Alliance Alert: 125 years of corporate personhood is enough!

As an action of our End Corporate Rule campaign, we invite you to add your name to this Motion to Amend the Constitution to eliminate the false notions that corporations are people and that money is equal to speech.

In May 1886 United States Supreme Court clerk J.C. Bancroft Davis, former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway, Company inserted a headnote to the United States Reports pertaining to the Court’s decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. Thus without a formal court ruling, this simple act set a precedent and effectively established corporations as legal persons entitled to the same rights as living, breathing persons under the 14th amendment.

What has followed is 125 years of case law giving corporations Constitutional rights leading to the destruction of our democracy at the hands of greedy corporations. The most recent case, of course, is the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission that opened the floodgates of corporate money in elections. From the environment, energy, and healthcare to jobs, education and the economy, the greed of big multi-national corporations is laying waste to the American dream, and our democracy.

The 125th anniversary of the Santa Clara Railroad case is upon us. As a member organization of the Move to Amend executive committee, Alliance for Democracy is urging our members and supporters to mark this anniversary by signing the petition at Move to Amend.org, and encouraging friends and allies to sign on too! Our shared goal is to collect 125,000 signatures for the 125th anniversary of corporate personhood.

We must come together to reclaim our democracy for living, breathing people by eliminating corporate personhood through Constitutional amendment.

Whatever issue arises, at its root you’ll find a corporation standing between “we the people” and the solution. If we are to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and posterity,” then we must put an end to corporate personhood.

Please sign the Motion to Amend. Alliance for Democracy is a member organization of the Move to Amend Executive Committee. On behalf of the End Corporate Rule team, thank you for signing the Motion to Amend.

Democratically yours,
Nancy Price, David e. Delk, and Barbara Clancy
PS – You can help Move to Amend get to 125,000 signatures. Find out more here!