Wal-Mart Is Not a Person

"We the People are the first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution; and from its adoption until the Robber Baron Era in the late nineteenth century, people meant human beings. In the 1886 Santa Clara case, however, the court reporter of the Supreme Court proclaimed in a “headnote”—a summary or statement added at the top of the court decision, which is separate from the decision and has no legal force whatsoever—that the word person in law and, particularly, in the Constitution, meant both humans and corporations.

Thus began in a big way (it actually started a half century earlier in a much smaller way with a case involving Dartmouth University) the corruption of American democracy and the shift, over the 125 years since then, to our modern corporate oligarchy."

"McCain-Feingold was a good bipartisan achievement by conservative senator John McCain and liberal senator Russ Feingold to limit the ability of corporations to interfere around the edges of campaigns."

"But the law offended the members of the economic elite in this country who call themselves “conservatives” and believe that they should be able to spend vast amounts of money to influence electoral and legislative outcomes."

"By having free-speech rights equal with people, Stevens argued, corporations will actually harm the “competition among ideas” that the Framers envisioned when they wrote the First Amendment:


“[A] corporation...should have as its objective the conduct of business activities with a view to enhancing corporate profit and shareholder gain.” In a state election...the interests of nonresident corporations may be fundamentally adverse to the interests of local voters. Consequently, when corporations grab up the prime broadcasting slots on the eve of an election, they can flood the market with advocacy that bears little or no correlation to the ideas of natural persons or to any broader notion of the public good. The opinions of real people may be marginalized."

Read the rest of this '1st in a series' HERE.

(EDIT)
The original version of this post included a banner from wakeupwallmart .com. The links used for that banner now point to a UFCW union webpage where they are promising to make things better. I'm not sure if wakeupwallmart was always a part of this union website, but I do know they have removed all of the pages from the wakeup site. Perhaps under pressure from the giant one? wakeupwalmart com banners ticker ticker150x200 html