Corporate personhood is one of the biggest issues for Occupy Wall Street. Thom Hartmann, who wrote THE book on it, discusses it and related issues as they relate to Occupy Wall street, Citizens United and the current state of affairs.

::::::::

Listen to the recording of the interview here

Rob: Hi, welcome to the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Shaw WMJC 1360AM, out of Washington Township reaching Metro Philly and South Jersey. My guest tonight is Thom Hartmann. Thom Hartmann, it's hard to imagine you not knowing who Thom Hartmann is because he's such a presence all over the place. He's the top progressive radio talk show host, he's got a television show on RTTV and he's got a couple dozen books out. His newest one is called the Thom Hartmann Reader and whether you've read one or two or a bunch of Thom's books or you never read them before, this is a great place to start. Thom is one of the most -- how do I make this a superlative? He is a renaissance man. Of the many brilliant people I've had the gift of meeting, he's one of the brightest, most wide and diverse people I've ever met and this is an overview of his writings for the last couple decades and you really should get a look at it.

We're going to talk today about some of his different diverse ideas but one of the reasons that I also got together with Thom is to talk about Corporate Personhood because it is one of the biggest topics in the Occupy Movement. So I wanted to get some new thinking from Thom on that and there is a chapter in the book on Corporate Personhood; Walmart is not a person. So welcome to the show, Thom, great to have you back.

Thom: Well thank you, Rob. It's great to be here. It's always great to talk with you and thank you for your very kind words on the introduction and please forgive my cat. My attack cat, he's having a bad day.

Rob: You have some wild cats there too, I think.  

Thom: This is Higgins.  He's been a character on our show for years. He attacks anybody who gets within 10 feet of him except me so. Anyhow, to Walmart is not a person. Walmart is not a person, repeat after me. That's the mantra though.

Rob: Well, you wrote this book, Unequal Protection, which got into all the details about Corporate Personhood and I remember when you were working on that book and you sent me an advance draft of it, I was like, "What is Corporate Personhood?" I didn't know anybody who knew about it. It's kind of like...

Thom: Everybody said that back then.

Rob: Pardon me?

Thom: That's what everybody was saying back then. This was 2000, well 1999, 2000, 2001 was when I wrote that book and people were like, "What are you talking about?" and I was like, "You just wait. If Supreme Court keeps going the direction its going, its going to get a whole lot worse and you're going to know all about and you should know that now." The book was published, I think, in 2002 in first edition and I got picked up through some law schools that use it and a lot lawyers read it and a lot of law lords read it and it was in the movement, in the progressive movement, it's fairly well known, I think, but outside of that, nobody was paying any attention to it. 

Then when Citizens United happened, publisher called up and said, "You know we've got a" -- actually I called them and said, "We've got to redo this to include Citizens United." So I rewrote the book basically and added a 20 percent new content and we came out with a whole brand new edition. Then when we did the Tom Harlan Reader Week, we took the piece of it, that's the piece of -- actually it's out of -- I wrote another book called Rebooting the American Dream and it's got 11 policies prescriptions. It's the book that Bernie Handers read from when he did his AR for the [inaudible 04:05] on the floor of the Senate. He wrote a cover letter for and gave it to all 100 members of the US Senate and one of the chapters in that book is called Walmart is not a Person and it's basically a chapter long distillation of the entire book Unequal Protection that you had read back in 2000.

That's a in the Thom Hartmann reader and it's a pretty good summary. It's a very good summary although the whole book Unequal Protection is also being serialized right now through that. I think you've got a piece of it over at OpEdNews as well and probably you'll have more of it I'm guessing.

Rob: That's right. Yeah. We've got permission from the publisher as well to republish it. So I'm curious, whatever happened with those copies of the book that went to all those senators? Did Bernie or you ever hear anything from anybody?  

Thom: I haven't talked with Bernie about it. I doubt it. I'm guessing that they probably all get a book or two a day, just like we do from various publishers and people and I know that Dennis Kucinich has it; he's familiar with it and I had a diner with him and his wife a couple of nights ago actually. He's got a proposal out to nationalize the fed and he's on the Corporate Personhood bandwagon. There are some other good members of congress who are on the topic but I think what's happened is, back when I first published the book Unequal Protection of this topic, it was obscure. Since citizens United, there've been all these movements that have come out. Now you've got Dylan Ratigan jumping on the bandwagon and Laurence Lessig and John Bonifaz and David Cobb. David Cobb's been on it from day one. In fact, I called David Cobb extensively. The guy ran for the president on the Green Party in 2004. David's a really good guy but some of these guys are just saying, "Oh, we don't need a constitutional member to eliminate personhood, all we need to do is just get the money out of politics." And I think that that's a horrible mistake. If you're going to have a constitutional amendment you don't go halfway, you do the whole thing. So anyway.

Rob: It's the whole thing.   

Thom: Well, here's the history of it, Rob.  In fact, there's two different issues here frankly and one of them is going to be a topic of a book that I want to write the year after next, after I finish writing the book I'm writing right now. The first topic is the issue of Corporate Personhood and then the second topic, which frankly I think is even more important, is the issue of what's called Judicial Review and Judicial Supremacy and that is that the Supreme Court are the kings of America. 

To the Corporate Personhood issue, starting in 1815, in the Darmouth case,  the Supreme Court recognize that a corporation could have standing before the Supreme Court and established an idea that rather than the individuals who own the corporation coming before the court because they're persons, that the corporation itself could come before the court. That was the beginning of the precedent although that was very small. 

Then in 1886, everybody points to this case, Santa Clara County Vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, five tax cases that went up before the Supreme Court from the 9 th circuit. Of course, Stephen Field was the Supreme Court Justice. Field was bought off by the railroads; they were promising him that they'd support him for president in the election of 1888 or 1892, if he would go their way. He was one of several actually on that Supreme Court who were being bribed by the railroads. The railroads tax cases basically said, "If we're paying tax A, five cents a mile in Santa Ana County and six cents a mile in Santa Clara County, that that's the same thing as saying that there is different rules for black people and white people under the 14 amendment of the Constitution, "All person are equal under the law, equal should -- equal protection under the law," and that's unequal protection and so we should have the rights." Of course, the 14 th Amendment starts right out by saying, "Persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens thereof." So it's obviously talking about people and no person should be denied equal protection under the law. You just read the 14 th Amendment, there's no way any rational person could think it had to do with corporations. 

In fact, in 1886 that's how the Court ruled; they ruled the corporations don't have personage rights. Or they failed to rule but they did. What they did is they ruled that the corporation, the railroad corporation lost because the California law trumped their argument and it didn't even need to address the constitutional issues. But the Clerk of the Court, John Chandler of An CrossDavis who was a former president of the Newberg and New York Railroad and was in on this scheme, he wrote a headnote which has no legal standing; it's a cleft note version of what the case it about, it's a summary, just for people to do quick and easy, you know, "I'm looking for a case about so and so," so you look through the headnotes. He wrote a headnote for the case that said that the case had decided that corporations are persons under the law and equal to 14 th Amendment protections. 

So then 10, 15 years later, the Court started quoting that headnote and right up to the case of Boston Vs. Vallejo in the 1880s, the Court was quoting that headnote in the 1886 case, not the case itself because the case itself did not say that. So there's been a lot of us who for a lot of years have been saying, "This is a doctrine that was never genuinely established as a result of a debate before the Supreme Court but has taken on a life of its own."

Then in the 1970s a case called Buckley Vs. Vallejo, the court ruled that money is speech; this case it was individual money. Then in the 1980s the court rule that corporations couldn't be restrained from participating in politics.  In Massachusetts there was a law that said that if a corporation was participating in political campaigning, they could only do it if it affected their business. The First National Bank arguable could have run ads saying, "There's a valid measure that says that we can't charge more thank 9 percent interest, please vote against it." They could have done that but they couldn't run an ad saying, "Let's make abortion illegal," because that's got nothing to do with banking. In fact, the First National Bank was funding some rather regular initiatives that had nothing to do with banking. So Mr. Vallejo or actually Mr. Buckley, who was the attorney general of  Massachusetts, sued them. It went to the Supreme Court, Buckley -- excuse me, First National Bank Vs Bellotti; his name is Bellotti. 

      Rob: How do you spell that?

Thom: I think it's B-E-L-L-O-T-T-I. Don't hold me to it. Close to it. I'm pretty sure -- my recollection is it was Frank Bellotti but it's been 12 years since I wrote the book so. The First National Bank Vs Bellotti, and that case, if you're look up that case, Rob, I strongly recommend that you read Rehnquist dissent. Rehnquist was actually opposed to that. In that case the court rule that a corporate can participate in the political arena even on things that don't affect the corporation. In other words, they're a player. So those two cases, Buckley Vs. Vallejo in the 70s, First National Bank Vs Bellotti in the 1980s, set the stage for Citizens United in 2010 and in the dissent, Rehnquist says,  he thought corporation should have that kind of  power and that dissent, of course he's been replaced by John Roberts who's a corporate lawyer, and who brought us Citizens United. But in the dissent in First National Bank, Rehnquist, this doctrine of personhood and this isn't a quote this is a paraphrase but this doctrine of Corporate Personhood came before the Santa Clara County Vs. South Pacific Railroad and was decided in the affirmative, decided on behalf of the corporations without benefit of public debate or dissent and in my opinion, was wrongly decided. 

Well the fact was never decided by the Supreme Court. So the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court was mistaken as is pretty much everybody else, these text books and everything. No law and you could just go back and read the case which is what I did. I was trying to the entire book from original source material which is how I discovered that everybody had it wrong. So anyhow, that's where we're at now. What the court has ruled now is that corporations are people and that money equals speech and because the court has ruled this, because of these twin doctrines that are some of the other evils of Judicial Review and Judicial Supremacy, of course the court has ruled this, it supersedes the law of the land. 

Now that was not the intent of the founders, that the court would have that kind of power; that was a part the court took onto itself and it threw it in a case called Marbury Vs Madison. But because the court has ruled that that's the law and so the only way to get around that is to pass constitutional amendment to undo what the court has done. Just like they had to pass the 13 th , 14 th and 15 th Amendments to undo Dred Scott or at least much of Dred Scott, we need a constitutional amendment. 

Now if we pass a constitutional amendment -- now let me just back up a little bit if I may. In addition, claiming the rights of free speech, corporations are claiming other rights under the Bill of Rights. That's the 1 st Amendment, Right of Free Speech. They're also claiming the 4 th Amendment, Right of Privacy. They're also claiming the 5 th Amendment, Right to be Silent, to not incriminate themselves. This is why the tobacco companies hid their knowledge of the fact that their product was toxic and how the asbestos companies hid their knowledge for years and years, by hiding under the 5 th Amendment. Then the most egregious, in my opinion, is they're using 14 th Amendment and this is when a big company comes into town, whether it's building a waste incinerator or 10,000 hog farm where a giant retailer, the Walmarts of the world, come into town and say, "We're going to put a business here," and the local community says, "No, you're not," and they say, "You can't keep us out, that's discrimination under the 14 th Amendment." You can't; if you're going to allow any corporation to operate here, you have to allow all corporations to operate here otherwise you're discriminating against us.

So corporations are claiming many different pieces of the Bill of Rights as theirs, as persons and that's as a big a problem frankly as is the fact that they can screw with our elections. So I think that the people like Dylan Ratigan and Laurence Lessig, they're doing a great job and they've identified a real problem  and that is that money in politics has turned our political system from a democracy into kleptocracy or corporatocracy. That's true, but as long as those corporations have powers under the Bill of Rights, you could take away their free speech power, their money power, and they'll figure out another way to do it. You need to strip them of all their constitutional powers which means we need your constitutional amendment that says, "Corporations are not people and money is not speech." The corporations are not people part would mean that they would no longer use the 1 st amendment to influence politics but they could also no longer use the 4 th and 5 th Amendments to hide their crimes and they could no longer use the 14 th amendment to force themselves on communities. The money is not speech part would allow Congress to pass laws like McCain Find Gold that says that whether it's a corporation or it's a billionaire, the Koch brothers,  for that matter, the most that you could spend on a political campaign is a certain amount. In the case of McCain Feingold it was twenty-two hundred dollars and that levels the playing field. That was of course blown up by Citizens United. So I hope that wasn't too long an answer to a short question.

Rob: No, it's raised other questions though. First Marbury Vs. Madison, what's that?

Thom: Well the constitution, if you read Article 3 of the constitution which is the article that defines, that creates the judiciary. Section 2 of Article 3 creates the Supreme Court and it says that, "The Supreme Court should be the final court of appeals on issues as to law on the fact." It defines about  seven or eight responsibilities of the Supreme Court. It can make decisions about treaties, it can make decisions about disputes between the states; there's a bunch of specific things that only the Supreme Court can do.  Then it says that the Supreme Court should be the final arbiter of all cases according to law of the fact. So if you were to sue me for whatever, bumping into your car and banging the fender and I sued you back and we just had a dispute in court and it went up through the courts, eventually it has to end some place. Somebody has to be the final court. It says, "No, Rob owes Thom," or "No, Thom owes Rob."  That is the job that is describe for the Supreme Court in Article 3 Section 2 and you can read it yourself.

Furthermore, it says that the Supreme Court shall be subject to regulations defined by Congress. So this is why again Federals No. 78, 79 and 80, Alexander Hamilton wrote that the Supreme Court is the weakest of the three branches of government, is the most least likely to do harm to the United States, that is has no enforcement mechanism and in fact, Andrew Jackson I believe it was, might have been Zachary Taylor, I mix them up but I'm pretty sure it's Andrew Jackson -- ignored Supreme Court decisions about, I think it was the Second National Bank, just ignored it. [inaudible] and that was Hamilton pointed out in Federal No. 80.

So when they were putting together the constitution, the idea was the Supreme Court would basically just be the final court of appeals plus it would adjudicate disputes between the states and that was it. If Congress passed a law that was unconstitutional, the remedy for that would be that the President would veto and if the President failed to veto, if the President signed it, the remedy for that would be that the people would be sufficient horrified by it that they would throw the bums out and replace them with people who would change the law. In other words, the people would be the arbiters of what was and wasn't constitutional. 

There is nothing in the constitution that gives the Supreme Court the right to overturn a law, to declare the law unconstitutional. That power is explicitly not given to them in the constitution, it was part of the debates in the constitutional convention which you can read, James Madison kept the notes, it is explicitly laid out in the Federal's papers, that the Supreme Court does not and shall not have that power.

Rob: Yet, that's what happened with Citizens United, isn't it?  

Thom: That's exactly right. So from 1789 when we became a country, when the constitution was ratified, until 1803, the Supreme Court never did anything other than be the final appeals court. In 1803, there was a case where -- I can give you the details of the case if you want, but the bottom line is basically, it's called Marbury Vs Madison, and Madison was James Madison. He was the Secretary of State in the Thomas Jefferson administration and Marbury was a guy that James Madison was suppose to make a judge and didn't and he sued. The court, John Marshal was the Chief Justice who was Thomas Jefferson probably number one political enemy, and the court ruled that Jefferson won, Jefferson and Madison won the case and they won the case because the law under which Marbury was saying that he should be entitled to be a judge, was unconstitutional.

Now Jefferson found himself in a terrible bind because on the one hand he won the case which is what he wanted; on the other hand, he freaked out. He wrote, and this I can do from memory, he said, "If this decision is allowed to stand, then indeed has the constitution become a [inaudible]," which is Latin for a suicide pact.  "For with this constitution one branch of government and of that, the one which is unelected and unresponsive to the people has taken upon itself the ability to declare what is and is not the law of the land." And so he said, "If this allowed to stand, the constitution has become a thing of wax in the hand of the judiciary and the republic is doomed." That was in 1803, Thomas Jefferson said that.  

The violence the ferociousness of Thomas Jefferson's response to that Marbury Vs. Madison case was so intense that for the next 25 years the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court...

Rob: Marshall?  

Thom: Marshall, thank you. That Judge Marshall was on the Supreme Court, for the remaining 25 years he never again decided a case based on constitutionality. It wasn't until after he died. 

So basically, for the first 50 years of this country's existence, the Supreme Court never decided or very rarely decided constitutional issues. Now the Supreme Court does nothing but decide constitutional issues and as I said, this is a power that was not given to the court by the constitution. And arguably, Congress has the right to take this power away from the Supreme Court. Here's an of example of when it was tried. 

In 1935, Franklin Roosevelt passed a series of laws including a minimum wage and child labor laws as part of the collection of laws to be called a new deal and the [inaudible 23:26] the right to unionize and the Supreme Court struck them down; said these are unconstitutional because the Supreme Court is very conservative. Most of these guys were over 70, most of them had been put in the court back in the 1910s when they had also struck down child labor laws. There was one in 1914, there was 1917 that they struck down. That one said that children over the age of 7 couldn't and they established the age at which children could work at as 12 including in prostitution. 

In "35 when they struck down child labors laws and the union of laws, FDR went crazy and he was like, "What should I do?" So he came up with a scheme in 1935 that, because Congress could regulate the Supreme Court, that they would pass a law, he wrote the legislation and was going to have it introduced into Congress, and he actually would have passed it. There's a fascinating book written about this. Roosevelt kind of screwed up the politics of it, he missed an opportunity but he could have gotten this passed. 

He was going to have this law passed that said that, "Any justice over the age of 70 could no longer vote. They would become what's called a Justice of Martyrs and because there was to be 9 votes on a court, then all of the justices over 70 and aggregate would have one vote as Justices of Martyrs." No matter how many Justices of Martyrs there were, the Justices of Martyrs and aggregate would have one vote. Now that's when there were 5 guys who over 70 on the court. Then the president could appoint 4 new people to be on the court. So the court would end up, not with 9 but with 14 but 5 of them would be Justices of Martyrs; they'd only have one vote. So he would be able to get enough people on the court that he could pack the court and have them start ruling that his laws were not  unconstitutional.

He tried to that, there was so much blow back from the Republicans who freaked and most Father Coughlin actually, who went nuts; got the whole nation inflamed about this and that is why after the election in 1936, not only did Roosevelt back away from his court packing but that gave the conservatives so much power that he actually scaled back the new deal which is why we slipped back into the depression of 1937. 

So that was the one time in the history of this country when the President and the congress actually tried to use Article 3 Section 2 where it says that "The Supreme Court shall operate under regulations as defined by Congress." And frankly, there hasn't been a president or a congress that has had the balls to do it since then. But the constitution, in my opinion, and that of many legal scholars, the best book on this topic is actually written by the Dean of the Stanford Law School, is operating totally independent of the constitution. You have 9 kings here in Washington DC who decide what the law of the land should be, which is absolutely not just not what the founders thought they were doing with the constitution, but it's the opposite of what the founders thought they were doing with the constitution. Constitution starts out with, "We the people," not, "We, 9 guys with lifetime tenure in Washington DC."

Rob: Yeah, you said"

Thom: Have I sufficiently blow your mind?  

Rob: Say that again.  

Thom: I said have I sufficiently blown your mind?  

Rob: Well, you've kind of put in words what I've been feeling about the Supreme Court, that it's an evil entity that is -- it appointed George Bush president basically in 2000 and it...

Thom: And it did not have the power to do it.

Rob: ...destroying this country and democracy really.  

Thom: Yes. Yes, and they should have been impeach for that. And Congress had the power to impeach them for that by the way. The power to impeach the Supreme Court is also in Article 3. In fact, Article 3 starts out saying that the Supreme Court justices shall serve during good behavior. So Congress can decide what is bad behavior. They can impeach them for things other than treason. They can impeach them simply for bad behavior. Now not living up to the current judicial ethics which says that, "You will not go duck hunting with Dick Chaney and then decide a case in his favor a week later," frankly, in my opinion, qualifies as bad behavior. Scalia does that and just thumbs his nose at us.

Rob: How many of the member so the Supreme Court you think have engaged in impeachable offenses?  

Thom: Well clearly, as least two, Scalia and Thomas. The obvious examples are Scalia with Dick Chaney and Bush V. Gore and Thomas with Bush V. Gore and the fact that his wife is working on many of the cases that came before the court. I would suggest that Roberts in Citizens United engaged in questionable behavior. I'm not sure you could nail it. Alito has just gone along; there's been no discernible personal gain to him for these things. Kennedy is the swing vote and he seems to have been dragged into this by Thomas, by getting them in all this very fundamentalist Catholic Church here in DC. All 5 of them are Catholic; Thomas converted to Catholicism. So it's like these 5 judges, I don't have anything against Catholics but I think my frank opinion is that Thomas has used Kennedy's Catholicism as a way to swing him because Kennedy was fairly liberal before Thomas got on the court; now he's always voting with Thomas. He's an old man too. He's probably going to be the next one to retire which means that the next president will replace the swing vote on the Supreme Court which means that if a Republican wins, then the court is going to go even further right and democracy is really screwed.

Rob: Yeah. So you use to know that there were words about justice? Where is it? I have it in my notes here somewhere. Worry about... 

Thom: Judicial Review and Judicial Supremacy, is that it? 

Rob: Yeah, that's it. Judicial Review and Judicial Supremacy, what does that mean?  

Thom: They're different doctrines. Judicial Review is what came out of Marbury Vs Madison which is the doctrine that the Supreme Court could review a law to determine whether or not it's constitutional. That was 1803. Judicial Supremacy came out of a case, I think was around 1820, also the Marshall Court, in which the Supreme Court ruled that it itself had the power to strike down any lower court rulings. In other words, their ruling was supreme law of the land. If they said a  law was constitutional or not constitutional, if they said a court ruling was constitutional or not constitutional, it stood and they could not be -- Congress could not overrule them.  

Rob: So what could we do about this? Is it only a constitutional amendment? Can Congress do something? And really, it sounds to me like it's not -- you've convinced me. It's certainly not enough to just talk about  Corporate Personhood because it's just going to go back to the Supreme Court and they're going to screw with it.

Thom: That's right, they'll undo it. I think that a couple of things have to happen. I think, first of all, this is an issue that when you lay out the facts, as I hope I've just done and have fairly easily understood, I thought when I have conservative guest on my shows or tea parties, that they will agree with me just as quickly as a liberal will. In fact, the person who first turn me on to this, and this was years ago, was Phyllis Schlafly. She came on my program and she said the Supreme Court had no right to do decide roe Vs. Wade 1973 and I said, "Why?" And she said, "Because they had no right to determine the constitutionality of the law." And I said, "Come on, Judicial Review is like Law School 101. I mean, I didn't even go to Law School and I know Judicial Review." And she's like, "Show it to me in the constitution." And I'm digging out the constitution thumbing through it and she informed me of this. She went on to write a book on it by the way about 20 years ago maybe 30 years ago, 40 years.

So this is, first of all, not apart as an issue. This is an issue of the nature of our republic. So we need to do a big educational job on this; on Judicial Review, on Judicial Supremacy and on Corporate Personhood and all three of them, in my opinion, are part of the same fabric. I think that if enough people are informed about it, just like people are starting to be informed about the Fed, people start waking up, they will force change. So I think our biggest job is to educate people about how toxic Judicial Review and Judicial Supremacy are and how...

Rob: Now this is strictly in the Supreme Court, right?

Thom: Yes, these are powers the Supreme Court has taken upon itself, Congress did not give them to it, the Supreme Court does not give them these powers and they just took them.

Rob: Now it's not just the Supreme Court there, Thom. Let's face it, between Chaney and Bush and Obama, the executive branch has been grabbing incredible powers too and Congress keeps letting them do it. They're getting weaker and weaker and weaker and giving up what maintains proper balance.

Thom: I agree and if you look at the main reason why they're grabbing those powers, it's so that they can hand out contracts to people who are funding their campaigns. 

Rob: Well if they're not...  

Thom: You have the spy contracts, the defense contracts, the"

Rob: If they're not grabbing powers. It's the opposite, they're giving up powers.

Thom: Rob, the same thing. I mean, yeah, they're -- actually I would say it's both. They're claiming the right to snoop on you and there is people who profit on the snooping. If you were to do away with the ability of corporations or rich people to finance campaigns, then you could have a president who would actually do the right thing because he wouldn't worry about being squashed like a bug in the next election by the money from the defense contractors for example.

Rob: Wait, wait, what I was saying is that between the Supreme Court and the Executive Branch, the White House, they've both grabbed a lot of power and the Congress has allowed them to do it. They've given up power; that's what I'm saying.

Thom: Yeah, I don't disagree because they're all bought off by the same people.

Rob: So unless"  

Thom: That"  

Rob: I don't understand your response.  

Thom: Okay. My response is...  

Rob: Why are they giving up power?

Thom: I think I can summarize it very simply.  

Rob: Okay.

Thom: The national security state is very profitable. Perpetual war is very profitable. The people who profit off of those two things are going to keep pushing those things and the president and Congress are going to keep allowing those things or promoting those things as long as there is money to be made on it, as long as"  

Rob: And that's why member of Congress are giving up their power?  

Thom: I believe so, yes.  

Rob: So they're basically just being bought?

Thom: Well, it's not so much that they're being bought, is they're being threatened. I know a member of Congress who chose not to run for re-election 2 years ago who told me the story of how he was sitting in his office one day and a lobbyist walked in and said, "Under the Citizens United decision, our corporation can spend up to a millions dollars, we have a budget up to a million dollars in your district." This is a district where he typically would spend two or three hundred thousand dollars in a year to win re-elections. He said, "We can spend about a million dollars in your district. We can use that money to destroy you or to re-elect you. Which would you prefer?" And this fellow told me that was when he made the decision that he was not going to run for re-election. That kind of conversation is being had all over this city right now everyday.

Rob: This is the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Shaw WMJC 1360AM, sponsored by OpEdNews.com. You picked us up in the middle of a conversation. You go to iTunes and look for Rob Kall, K-A-L-L, to download podcast or got to OpEdNews.com/podcast. I'm talking about Thom Hartman.  His newest book is The Thom Hartman Reader.  We're also talking about his book, Unequal Protection, and what's the other one we were discussing,  How to Jump"

Thom: Rebuilding the American Dream.  The, the reader has a chapter on Rebuilding  the American Dream that basically summarizes Unequal Protection.

Ron: Okay.  Well"

Thom: Yes.

Ron: Unequal Protection has become a very central conversation point for the Occupy Movement.  When I was down at Occupy Philly the other day, that's the topic that they were focusing on, saying this is what we want to deal with.  I asked Thom to get in this conversation because I wanted to get up-to-date on his thinking about it, and it really went in a place I didn't expect.  You started talking, Thom, about the other part of the other part of the problem that really was the source of the original problem with unequal protection, which was the Supreme Court  which is what"

Thom: Yep.

Ron: "set off this problem and now, is basically the igniter fluid and it's exploding and doing the damage to our Constitution and our Democracy basically.

Thom: Yes.  Well said.

Ron: The reason I wanted to talk to you is because - though I've been thinking about something a little different.  In this last election, which just happened, there was another personhood that was brought up down in Mississippi, a personhood of unborn fetuses. The Christian Right was attempting to pass a law making personhood for unborn fetuses.  And I've always thought that the Christian Right should be outraged by the idea that Corporate Personhood is allowed.  That a nonentity, soulless thing could be treated like a person.  And I just wondered, Thom, have you looked into that much? Have you gotten in to any aspects of how to get the Christian Right onboard with tying that together personhood?

Thom: You know, I've brought this issue up with a few of these folks, and when they come on my show, because you know, I debate Right Wingers all the time.

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.

Thom: "Tuesday.

Ron: It doesn't play till Wednesday.

Thom: Oh, okay.  Well, it still, I mean you know, follow that vote.  Find out how their vote went.  If the vote went down, if the vote failed, tell them to, to bring it up again.  But beyond that, you can bring"

Ron: There was a meeting in Philly about it.

Thom: "it to a town near you"

Ron: Go ahead, I'm sorry.

Thom: All right.  You can bring it to a town near you and the whole package on how to do that, the whole kit of how to do that, is over at movetoamend.org.

Ron: Okay, that's good to hear.

Thom: I, unabashedly and without reservation, endorse them and their work.

Ron: So, the Occupy Movement is paying a lot of attention to corporate personhood.  It is something that every occupied territory has a sign that says "I'll accept Corporate Personhood when Texas executes a corporation."  Got anything to say about that sign?

Thom: I think it's brilliant.

Ron: Yeah? 

Thom: Or, I'll accept Corporate Personhood when a corporate merger is prosecuted for bigamy or polygamy, or gay marriage.  I mean, there is so many ways to demonstrate the absurdity of Corporate Personhood.  It's almost unnecessary, except for the fact that it is law.

It's not law.  I mean, it's not law.  Congress never passed the law granting corporate personhood.  A person never signed the law granting corporate personhood.  In fact, Grover Cleveland, 1887, State of the Union Address.  Read it.  There is a paragraph in there where he says, "As the result of monopolies and trust, we are," you know, "and new use of corporations, we are now seeing the iron heel of corporations upon the next of the average working citizen". 

Ron: What year is that again?

Thom: 1887.  Grover Cleveland's State of the Union Address.  President Grover Cleveland.  The only Democrat that served in the entire last half of the 19 th century.

Ron: Really?

Thom: Yeah.

Ron: There was only one Democrat serving for 50 years?

Thom: Yeah, yeah.  It was Grover Cleveland.  He got elected twice and in between him, there was a Republican and then he ran again and got re-elected.  But keep in mind,  I mean, the Democrat Party has been fluid over the years.  The Republican Party had become basically by 1870, the Party corporations, but the Democratic Party was still very powerful in the South, and  although no longer the party of slavery, it was the party of Jim Crow and of apartheid.  But then the Republican Party jumped on that band wagon in the 1870's and both parties were in favor of segregation until the 1950's.  So the politics of it all are a little more complex, complex than people tend to think.

Ron: Well, I'm not going to go there.  

Thom: Okay.

Ron: But let's talk about the Occupy Movement.  

Thom: Sure.

Ron: Occupy is very interested in Corporate Personhood.  What advice would you give to people in the Occupy Movement about Corporate Personhood?

Thom: Go the movetoamend.org website and get informed and get the stuff that you can print off that website to hand out to other people, and whatever city you happen to be occupying, try to occupy City Hall, and get City Hall to vote on an amendment and then try to occupy your state legislature and then get them to vote on an amendment but if an amendment passes Congress, that state will ratify it. They have to get two-thirds of the House and Senate and then they have to get three-quarters of the state legislatures. Start the organizing; that's the way we end Corporate Personhood.

Rob: It's a big deal. It's a little"

Thom: It is a big deal.

Rob: The last time there was an amendment, the constitutional amendment?

Thom: I don't know if it's the last one, it might be the next to the last one. I think the last one had to do with congressional pay raises but the next to the last one was only six months, from the time it was proposed until it was ratified by the three-quarter state. What would that be? The 41 st state or 38 th state or whatever it is. That is six months and that was the one to lower the voting age from 21 down to 18 and it was because of the Vietnam war. It was really because of that song. Remember Eve of Destruction, Barry what's his name?

Rob: Yeah.

Thom: And that song, it says, "You're old enough or you're old enough to kill but not for voting. And they tell me over and over," the Eve of Destruction. And that song fuel that movement and created a national consensus that if somebody was 18 years old, if somebody was old enough to kill they should be old enough for voting and within six months you had a constitutional amendment proposed, passed through the House and Senate by two-thirds majority, submitted to the states and passed and ratified by three-quarters of the state legislatures, sent to the president and signed into law as an amendment of the constitution in less than, I think it was less than seven months.

Rob: Well, you know, it gave me a chill just thinking that maybe the answer is for people to start writing songs about Corporate Personhood.

Thom: Could be. The bottom line, Rob, and you know this, you've been preaching this all your life, is movement politics. Things don't happen from the top down in this country, they happen from the bottom up and now they only happen from the bottom up when the people are (a) pissed off and (b) informed. The people are pretty much (a) right now but we've got to get them informed as well.

Rob: Is there progress on that, getting them informed?

Thom: Yeah.

Rob: Is the mainstream media talking about this? I guess Dylan Ratigan is. Any other"

Thom: Well sort of. I mean. Dylan Ratigan, he's opposed to ending Corporate Personhood altogether. He just wants a constitutional amendment that says that Congress can regulate money in elections which is the half-measure that I think is dangerous actually because it leaves intact Corporate Personhood. But I'm guessing that's just because he doesn't understand the situation that well. I think his intentions are really good.

The fact though, as you pointed out, Rob, virtually every occupy movement has a sign that says, "I'll believe the corporation is a person when Texas execute a corporation." That tells me that the education is working. As you pointed out to me in this interview, 10 years ago, 12 years ago when I wrote the book, the first book on Corporate Personhood, Unequal Protection, everybody was going, "Corporate what?" And for better part of eight or nine years people are going, "Corporate what?" Everybody knows what it is now, so I think it's working. You're doing your job, I'm doing my job, it's getting out there.

Rob: All right. Thanks, Thom.

Thom: We just need to do more of it.

Rob: That's what it is.

Thom: Good talking to you. Thanks for having me on.

Rob: Okay. You want to talk a little bit about your show? Talk a little bit about your show for a minute.

Thom: You can learn about it at thomhartmann.com. There's a list of our radio stations and I do radio show like you do radio show and we're...

Rob: No. 

Thom: "patriots and spreading the word. I mean, it's an important thing.

Rob: Well, first of all, you don't do a radio show like I do a radio show. You do three hours a day, five days a week and it's unbelievable show. The top elimination, I do an hour a week so it's not in the same planet or galaxy.

Thom: Thank you for your kind words but I think we're in the same business.

Rob: Then you also have a TV show too that you're doing five nights a week, right?

Thom: Yeah, yeah, plus our radio show is televised as a TV show.

Rob: It burns my mind how much you do with Louise, your wife. If there's ever the case of the woman behind the man, I'm sure you agree, Louise is an amazing force in your life.

Thom: Oh, yeah. There's not that much time left, Rob. I mean, in part, there's not that much time left for me because I'm getting older but there's also not that much time left for democracy in this country, in my opinion, if we don't do something and I just don't think despair is an option and we need to get out there and get active. Without that, democracy is dust.

Rob: What do you think about the Occupy Movement in that regard?

Thom: I think the Occupy Movement is one of the best hopes for the future of this country. I think it's doing a spectacular job of spreading the word and waking people up and more power to them. I'm totally with them.

Rob: And last, what do think about OpEdNews?

Thom: I think OpEdNews is a great news source, Rob. I'm always please when you publish my stuff and it's a great thing that it's supporting your radio show and total kudos.

Rob: Okay. Rob Kall"

Thom: You've got a great community there.

Rob: What did you say?

Thom: You have a great community there and that's a really important thing.

Rob: Thanks, Thom. Well, we're going to end this show now. This is the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Shaw WMJC 1360AM; had Thom Hartmann on the show, thomhartman.com. T-H-O-M H-A-R-T-M-A-N-N.com and the show is sponsored by OpEdNews.com. Thank you.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.

His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

Join the conversation:

On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution

and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation