Maine dems to consider resolution against corporate personhood

Maine Democrats may have the opportunity to support a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment barring personhood rights for corporations. AfD vice co-chair and Hancock County Democratic Committee member Bonnie Preston is submitting the resolution, which is based on the model on the Campaign to Legalize Democracy/MovetoAmend.org site. It will first go before the county democratic organization, which Bonnie describes as a progressive and active group. She says that passage of of the resolution at the state convention level may be an uphill fight, but that she'll be a delegate to the convention in May and will work the floor in its support.

If you're looking for positive actions to take against corporate personhood at the local or state level, consider drafting a similar resolution and submitting it to your city council, town meeting, union, or party committee--sample resolution text is here.

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Op-eds from the Campaign to Legalize Democracy

Two op-eds written by Campaign to Legalize Democracy steering committee members have now been published in several papers--here's the start of the articles, with "read more" links to their most recent appearances on mainstream media websites. It's great that the word is getting out about the need for a constitutional amendment to retain personhood rights for human persons--if you write an op-ed or letter to the editor and would like us to feature it here, please email it to afd@thealliancefordemocracy.org.

Amend Constitution, restore our citizenship

By Ben Manski & Lisa Graves

You just lost the heart of your citizenship, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, five justices asserted:

"By taking the right to speak from some and giving it to others, the government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech to strive to establish worth, standing and respect for the speaker's voice."

The "disadvantaged person" they reference is, unbelievably, the corporation. In law-speak, this means that as "persons," corporations now wield constitutional protections against government regulation of elections.

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Unhinged. Absurd. Outrageous.

by Ben Manski

That's how you could describe the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission. Unfortunately, the decision was much, much worse than that.

How much worse?

You might have some idea if you've ever found yourself facing foreclosure on your home; or worked at a company that was downsizing and laying people off; or enrolled in a college where the tuition keeps doubling; or faced salary freezes year after year, even while the cost of living rises. Most of us know how those things feel. It's the feeling of losing control over your destiny.

Get used to that feeling. It has just become what it feels like to be a citizen of the United States of America.

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Bottled water syndrome and the drinking water profiteers

A new book give the history of the commodification of water, focusing in particular on Nestle's operations in Maine.

by Joseph Nevins. Posted on Counterpunch February 5

In mid-January, I received a mass email asking me to donate $10 for bottled water and other supplies for participants in an important immigrant rights march in Phoenix. Given the ever-repressive and cruel political climate in Arizona for immigrants (especially unauthorized ones), I was unequivocally in support of the mobilization. Nonetheless I was taken aback by a request to contribute even nominally to an effort to buy bottles of water for what turned out to be, according to some estimates, more than 20,000 people.

Certainly there are other ways—ecologically sustainable and less expensive ones—to provide water for such a multitude. How, why, and to what effects bottled water became the preferred way to do so for myriad people and places far beyond a single event in Phoenix is the focus of Elizabeth Royte’s powerful and compelling book, Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs and the Battle Over America's Drinking Water.

I’ve never been a fan of bottled water, considering it ecologically damaging—in the United States alone 30-40 million single-serve bottles per day end up as litter or in landfills—and economically foolhardy, another capitalistic trick to con us into purchasing something from profiteers that we don’t shouldn’t have to. But as Royte powerfully illustrates, the increasing commodification of drinking water is far more complex, and dangerous, than at least I appreciated.

Until recently, the sale of single-serve bottles of water was rare. While the United States had regional bottled water companies as early as the nineteenth century, such entities mainly supplied homes and offices with large containers of the life-sustaining liquid (for water coolers, for instance). This situation began to change in the 1980s with the entry of Perrier into the U.S. market and its successful television advertising which stressed that a little luxury—a bottle of the French water—was available to everyone.

Other companies, like Evian and Vittel, followed, employing the likes of Madonna and fashion models, to help equate bottled water with personal health, fitness, and glamour. That, combined with the invention of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic—which made water easily portable—helped the U.S. bottled-water industry boom: between 1990 and 1997 its annual sales increased from $115 million to $4 billion. (By 2006, the figure was $10.8 billion; globally bottled water’s income was $60 billion.)

This dramatic increase is the outgrowth of “one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” asserts Royte. What makes it all the more extraordinary is that in the vast majority of cases “tap water meets or exceeds federal health and safety standards, regularly wins in blind taste tests against name-brand waters, and costs 240 to 10,000 times less than bottled water.” Part of the reason it has succeeded, contends Royte, is “that bottled water plays into our ever-growing laziness and impatience.”

This corporate-driven success contributes to the demise of water as a public good. Take the increasingly rare public drinking fountain, for instance: Royte tells of visiting a Midwestern college where there is no drinking-water fountain in its gym.

Bottled water’s rise has changed behaviors even among those whom you might expect would have an alternative consciousness. While I was reading Royte’s book, I accompanied a group of students from my institution on a visit to a geography department at a university elsewhere in New York State, a department with a strong focus on issues of environmental sustainability. At the luncheon, the department offered bottled water as one of the beverage options.

The profound change in how so many of us consume water has consequences far beyond what we imbibe. Among other things, it increases our consumption of oil—and all its attendant detrimental impacts: Royte reports that it takes 17 million barrels of oil each year to make water bottles for the U.S. market alone—enough to fuel 1.3 million cars for a year. Meanwhile, according to one estimate, a quarter of a water bottle’s worth of oil is required to produce each bottle, transport and depose of it.

Royte focuses much of her energy on Poland Springs—the Nestlé-owned company that is the largest U.S. producer of bottled spring water—and the struggles and controversies surrounding its activities in and around Fryeburg, Maine, where it is based. However, her important and compelling book is much more than an examination of the bottled water industry. It is first and foremost about the health and viability of drinking water and thus human society as a whole. As Royte points out, “We can live without oil, but we can’t live without water.”

Already for all-too-many across the planet, access to safe drinking water is far from assured. As Royte informs the reader, “only 3 percent [of the earth’s water supply] is fresh, and of that fraction only a third is available for human use,” with the rest stored in glaciers and the like.

Not surprisingly that fraction is not equitably distributed based on needs. As such, more than a billion people do not have sufficient access to potable water. And according to U.N. projections, increased demand and water pollution, combined with climate-change-induced drought and reduced recharge of groundwater supplies will lead to two of every three of the planet’s denizens lacking sufficient access by 2025. “Those two out of three won’t just be thirsty;” writes Royte. “[A]lready some 5.1 million people a year die from waterborne diseases, many of which stem from lack of sanitation and its resulting water pollution. That number is going to spike.”

Among the major culprits of water pollution is industrial agriculture with its heavy reliance on synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and insecticides, the runoff from which ends up in the water supply. Atrazine, for example, an herbicide that has been shown to cause birth defects, reproductive disorders, and cancer in lab animals, has contaminated, according to Royte, drinking water sources “in nearly every major Midwestern city, and well water and groundwater in states where the compound isn’t even used.”

The pernicious irony of the degradation of the water commons is that it helps to undermine trust in public water supplies and facilitate their neglect, thus driving more people—especially the relatively wheel-heeled who can afford it—to embrace the bottled water option. In 2001, La’o Hamutuk, a non-governmental organization in East Timor, for example, calculated that the United Nations mission in charge of governing the territory was spending more than $10,000 per day (almost $4 million annually) on bottled water. (And this was the figure just for the international peacekeeping troops present in the country—to say nothing of the water purchased for the non-military U.N. personnel.) According to various estimates, it would have cost $2-10 million at the time to rehabilitate the entire water purification and delivery system of Dili, the now-independent country’s capital, and provide potable water to nearly all of the city’s more than 100,000 residents.

Royte would see such behavior as part of an “insidious trend,” one in which it has become “normal to pay high prices for things that used to cost little, or nothing”—or to go the route of the private rather than the public. But ultimately, preserving or improving public water supplies is the option we must collectively pursue as “too many people can afford to drink nothing but.” Otherwise, Royte warns, we run the risk of a world in which there is “a two-tiered system—bottled for the rich, bilge for the poor.”

Given the ubiquity of bottled water, it might seem like it doesn’t matter if the organizers of one mass demonstration, a single geography department, or a particular U.N. mission choose bottled water, rather than embracing public water options that were the unquestioned norm in the very recent past. But these individual decisions add up and, as such, have a profound impact on people’s livelihoods and the environment. Given the necessity of water for life, do we really have a choice as to what we should do?

Joseph Nevins teaches geography at Vassar College. His most recent book is Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books, 2008). He can be reached at jonevins@vassar.edu

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AfD's Defending Water Campaign: Rights of nature as basis for international law

This article, from the upcoming issue of Justice Rising, focuses on AfD's work as part of a growing global "rights of nature" movement, challenging exploitation of the environment and the usual legal conception of nature as simply property.

This quarter's Justice Rising will feature articles on the judiciary, corporate personhood, and the relationship between legal and corporate elites--especially timely following the Citizens United decision and the start of a movement to address corporate personhood issues through constitutional amendment.

If you would like to be added to the mailing list for the next issue, please email afd@thealliancefordemocracy.org, or join the Alliance--a subscription to Justice Rising is free with your membership.

by Ruth Caplan
Thanks to the leadership of President Evo Morales of Bolivia and Pablo Salon, his ambassador to the United Nations, who previously was active in the Our World Is Not For Sale network, the UN has declared April 22 to be International Mother Earth Day. The day will be celebrated in Cochabamba, Bolivia, by rallying activists from around the world to proclaim the fundamental rights of nature.

In the words of President Morales, there must be a charter to “enshrine the right to life for all living things; right to regeneration of the planet’s biocapacity; right to a clean life -- for Mother Earth to live free of contamination and pollution; and the right to harmony and balance among and between all things.”

The framing in the U.S. Constitution, which treats nature as property, is in direct contradiction to the rights of nature. Further, the series of court decisions granting corporations fundamental Constitutional rights has allowed corporations to use these conferred rights to exploit nature for corporate profit. In its organizing with local communities, the Alliance’s Defending Water for Life campaign has been challenging these fundamentals of U.S. Constitutional and court-conferred law. It is time for us to join the budding international movement.

From the small town of Barnstead NH to three other towns in NH and two in Maine, the Alliance has worked with communities that have passed ordinances to protect their water by denying corporate rights and asserting the rights of nature. These towns have challenged “settled law” based on court rulings interpreting the U.S. Constitution. Best known is the 1886 Santa Clara decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in which the court declared that everyone understands that corporations are to be included as persons under the 14th Amendment so the Court did not need to rule on this.

Last fall, the campaign’s Maine organizer, Emily Posner, brought an international focus to the Defending Water for Life campaign. First she brought “Hurricane Season” www.hurricaneseasontour.com to Maine for several college campus performances. The two-woman show addresses pertinent social themes from the devastation of Katrina to global water justice through their dance, poetry and multi-media performance. Emily followed this by organizing a speaking tour with Marcela Olivera from Cochabamba, Bolivia who, with her brother Oscar Olivera, played a central role in the people’s uprising against Bechtel’s privatization of their water. Before organizing with the Alliance, Emily spent a year in Cochabamba working with the Oliveras.

The international focus continued with the campaign’s Water Justice art show, which opened in Portland ME in November and included art related to Cochabamba. Now plans are afoot for Emily to take the Water Justice art show to Cochabamba in April for the 10th anniversary of the Cochabamba uprising and stay on for the Peoples’ World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth’s Rights. The conference goals include preparing a Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth.

Just as we must learn from nature, we also stand to learn from Bolivia and Ecuador, which have made the rights of nature part of their Constitutions.

As the Alliance joins the Right to Amend coalition against corporate personhood, we must also continue our local organizing to build a movement for the rights of nature as a fundamental constitutional right. Settled law created by the courts allowing corporate exploitation of nature must become unsettled by a people’s movement to honor the fundamental rights of Mother Earth.

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Make your own corporate person!

Planning a demonstration, action, or tabling on corporate personhood and the need for a constitutional amendment to take back personhood rights from corporations? Dress up as a "corporate person"--just see the costume instructions below. The costume was designed by Jan Edwards and Leon Schneiderman and appeared in the Summer 2003 issue of AfD's Alliance Alerts. It prints on ledger-sized paper.

PersonhoodCostume

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AfD Co-chair Nancy Price on "Citizens United" and the need for an anti-corporate personhood amendment

AfD Co-chair Nancy Price wrote this op-ed for the Davis (CA) Enterprise:

If you ask someone on the street whether “a corporation is a person,” most laugh and say, “no, of course not!” But on January 21, a 5-4 majority of unelected Supreme Court justices, finding for Citizens United against the Federal Election Commission, not only expanded the free speech rights of corporations under the First Amendment to spend unlimited money for or against candidates in elections, but in so doing, further entrenched the controversial legal doctrine of “corporate personhood” as the law of the land.

The Case
The Supreme Court first heard the case in March 2009. Citizens United, a nonprofit Virginia corporation, produced a film attacking Hillary Clinton, “Hillary: The Movie,” during the 2008 primary elections and the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) had barred release of the film after concluding it was a corporate-funded electioneering advertisement, not a documentary as Citizens United claimed. Thus, under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (McCain-Feingold Act), the film could not be shown within 60 days of the election. This is the ruling that Citizen’s United went to court to challenge.

In a very unusual move at the end of June, the Court went out of its way to ask for new briefs and re-argument. In this way, the Court signaled it wanted to broaden the scope of Citizens United beyond what was argued in the lower court to examine the issue of corporate political speech more broadly in regard to the First Amendment and two important earlier campaign finance cases relating to state and federal elections. Fast-tracking the case, the Court wanted briefs by July 31st, with oral argument set for September 9. More “friend of the court” briefs were submitted for this case than in the entire history of the Court.

Over the summer, newspaper editorials and op-eds warned that a broad ruling would allow corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money from their treasuries in elections for or against candidates, and would be a threat to democracy by allowing corporations to dominate the political process. In fact, the Supreme Court’s recent decision overturned a century of campaign finance laws going back to the 1907 Tillman Act, the first legislation prohibiting corporate money in national political campaigns. Now, corporations, including U.S. subsidiaries of foreign multinational corporations, can spend unlimited amounts of money to buy the election results they want and manipulate politics and policy in their self interest. A crucial basis for this decision is that corporations, as “persons,” enjoy free-speech rights.

Why is a corporation a person with a voice?
Corporations are artificial entities created by people through charters for specific economic purposes granted by states and subject to state and federal laws. Throughout the 19th century, corporations unsuccessfully attempted through Supreme Court to get out from under government regulation and accountability to the people. Then, finally, in 1886, in a case about taxes, the Court asserted without explanation that the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, to guarantee equal protection and citizenship rights to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, applied to corporations. Now, corporations had rights and protection under the Constitution. This at a time when all women, all Native Americans and most African-American men had no right to vote!

Finally, in 1976, almost a century later, the “corporate person” found its voice, when the Supreme Court ruled that corporate money equaled speech under the First Amendment. Money began to flow into political campaigns. In response, state legislatures and Congress moved to enact laws to regulate corporate money in politics. But, now, this recent Supreme Court opinion has provoked a national cry of outrage that corporations can claim political and civil rights to overturn democratically-enacted laws.

Why it Matters
Many would argue that the problem is not that corporations are people, but that it is just regulating money in politics. But as Jeffrey Clements, a lawyer points out in “Beyond Citizens United v. FEC: Re-Examining Corporate Rights,” since the 1970s, corporations have aggressively used the First Amendment to strike down state and federal laws from “those concerning clean air and fair elections; to environmental protection and energy; to tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals, and health care; to consumer protection, lottery, and gambling; to race relations, and much more.”

What’s even more important and less known is that once corporations became “people,” their lawyers began to get more “rights” for them. In 1893, corporations were granted “due process” under the 5th Amendment; in 1906, they got 4th Amendment search and seizure protections; in 1922 they got the “takings” clause of the 5th Amendment in which a regulatory law is deemed a “takings.” A fundamental doctrine of all free trade agreements allows multinational corporations to sue a national government for federal or state regulations that impacts or “takes” their profit-making.

What Can “We, the People” Do?
In anticipation of this ruling, a broad and deep coalition of groups came together to form the Campaign to Legalize Democracy with a call to amend the Constitution. One hour after the Supreme Court opinion was released, the Campaign launched the “Move to Amend” website calling for people to support an amendment to firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights. Other campaigns are focused solely on denying or limiting corporations First Amendment rights and limiting money in politics. These are only half measures.

A Constitutional amendment is need to deny corporations personhood and thereby stripping corporations of all constitutional rights conferred on them piecemeal by the Supreme Court over the decades. As of this writing, one week later, more than 50,000 people have signed the “Motion to Amend.” Please join this movement to take back our Democracy.

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The Dispatch is out!

February's Boston/Cambridge Alliance newsletter, the BCA Dispatch, is heading to mailboxes across the country, with articles on Haiti, healthcare, soldier suicides and thoughts on the Massachusetts special election. If you'd like a copy, email the office at afd@thealliancefordemocracy.org.

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Murray Hill Inc. declares for Congress!

It was only a matter of days... but now there's a corporation running for Congress. Murray Hill Inc., which in everyday life is a creative consulting and design firm, has thrown its... um... not its hat, it doesn't have a head... or is it "their hat"... well, whatever.



And here's the statement: "Until now, corporations only influenced politics with high-paid lobbyists and backroom deals. But today, thanks to an enlightened supreme court, corporations now have all the rights the founding fathers meant for us. That's why Murray Hill Incorporated is taking democracy's next step-- running for Congress."

On the personal side, Murray Hill Inc.'s hobbies are capitalism, and its or possibly their favorite book is "Atlas Shrugged."

However, Murray is not the first corporation to take this momentous step. In 2008, Rich-CorporateSon Inc., a feisty Oregon institution incorporated by Portland's End Corporate Personhood Action Group, ran for Governor, and had a few of his proxies debate Thom Hartmann, with piano accompaniment. It's a long video but fun to watch with lots of good background on this important issue.

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