To get some name recognition with the kids on the interwebs, Move to Amend has developed an ongoing series of short videos that don't tell you much about the ins and outs of corporate personhood or constitutional amendment but aspires to be the kind of funny stuff that gets shared online.
The first few videos in the series were all somewhere between NSFW and WTF but these two are a hoot. So we're sharing them online.
The videos are done by Dennis Trainor Jr., whose work is online here, and Lee Camp.
Hopefully this will inspire even more art, video, song and meme-making. The more the merrier and merry is good.
...that protesting corporate rule is at least as old as our own American Revolution? Move to Amend's Ashley Sanders brought the history of the early days of corporate domination of politics and economies to this edition of Populist Dialogues.
This past June, Portland OR Alliance for Democracy/Move to Amend joined the Portland gay pride parade as the Supreme Court "Corporate" Justices, bringing the message that we need to amend the Constitution to eliminate corporate access to the rights of human persons, and that money is not speech. Chapter president David Delk shot the video:
The Citizens United decision didn't come out of thin air. This video is a terrific look at the history of corporate personhood and political bribery and how the expanding nature of "we the people" has been countered by an equally lengthy history of a US ruling class obtaining more rights and powers for corporations.
The good news is that from the national level, with the Move to Amend coalition, Free Speech for People, and other groups working on constitutional amendments to eliminate corporate access to constitutional personhood rights, to the local level with towns passing rights-based ordinances to protect local economies and ecosystems, "we the (real) people" are developing more ways to take back our government from corporate rule.
Post, tweet and get 'em viral for Friday's Occupy the Courts action and for building the movement.
Jawnzap7 of Occupy Philly demands Reasonable Solutions while providing some good background on Citizens United, political bribery, and how corporations legally masquerade as human beings.
David Swanson will be speaking in Charlottesville, VA, because he's been banned from speaking on Capitol Hill. Here's his take on how how getting rid of "the corporate right to speak by bribing people with money" will help dismantle the military-industrial complex and redirect some federal spending to what the people want.
Lastly, the Coffee Party introduces "Citizens United the Musical," and adds corporate personhood and speech-is-money to the great American song and dance book.
In support of the January 20 Occupy the Courts action, here's Bill McKibben on our "money talks" political system, climate change, and the need for environmental activists to be involved in the democracy movement. Get to MovetoAmend.org to find the Occupy the Courts action near you.
Alliance for Democracy is part of the Move to Amend coalition and most AfD chapters are planning or will be involved in Occupy the Courts events. Our local chapter list is here. If you're heading to an action check out material (signs, fliers, bumper stickers) here.
Toward the end of this clip from today's edition of Democracy Now, John Nichols, blogger and writer for The Nation, totes up the spending by candidates and superPACs in Iowa and estimates that it works out to about $200 per vote cast, most of it going to broadcast last-minute negative ads. That's just one reason why anti-corporate personhood advocates will be attending both Democratic and Republican caucuses this evening in hopes of passing Move to Amend resolutions calling for an amendment overturning the Citizens United decision, and allowing for the re-regulation of campaign spending.
Congratulations to Move to Amend Los Angeles. Organizing paid off as hundreds of supporters packed the City Council's chambers to speak in favor of a resolution barring corporations from accessing constitutional personhood rights, and allowing the re-regulation of political spending. LA now becomes the first major US city to rule that corporations are not people and money is not speech.
The council's unanimous vote came before a standing room only crowd. The resolution was sponsored by City Council President Eric Garcetti and seconded by Council Members Bill Rosendahl and Paul Krekorian with passionate support by Council Members Richard Alarcon and Paul Koretz.
Mary Beth Fielder, Move To Amend-LA founder, spearheaded the effort to bring the resolution to the LA City Council. “It’s a great day for Los Angeles and it’s a great day for the United States of America," Fielder said. "I hope this is the vote heard around the world and that it will inspire other who want to reclaim our democracy to begin organizing in their communities. Together we can build the grassroots support we need to actually amend our constitution.”
“Every struggle to amend the constitution began as just a group of regular Americans who wanted to end slavery, who thought women should vote, who believed that if you’re old enough to be drafted, you should be old enough to vote,” said Council President Eric Garcetti. “These are how American amendments move forward from the grassroots when Americans say enough is enough. We’re very proud to come together and send a message but more than that, this becomes the official position of the City of Los Angeles, we will officially lobby for this.
"I also chair a group which oversees all the Democratic mayors and council members in the country and we’re going to share this with all our 3,000 members and we hope to see this start here in the west and sweep the nation until one day we do have a constitutional amendment which will return the power to the people. ”
“What we saw in that chamber today was the beginning of a sea change in the way people think about politics in America and I hope that this will be the first day of a long and sustained movement that changes the way we represent ourselves and the way we demand the kind of government that we deserve,” said Council Member Paul Krekorian.
“I could not believe the coalition of energy that filled the council chambers today,” said Council Member Bill Rosendahl. “It made a huge difference. It was democracy at its best! ”
Open mouth, remove silver spoon, insert foot. Regardless of whether Mitt Romney was speaking from the heart or got jittery and shot from the hip, his Iowa State Fair quip that "corporations are people" set a lot of teeth on edge. For Romney, perhaps, it was a glib critique of tax increases. But it was also a sign of how closely political fortune is tied to corporate rule and corporate cash.
Romney might be correct in that the money corporations make eventually get paid out to some individuals--employees or stockholders. But to say that corporations are people, and especially to endow corporations with constitutional personhood rights, as court decisions have steadily done, endangers our nation and our democracy. Corporations have no loyalties to any concept other than making a profit. If the good of an individual, a family, a community, or even the nation gets in the way of a strong bottom line at the end of the quarter, there's no question that real people--you and me--will take a back seat to profit.
You don't have to look much further than Romney's own business career to see this concept in action, courtesy of leading political commentator (sadly, we're not being ironic) Stephen Colbert:
“You see, Romney made a Mittload of cash using what’s known as a leveraged buyout. He’d buy a company with ‘money borrowed against their assets, groomed them to be sold off and in the interim collect huge management fees.’ Once Mitt had control of the company, he’d cut frivolous spending like ‘jobs,’ ‘workers,’ ‘employees,’ and ‘jobs.’ […] “Because Mitt Romney knows just how to trim the fat. He rescued businesses like Dade Behring, Stage Stories, American Pad and Paper, and GS Industries, then his company sold them for a profit of $578 million after which all of those firms declared bankruptcy. Which sounds bad, but don’t worry, almost no one worked there anymore."
Romney's rep as a job killer led to his Senate campaign being bird-dogged by a "truth squad" ‘of striking workers from a Marion, Indiana, paper plant who had lost jobs, wages, health care, and pensions after Ampad, a Bain subsidiary, took control. Ampad eventually went bankrupt, but Bain walked away with $100 million for its $5 million investment.
The threat of profit-before-people corporate deeds are why in the early days of this country corporations were kept under tight legal restraint: chartered for a specific public purpose, dissolved when that purpose was accomplished, their books subject to inspection, and conglomerates of corporations owning other corporations forbidden. But thanks to a slew of court decisions, we've swung the other way, to where corporations are legally immortal, dedicated only to profit, and "human" enough to have the same free speech rights as individuals, although their "voice" is amplified a thousand-fold by the money they have on hand to buy, bribe, or influence the candidates of their choice.
So while the Democrats have jumped all over Romney's remark, don't believe their hype. For DNC Communications Director Brad Woodhouse, for instance, Romney's remarks amount to little more than a lack of sympathy: "There's a great message for people struggling to get by and trying to make ends meet. Don't complain -- corporations are people too!"
Here's news for both parties: it's not just the folks who are struggling who are mightily ticked off at the attitude that Romney's quip represents. It's everyone who questions whether our elected officials are more loyal to their funders than to their constituents. It's everyone who sees elections as a public good that should be publicly funded, just as our police, fire, and libraries are, to ensure every voice and every vote counts. It's everyone who sees the Citizens United decision as the ultimate auction of constitutional personhood rights to the highest bidders. We're the majority, we're the citizens, we're the voters, we're the people, and we want our democracy back.
Read more...
The Story of Stuff people and Free Range Studios have collaborated on a new video, "The Story of Citizens United."
Enjoy and share--the video offers a good, quick explanation of how corporations got to be such an influence on government and policy even before the Citizens United decision. It also briefly mentioned public funding for elections--a big part of the fix for the problems that spring from institutionalizing big-money politics.
As far as amendments go, there's debate on whether the better approach is to go after all corporate usurpation of constitutional personhood rights or just First Amendment ones. The organizations that Story of Stuff links to on this YouTube video limit themselves to the first amendment. Story of Stuff's website also gives a nod to the Move to Amend coalition, which proposes ending corporate access to all constitutional rights, not just those granted by the First Amendment. Alliance for Democracy is a member of the Move to Amend coalition and recommends the broader approach--check out the fliers on this page to find out why.
There are state and local resolutions in the works supporting both approaches--maybe one where you live. Given that this movement is just beginning and has a long way to go, this is a good video to share regardless of your views on how broad an anti-corporate personhood amendment we need to win.
by Annie Leonard and Allison Cook. Posted Feb 21 at Yes! Magazine
Watch the trailer for "The Story of Corporate Personhood," coming out March 1.
We never expected to be writing an article with this title. Aren’t united citizens a good thing? Civil Rights movement? Egypt?Madison?
Yes, but that’s not the kind of people power we’re talking about here. What we want to fight is the disastrous 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United v Federal Election Commission (FEC) decision Ironically, “Citizens United” is the name of a conservative advocacy group which receives corporate funding and works to promote increased rights for corporations. The Citizens United v. FEC case originally dealt with the question of whether or not airing Citizens United’s documentary about Hillary Clinton was an advocacy ad, and therefore subject to existing restrictions on election ads under the McCain-Feingold law. Whether your passion is protecting the environment or creating green jobs or improving public education—or really any other issue on which corporate interests are blocking real solutions—this is your campaign too.
But in a brazen act of judicial activism, the court decided to consider the much broader issue of corporate spending to influence elections, which wasn’t even presented in the original case. In a decision that stunned democracy advocates and trampled a number of campaign finance laws, a slim five-Justice majority ruled that corporations—including for-profit corporations—do indeed have a right to spend as much money as they want to elect or defeat candidates in our elections.
This decision effectively grants corporations the same First Amendment Free Speech protections granted to real live people.
The catch is that corporations obviously are not people. Someone get the Supreme Court a biology textbook! There are some really big, and really significant, differences. For starters, people are part of the biological system; we need clear air and water, a healthy environment, a stable climate to thrive. Corporations are legal entities, created by people, and have no such biological needs and thus no inherent reason to safeguard the environment.
People make decisions based on a constant balancing of many interests, including love for our families and communities, compassion, kindness, desire for a better world, as well as economic and material interests. Corporations don’t have families and communities, nor hearts with which to love them. As Justice Stevens said in his dissenting opinion, “corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts and no desires.” Instead, corporations—by both law and the demands of the market—are under enormous pressure to focus on one thing: maximizing profit.
Their single minded focus, plus their enormous scale, means it’s dangerous to invite them into our democracy. If corporations spend even a tiny percentage of their profits on influencing election outcomes, they can dwarf the contributions from real people, skewing election results to favor corporate interests, which aren’t always the same as the interests of workers, families, and the environment.
At the Story of Stuff Project, we have partnered with organizations working for solutions to issues as diverse as climate change, toxics in consumer products, and the wastefulness of bottled water. In every case, when we ask these experienced organizers what the biggest obstacles to progress are, the answer is the same: corporate influence in the political process.
The Citizens United v. FEC decision makes this problem even worse. Reversing it is a critical step to reclaiming our democracy by the people and for the people. Yes, we know that reversing this case won’t immediately prevent the myriad other ways that corporations exert influence in our democracy, but it is a really, really important place to start. Reversing a Supreme Court decision requires a new Constitutional Amendment so we’re joining with a number of organizations launching a national campaign to obtain one. It’s not going to be quick or easy, but working for big changes requires big efforts. And while we’re working on it, we can be building a broad-based national movement to get corporations completely out of our democracy—and get the people back in.
This is a really important fight. Until we wrestle control back from the corporations, we can’t leverage our amazing democracy for real progress on any of the issues we care about. So, whether your passion is protecting the environment or creating green jobs or improving public education—or really any other issue on which corporate interests are blocking real solutions—this is your campaign too. Here are five ways to plug in and get started.
Five Ways to Fight Citizens United: 1. Watch The Story of Stuff Project’s latest film, The Story of Citizens United v. FEC: Why Democracy Only Works when People are in Charge at www.storyofcitizensunited.org. Then share it widely! Post it on Facebook, tweet about it, blog about it, organize a showing in your school or church, put a link on your website. Help turn the volume up on this much needed conversation!
2. Party for the Cause. Hold a house party to screen the The Story of Citizens United v. FEC and invite others to join the campaign. Invite friends, neighbors, family members over to your place for an evening of democracy in action! You can download our House Party Guide, which has house party tips and action ideas, here.
3. Sign on. Sign Public Citizen’s petition calling for a Constitutional Amendment clarifying that free speech is for people, not corporations. We need a lot of signatures to launch this ambitious campaign. Please download the petition here, make copies and carry them around with you collecting signatures—and thus telling others about the campaign—everywhere you go. If you want to sign electronically, please do so here.
4. Get National. If corporations spend even a tiny percentage of their profits on influencing election outcomes, they can dwarf contributions from real people, skewing election results to favor corporate interests, which aren’t always the same as the interests of workers, families, and the environment.
Join a national organization working on taking back our democracy. This way your local efforts can be magnified and it’ll be a lot easier to track this issue and identify opportunities to get involved locally and nationally. Check out Public Citizen, Free Speech for People, People for the American Way and Move to Amend.
(blog editor's note: Alliance for Democracy is a member of the Move to Amend coalition, which supports an amendment barring corporate access to all constitutional personhood rights, not just those under the First Amendment--if you'd like to support a wide ban check out the site--organizing resources, including a petition, are here.) 5. Democracy: Use it or Lose it. One reason corporations have been able to hijack our democracy is that many of us haven’t engaged much in it ourselves lately. If we want policy makers who prioritize public good, healthy jobs, and a sustainable environment, we need to get involved, hold them accountable, and engage as active citizens every day—not just on voting day. Join a local organization working on an issue you care about, host a community event to share information, write letters to your congresspeople and local newspapers to share your opinion. There are an infinite number of ways to get involved and once enough of us do, we can take back our government so that it really is by the people, for the people. Then, we can get to work solving today’s pressing problems with a government working for us, instead of big business.
Annie Leonard and Allison Cook wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Annie is the author and host of The Story of Stuff and the director of the Story of Stuff Project; Allison is special project coordinator for the Story of Stuff Project.
Video of citizens' statements at the Ft. Bragg (CA) City Council. The council is considering a resolution favoring a constitutional amendment to eliminate corporate personhood--you can read the text of the resolution here.
Thanks to Jim Tarbell and Mendocino County community access cable tv for editing and footage.
Corporate persons frolic on a frosty morning at the Capitol. The theatrics and following march were part of the Movement for the People summit with participation and performances from members of many of the sponsoring groups, as well as Code Pink. Thanks from the organizers to Steffon Moody, Diane Wittner, Sally Rose, Will Rice, Susan Harman, Perry Goodfriend, Jay Marx, and many others.
C-SPAN taped several of the panel discussions at the January 20-22 Movement for the People summit, including the keynote speech by Lawrence Lessig on ethics in politics--you can watch the broadcasts here. Highly recommended: the panel discussion on movement building models, with Steve Meacham from City Life/Vita Urbana in Boston, Veronica Dorsey and Ashley Hufnagel of United Workers of Baltimore, Steve Dubb from Community Wealth Project and Evergreen Coops in Cleveland, entrepreneurial activist Paul Glover, and Marty Cobenais Indigenous Environmental Network.
Laughs of the day: Have you considered the advantages of being a corporate person? These videos from Movement for the People highlight a new frontier in self-actualization. Haven't you always wanted to be an Inc.?
Hate paying taxes? Not a problem when you're an inc. with a PO Box in the Cayman Islands! "We're here, we're corporate, get used to it!"
Part 1 of a GritTV expose by the US Chamber of Commerce, by Harry Handbury. This big-business lobbying outfit has used the Citizens United decision and its 501 c 6 trade association status to swiftboat any candidate who tries to regulate their top funders, say the experts interviewed here.
Whether or not we see part II of this report depends on whether the filmmakers can raise enough money before Election Day. See the video website to find out more.
Take a look at USChamberWatch for more information on the US Chamber of Commerce, including facts on funding and how local chambers of commerce are publicly distancing themselves from the national group's partisan political activities.
As the finale of our amazing week of Localize This! Artful Activism camp, last Sunday Backbone worked in collaboration with Agit-Pop to execute a model flash-mob, non-arrestable, high-visibility action with great video production that has since gone viral, likely to reach half a million views by the time you read this email. MoveOn.org provided the funding to pay for this production and has since begun sending it to their members.
IMHO - I think we should boycott Congressional elections in districts where members have not signed on to a bill to Amend the Constitutional to ABOLISH "Corporate Personhood." Corporate personhood is the "gateway" to the gateway issue of public financing of campaigns, otherwise known as Clean Elections or Voter-Owned Elections.
Thanks to all the trainers, dancers, musicians, videographers, and especially Agit-Pop for giving us this excellent way to end Localize This!
In Gratitude and Collaboration,
Bill Moyer Executive Director, Backbone Campaign PO BOX 278, Vashon, WA
Have you quit shopping Target and Best-Buy? More importantly, have you told the CEO and your neighbors why? If you need a quick link to express your opinion, check out this cool website from the New York Public Advocate's office, with the corporate political donation policies and contact info of the 100 biggest corporations in the US.
Here's the video--you've probably already seen it but it's too good to not post:
Drive the message home! Support constitutional rights for people, not corporations and show the big donors you're on to their game with these bumperstickers!
