The doctrine that corporations are ‘persons’ and thus have the same rights as human beings originated in 1886 under dubious circumstances and there is a movement to repeal it. Greg Coleridge of the American Friends Service Committee has forwarded to me a petition to repeal this doctrine.
Dear friend,
In May 1886 United States Supreme Court clerk J.C. Bancroft Davis, former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company, inserted a headnote to the United States Reports pertaining to the Court’s decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company.
Thus without a formal court ruling, this simple act set a precedent and effectively established corporations as legal persons entitled to the same rights as living, breathing persons under the 14th amendment.
What has followed is 125 years of case law giving corporations Constitutional Rights leading to the destruction of our democracy at the hands of greedy corporations. The most recent, of course, is the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission that opened the floodgates of corporate money in elections. From the environment, energy, and healthcare to jobs, education and the economy, the greed of big multi-national corporations is laying waste to the American dream, and our democracy.
The 125th anniversary of the Santa Clara Railroad case is upon us. AFSC has for more than 15 years been addressing corporate constitutional rights. As an endorser of Move to Amend, we at the Northeast Ohio AFSC hope you’ll mark this anniversary by signing the petition at Move to Amend.org. Our shared goal is to collect 125, 000 signatures for the 125th anniversary of corporate personhood.
We must come together to reclaim our democracy for living, breathing, people by eliminating corporate personhood through Constitutional amendment.
Whatever issue arises, at its root you’ll find a corporation standing between “we the people” and the solution. If we are to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and posterity,” then we must put an end corporate personhood.
Please sign the Motion to Amend
Democratically yours,
Greg Coleridge
DirectorPS – You can help Move to Amend get to 125,000 signatures. Find out more here!
I have added my name to the list of over 111,000 signatures. I hope you will too.
Here are my thoughts:
And evil people created Persons.? The word Person comes from the Latin word Persona, which means mask.? A Person is a fictional entity in an imaginary world.? It does not and cannot exist in the reality where you and I live.? A PERSON has two attributes, a Name and a Birth Date, both of which are hearsay.? Law books have skewed the definition to include corporations as being a Person, which is the crux of the Fraud and the truth of the illusion. A Corporation cannot be a man created male or female by God. A human being is not a living man created male or female by God, human means Color of man and thus is not a species of man of God.? Corporations exist in an imaginary world, we do not.? The idea of there being a natural or artificial Persons being the same as a man created male or female by God is a fraud, for a Natural Person is a person, thus a fiction with some fictional attributes. It is also important to note that a man created male or female by God is only a reference point from the King James Bible, in terms of LAW franchised from the BAR in THE CITY OF LONDON. This is the best way to describe ourselves in relation to that fraud, for they make use of the King James Bible, although it is truly the Torah and the Talmud, but we?ll get into that later.
The foundation of all LAW on the planet is to fraudulently equate a PERSON, a fictional entity, as being a man created male or female by God. The main trick that they use is to attempt to get you to sign on fraudulently as a SURETY for the PERSON and thus whatever they do in their imaginary world, they can do to you as the SURETY. Thus because it is an imaginary world they are indemnifying themselves from what they do to you through fraudulent contracts.? It is a scam.? There is hope though in that by learning the truth you can set yourself free.? In time we will all be free, but it will take time. The simple foundation of PERSON is that they want you to buy into the fact that a PERSON is the same as a fictional entity called a CORPORATION, and as such a Corporation can have GOD status over us, like a Country or Government has. Thus, because we can create then it is okay to say that fictional entities can create, and therein is the foundation of the Tyranny, in that we are considered to be imaginary things.?
Shalom Mano,
I considered this topic a few weeks ago in one of my 272 Project essays: OUR COUNTRY IS OF WE…
A follow-up I’m working on asks the question: Is Corporate Capitalism the Problem?
B’shalom,
Jeff Hess