The Udall "Democracy for All" amendment is a Red Herring

The "Democracy for All" (Udall) amendment is a Red Herring and I am surprised that Bernie Sanders is said to be promoting it. Even Bernie's "Saving American Democracy" Amendment proposal is far superior to this tiny bone. It fails to bar corporations or other artificial entities from having rights protected under the Constitution. And it returns us to a century of failed campaign regulation.  It uses the word "may" instead of "shall." 

In other words, this amendment proposal is getting LOTS of press because it fails to mandate a ban on corporate personhood rights while promoting the false hope that regulatory boards protect people over industry profits. Unfortunately, is is too often the opposite. 

Free Speech for People apologizes about supporting this bill saying that they are also promoting a separate bill to ban corporate rights.  Unfortunately, that bill has no momentum. 

I recommend when our California Senators debate the Udall bill this coming month, that they bring up the following issues:

1) The campaign finance regulations in Arizona will be VERY different than those in Vermont. 

2) Do regulations really work?  Industry insiders tend to be the "experts" staffing regulatory boards and they habitually regulate loopholes in favor of their industry rather than protect the People. 

3) Ultimately, as long as large donations can buy politicians, Democracy is an impossible sham.  When campaigns will be publicly financed and limited to just a couple of months with private money prohibited, then public servants will bend in favor of those that pay for their campaigns, the public.  This will hopefully be the next constitutional amendment to get all big money out of politics once and for all! 

4) Regulations didn't work for most of the 20th century, what makes you think an amendment will make failed regulations any better?  Do we have to wait for another century of failed regulations before elections are publicly financed?

5) The root cause of this perversity of Democracy is the implication by the Supreme Court in 1886 that fictional persons get the due process of law promised to "all persons" in the 14th Amendment.  Any amendment proposal that doesn't pluck out the root by clarifying the status of fictional persons under the Constitution will ultimately miss the mark.  The Udall Amendment bypasses this question by saying that artificial entities "may" be distinguished from natural persons...  Its failure to clearly mandate that the protection of constitutional rights are for natural persons only makes it a waste of political capital. 

We can solve the issue non-violently with a constitutional amendment

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 1887 that corporations are persons under the Constitution. The justices actually REFUSED to rule on that issue in this decision. Yet, the court reporter, a schill for the railroad barons, wrote it into his headnote, and as such, a century of court decisions have been based on this false precedent.  This is a 115 year-old corporate farce! 

In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo that political money is speech and is protected under the First 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 (1887), and money is speech (1976), then corporations and trade unions have the right to free speech under the First Amendment and can spend unlimited amounts of undisclosed money to influence elections. This decision overturned a century of campaign finance reform, and was certainly the most anti-democratic decision in history. 

The Citizens United decision 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, 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.

Collective Bargaining and the Constitution

The First Amendment to the US Constitution gives us the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.  How else will the common man do that without a labor union?  Therefore, unions are guaranteed in the US Constitution. 

Whatever Governor Walker is doing in Wisconsin is unconstitutional. 
Will DFA pay for a court trial to take it to the Supreme Court?  Or is the Supreme Court currently stacked with philosophically pro-corporate, anti-populist justices that it would surely rule against organized labor. 

In addition, the Citizen's United Supreme Court decision ruled that only Corporations AND labor unions can give unlimited support to political candidates.  That leaves labor unions the ONLY force that can balance the purchase of elections.  And Governor Walker would like to skew the balance in favor of corporations.