{"id":1851,"date":"2010-01-23T15:57:03","date_gmt":"2010-01-23T20:57:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/?p=1851"},"modified":"2010-01-23T15:57:03","modified_gmt":"2010-01-23T20:57:03","slug":"corporate-personhood-trumps-human-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/2010\/01\/23\/corporate-personhood-trumps-human-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"Corporate personhood trumps human rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charlie Smith<\/strong>
\nAFFA, Charleston<\/p>\n

The 14th Amendment was adopted to ensure the constitutional rights of freed slaves and their descendants after the Civil War. There have been roughly 325 federal court cases relative to this amendment since that time. Nineteen of those cases have actually had anything at all to do with a human being. The remaining 300 or so cases have been part of the ongoing corruption process that grants \u201cpersonhood\u201d to corporations. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cCorporate Personhood\u201d is the legal concept that grants most of the rights of natural living, breathing citizens to corporations. Under our constitution US corporations are allowed virtually every right of human beings, including such rights as the right to marry. <\/p>\n

This \u201cmarriage\/merger\u201d concept which flies in the face of \u201ctraditional marriage\u201d is openly embraced by conservatives who will freely grant to a profit-making business what they flatly refuse to grant to millions of our living, breathing LGBT citizens. Did anyone hear a single conservative objection when half the major banks in our country eloped with the other half in 2008? Even corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton are allowed to serve openly in every branch of our military — unlike thousands of living breathing gay and lesbian citizens who still serve and suffer under Don\u2019t Ask, Don\u2019t Tell. <\/p>\n

What we have discovered over the course of the past year is that along with our \u201cconstitutional rights,\u201d human persons also have the obligation to serve time in prison and in some cases be executed when they break the law. Corporations have somehow managed to avoid that unpleasantness.<\/p>\n

In the wake of last week\u2019s decision in the Citizens United case, corporate rights of personhood will now also include the right of corporations to buy politicians and elections with no limit on the corrupting power of their contributions. This is because corporations as \u201cpersons\u201d must be granted free speech. This free speech right is in addition to their corporate \u201chuman right\u201d to marry and their corporate \u201chuman right\u201d right to serve openly in the military. <\/p>\n

Does anyone see the irony that corporations have now been granted more \u201cHuman Rights\u201d by the Supreme Court than millions of our own anatomically HUMAN citizens have been granted? After the last two years of outrageous corporate arrogance and greed, why is it that we have done absolutely nothing to strip those rights from corporations, yet we strip those very same rights every day from our very human LGBT soldiers and citizens?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charlie Smith AFFA, Charleston The 14th Amendment was adopted to ensure the constitutional rights of freed slaves and their descendants after the Civil War. There have been roughly 325 federal court cases relative to this amendment since that time. Nineteen … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,12,9],"tags":[65,64,66],"class_list":["post-1851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-newscommentary","category-network-newsevents","category-sc-newscommentary","tag-citizens-united","tag-corporate-personhood","tag-free-speech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1851"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1852,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1851\/revisions\/1852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scpronet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}