Ron: Yes..
Thom: And Corporate Personhood includes nonprofit corporations, which includes churches, which includes anti-abortion organizations, and some of the most profitable enterprises in America right now are religious organizations. I mean, there are for example, public broadcasting T.V. stations around the country that are going broke because PBS is having problems, and they are being bought up by religious broadcasters. Pat Robinson made a billion dollars personally, a billion dollars. He is a billionaire. He is worth over a billion dollars, just on his nonprofit ministry. So, I don't think they want to give up corporate personhood. They don't want to give up their ability to buy members of Congress. In fact, they're probably using Corporate Personhood to promote fetal personhood. So, no, I haven't found any who are outraged by that doctrine. They don't get the obvious irony as I think you and I do.
Ron: That's a dead end. Not something"
Thom: Unfortunately. In my experience, it has been, yeah. I've tried.
Ron: Now, you've been involved in the past, and I know that you had a connection with religious organizations in the past, with Solem.
Thom: Sure.
Ron: And, are they all that way? Isn't it possible to get to somebody, to get somewhere"
Thom: Maybe, but you know"
Ron: "that the religious community to talk about Corporate Personhood, even if it starts with, I don't know, Michael Learner and some of the Liberal members of the religious community? The question "
Thom: I've tried the conservative ones. I mean, one of the best receptions that I've ever got to doing a keynote speech on Corporate Personhood on my book Unequal Protection, must have been at least six or seven years ago. I gave the keynote speech for the Unitary Universalist Annual Convention, and it was in Seattle. And got a very, very good reception. That's a church that gets it. They've been fighting the battle against Corporate Personhood for years. I would guess that probably churches like the United Church of Christ and others are concerned about this as well.
Oddly, the unions don't like the idea of ending Corporate Personhood because they are also corporations; they are non-profit corporations, and they could arguably use it, but they are actually constrained by law. They are constrained by the Wagner Act and by Tart-Hartley so they have to disclose how they spend their money whereas [inaudible 41:48] doesn't.
So, what I say to my friends in the Union movement, and I'm not sure that I convinced any of them of this, although I've tried to have this conversation with a few of them, is that if unions were to lose their right of Corporate Personhood along with general electric, that a big corporation could say to its employees, "Hey, you all ought to vote for this law, this resolution, or this person," and its employees ignore it. The union is a democratic institution, which means 51 percent of the people voted for that leadership, and so if that leadership says, "Hey, I'm going to endorse, you know, so and so." Probably, most of the members are going to go along with that recommendation because they are simpatico; they put that person in power. So I think ending Corporate Personhood, even though it would end the ability of unions to participate in politics, in a way that was not regulated by Congress nor does it give Congress the right to control union participation in politics along with corporate participation in politics. Even though that would happen, I think it would work to the benefit of unions and the detriment of corporations. If you play that game out like a chess game, you know, three moves ahead, it works to their advantage. And it might to some churches, because many churches are membership organizations that are at least semi-democratic. I mean they not have elected their pastor, but they show up because they like the person.
If you're looking for advocates in the fight against corporate personhood, you're not going find them among the anti-abortion movement. You're going to find them among basically tea partiers, not by Wall Street people. In other words, populists, grass-roots folks on both the right and the left. People who believe that populism is the belief that the power in the United States should derive from the people, not from a ruling elite. And that's what our Constitution was written as; it is a populist document, and Thomas Jefferson was the ultimate populist. So I think that those people who hold his ratings dearly, whether it be right or left, are going, are going to be your allies.
Ron: So you've got me thinking. I've been an advocate of course for Single Player Health Care, and Single Player Health Care advocates are working to develop a divestment program, like that which was used for tobacco and apartheid. I wonder if that might have some effect on the anti-corporate personhood movement. Now, you just saying that word, anti-corporate personhood movement, is there such a thing? Is there an organization that defines itself by that? Because there should be.
Thom: Yeah. Yeah. This organization called "Move to Amend', movetoamend.org is their website. It was put together mostly by David Cobb, who was the Green Party candidate for president in 2004. He is an attorney in California. They have branches all over the country. They are the ones who successfully got on the ballots in Mazola, Montana and Boulder, Colorado, resolutions, asking their congressional delegations to support this constitutional amendment, to say that corporations aren't people and money is not speech to be in corporate personhood. It's going to be voted on Tuesday by the Los Angeles City Counsel, so, any of your listeners, if they have connections to anybody or friends in Los Angeles, tell them to call their city council members. If this recording does not plays before"
Ron: It doesn't. It doesn't play till Wednesday.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
2
1
