The new fire in the growth of Liberty and Democracy initiated by the Arab Spring and OWS has accelerated the process of our sovereign People taking back control of our government from the corporate oligarchy. We will non-violently take back our government from within the system set up by our Founding Fathers by amending the Constitution.
The Supreme Court never actually ruled in their Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad 1886 that corporations are persons under the Constitution. The justices actually refused to rule on that issue in this decision. Yet, the court reporter wrote it into his headnote, and as such, a century of court decisions have been based on this false precedent.
In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that political money is speech and is protected under the 1st Amendment in the Bill of Rights.
On January 21, 2010, the Supreme Court made their worst decision to date, even worse than the Dred Scott decision. In Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court legislated from the bench that if corporations are persons under the Constitution, and money is speech, then corporations & trade unions have the right to free speech under the 1st Amendment and can spend unlimited amounts of undisclosed money to influence elections. This decision overturned a century of campaign finance reform.
It opened the floodgates for international corporations to buy our elections. It drove the final nail into the coffin of Democracy, which is now dead. We no longer live in a Republic with government by the People. Our elected representatives are beholding to the special interests that financed their election campaigns, and not to the electorate. The whole system is seriously flawed.
We need to take our government back. The Declaration of Independence 1776 says, “…to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Short of an armed revolution, many people have concluded that we may be able to solve the issue non-violently with a constitutional amendment. A sudden rash of amendments have been proposed to Congress in both Houses. Most of them concern campaign finance reform. A couple of the proposed amendments go right to the crux of the issue. They propose that only human beings are persons under the law, and money is NOT speech.
Don’t miss David Cobb, the very knowledgeable speaker sponsored by Move to Amend – Ukiah, who will be speaking in 5 cities around Mendocino County. I’ll be there at the Saturday Afternoon Clubhouse on February 13 to hear him. You should go too.
