aol.com. -30-
Here's Cobb's bio:
David Cobb is a lawyer, political activist, and engaged citizen. He has dedicated his adult life to making the promise of a democratic republic a reality in the United States. He has sued corporate polluters,
lobbied elected officials, run for political office himself, and has been arrested for non-violent civil disobedience. He truly believes we must use ALL the tools in the toolbox to effect the systemic social change we so desperately need.
David was born in San Leon, Texas and worked as a laborer before going to college. He graduated from the University of Houston Law School in 1993 and maintained a successful private law practice in Houston for several years before devoting himself to fulltime activism to achieve real democracy in the United States. In 2002 David ran for Attorney General of Texas, pledging to use the office to revoke the charters of corporations that repeatedly violate health, safety and environmental laws. He did not win the office, but the Green Party of Texas grew dramatically during his campaign from four local chapters to twenty-six.
In 2004, he ran for President of the United States on the Green Party ticket and successfully campaigned for the Ohio recount. David Cobb is currently on staff at Democracy Unlimited and a spokesperson for Move To Amend, a national coalition calling for a constitutional amendment to abolish “Corporate
Personhood,” which is the legal doctrine that allows corporations to overturn democratically enacted laws seeking to protect citizens from corporate harm and abuse.
Corporate Personhood Talking Points
• When corporations have constitutional rights, peoples' rights become
meaningless. How can one human being’s power to speak compare to a massive
corporation’s ability to speak?
• A corporation has millions of dollars, exists in many places at once; can live
forever; and employs thousands to do its work around the clock. It controls
politicians, the media, and the economy. A human being has little expendable
income, lives in one place, dies, and must use her small amount of free time to
work for causes she believes in.
• A human being needs clean air, clean water, food, and love to survive. A
corporation does not.
• A corporation has no mind, no conscience, and no motive but to amass money. A human being thinks, tries to make ethical decisions, and is motivated by
obligations to family and community. How could we say that these two
dramatically different kinds of “persons” have an equal voice in a democracy?
• The Supreme Court has ruled that money equals speech. The corollary is this:
people who have money can speak, and people who don’t, can’t. This is a
plutocracy, not a democracy.
• To put this power imbalance in perspective, consider this: It took over $1 million individual donors to raise about $750 million for Obama's presidential campaign in 2008. $750 million is approximately five percent of ExxonMobil's third quarter profits in 2008, five percent of Bank of America's profits in 2007; 37.5 percent of Goldman Sachs's first quarter profits in 2009; 18 percent of JP Morgan Chase's third quarter profits in 2009; 25 percent of Ford's profits in 2009 five percent of Philip Morris's profits in 2008.
• Human rights are for humans. A corporation is not a human being.
• The word corporation does not occur in the Constitution. Corporations had to use unelected, unaccountable judges to give them rights.
• Corporations exist to serve the public welfare, not for the public to serve them. The Supreme Court has created a Frankenstein scenario in which the people’s creations now control the people.
• A person is a private entity with rights and sovereignty. A corporation is a public entity with obligations and responsibilities.
• The American Revolution was explicitly anti-corporate, and the revolutionaries made sure that corporations were tightly controlled.
• For the first seventy-five years after the Revolution, corporations could only exist if they served the public good.
• They were severely restricted in their activities: they had to be chartered by a
vote of the state legislature, they could only exist for a certain number of years, they couldn’t own other corporations, they could be dissolved once they had earned a certain profit margin, they couldn’t donate to political or charitable causes, they had to operate in the state they were chartered in, their
stockholders were local, they could only do the certain task they were chartered
for, and they couldn’t own land that was necessary for carrying out business.
• Judge-made law is not democracy. We didn’t elect the Supreme Court justices, but they get to decide who does and doesn’t count in our democracy. Congress and the People should decide those issues.
• The sole purpose of a corporation is to amass profit and consolidate wealth.
They are legally required and structurally designed to make money at any cost.
This makes them dangerous to people and democracy.
• The structure of a corporation separates humans from their actions. They destroy responsibility and hijack decision-making. They make humans do things
collectively that they would never do as individuals: poison water, deny
healthcare, and destroy the planet.
• Every cause we care about and fight for is affected by corporate power.
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It's ridiculous that the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney would give corporations and humans equal rights. Corporations can't vote, well maybe they can in Wisconsin, but no where else.
Posted by: Steve Waterworth | August 12, 2011 at 10:36 PM