Abolish Corporate Personhood—by David Cobb

Yet again the U.S. Supreme Court has sided with the ruling elite against the interests of the American people. Last week in Citizens United vs. FEC they overturned the flimsy federal campaign finance reform laws afforded by the McCain-Feingold law. Corporations can now to spend unlimited money in buying our elections. The Court has legalized corporate bribery of our elected officials.

So if you were already disgusted by the fact that over $5 billion dollars was spent in the 2008 election, watch out. Because the floodgates are now wide open!

There will be calls to fight back at the legislative level. We need publicly financed elections, we need laws requiring a majority of shareholders to approve corporate political contributions. Those laws would be an immediate improvement, and I support those efforts.

But even if every one of those laws passed, it would not be enough. Because once again, the Court relied on the illegitimate legal doctrine of "Corporate Personhood" in order to justify this profoundly undemocratic decision. Corporate personhood is the notion that a corporation can claim to be a person, and therefore entitled to basic human rights—also described as political and civil rights—and have courts overturn laws.

As this decision clearly demonstrates, corporate personhood is not an inconsequential legal technicality. Consider this—the Supreme Court ruled that a corporation was a "legal person" with 14th Amendment protections before they granted full personhood to African-Americans, immigrants, natives, and women.