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applegrove

(118,696 posts) Thu Aug 20, 2015, 08:36 PM Aug 2015

The GOP’s glaring “birthright” hypocrisy: How the 14th amendment also gave birth to corporate person

The GOP’s glaring “birthright” hypocrisy: How the 14th amendment also gave birth to corporate personhood

by Marcy Wheeler at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2015/08/20/the_gops_glaring_birthright_citizenship_hypocrisy_how_the_14th_amendment_also_gave_birth_to_corporate_personhood/

"SNIP..............

But there’s another way to think of such proposals, one that might have radical positive effects (even while leaving many Americans in a legally precarious position). In addition to granting all people born in the United States citizenship, the Fourteenth Amendment mandates that all persons be treated equally before the law. The same first clause that provides for birthright citizen continues, enumerating that states may not deprive “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” That part of the Fourteenth Amendment has helped African Americans — and Americans of all races — obtain justice, most recently in the ruling that guaranteed same sex couples the right to marry.

But, in practice, the Fourteenth Amendment has been at least as useful in guaranteeing equal protection for a different kind of person: corporate persons.

As Thom Hartmann has explained at length, the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment got radically expanded almost 20 years after it was ratified. In the written decision for an 1886 Supreme Court case reviewing how railroads could be taxed, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the headnotes recorded that Chief Justice Morrison Waite asserted during arguments that “we are all of the opinion” that the Fourteenth Amendment “applies to these corporations.” That language, which wasn’t even part of the decision’s central holding, has in turn been used as precedent and to force legislatures to treat corporations the same as human people.

Corporations, it turns out, are the original “anchor babies,” exploiting the Fourteenth Amendment to gain the same rights as American people born to citizens. And that’s well before you consider how corporations — including Donald Trump’s — selectively choose the site of their legal birth, usually opting for Delaware (as Trump has) or Nevada to obtain advantages every bit as real as any child gets from being born north of the Texas border.

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The GOP’s glaring “birthright” hypocrisy: How the 14th amendment also gave birth to corporate person (Original Post) applegrove Aug 2015 OP

Another historical perspective on Corporate Personhood LongTomH Aug 2015 #1

LongTomH

(8,636 posts)

1. Another historical perspective on Corporate Personhood

Reply to applegrove (Original post)

Thu Aug 20, 2015, 09:32 PM

Aug 2015

From 2011: http://journals.democraticunderground.com/LongTomH/91

An article on the Huffington Post page traces the history of corporate personhood back to the 19th Century Gilded Age and the reaction of America's elite to the Paris Commune of 1871.

The Paris Commune was the first international incident followed daily in the United States. While President Barack Obama complains about the 24-hour news cycle today, its roots stretch back to Cyrus Field's transcontinental telegraph cable, which allowed the elites of America to focus intently on the two-month uprising and ultimate slaughter of thousands of Parisians. Cyrus Field's brother and his family were in Paris at the time, and a third brother, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field, obsessively tracked the news back in the states. It was the Paris uprising that transformed Stephen Field from a mundanely corrupt judge in the paid service of the railroads to a zealous crusader for all corporations, with the aim of suppressing what he and other leaders saw as the threat of democracy from below.

The authors diverge from the usual historical account of how a Supreme Court decision was interpreted to grant privileges of personhood to corporations:

The common understanding of how the corporation became a legal person says that a Supreme Court reporter of decisions erroneously said as much in a case summary and that error became an unremovable stain, coloring every decision after. But that reading of history whitewashes what was, in fact, a coordinated effort to win citizenship for corporations.

They go on with a discussion of the history of the concept of the corporation, which had the original purpose of limiting the liability of investors. Justice Field delivered a number of minority opinions which at least implied that corporations, which had previously been regarded as artificial persons under the law, had many of the rights of natural persons, i.e., citizens:

The Louisiana Legislature, then controlled by a majority coalition of African Americans and white Reconstructionists known as "Radical Republicans," had passed a law insisting that all butchers move their business south of New Orleans, so the butchers' entrails didn't pollute the city's water supply. The Court upheld the law, and the city's pattern of repeated cholera outbreaks stopped cold. Field argued, however, that it was a corporation's God-given right to dump pig intestines wherever it saw fit, regardless of the public health consequences or laws on the books

Justice Field was as corrupt as today's Justice Clarence Thomas; he was heavily invested in railroads and other industries, and handed down decisions in favor of those industries, even when there was a clear conflict of interest. Congress allowed Supreme Court justices to sit in on lower, circuit court decisions. When Field sat the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in California, he inserted language in his decisions stating that corporations were persons.

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