A group called Move to Amend, with the support of the Occupy movement, has announced that it will hold Occupy the Courts events this Friday, January 20, and that California will be Ground Zero. Specifically, the Santa Clara County Courthouse in San Jose, California is being chosen as especially symbolic, because the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case that began in the Santa Clara County courthouse, is considered the first court decision mentioning that corporations are persons under the law.
According to the Occupy protesters, since the Santa Clara County decision, the courts have unjustly favored corporations over individuals, including granting them special tax breaks, more freedom to pollute, etc. This beneficial treatment, according to the protesters, culminated in the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which freed corporations from some of the constraints of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, and which has allowed U.S. politics to be dominated by so-called “Super PACs” funded in part by large corporations and their executives.
Effect on 2012 Elections
The result of the Citizens United decision can be seen today in the Republican presidential primaries. During the Iowa State Fair last August, candidate Willard Mitt Romney famously shouted to a questioner, “corporations are people, my friend.” Likewise, Super PACs supporting Republican candidates Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and others are spending millions of dollars to buy television ads attacking their candidates’ rivals. In the first such contest, the Iowa caucuses, some analysts say that such attack ads were largely responsible for damaging the candidacy of Gingrich, taking him down from a healthy lead to a fourth place finish from which Gingrich has never recovered. Many people now expect that the general election between the Republican nominee and incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama will be similarly dominated by big corporate money.
The Move to Amend protesters hope that their events in Santa Clarita County and across the nation this Friday will bring attention to the issue of the courts favoring corporations over individuals. Specifically, Move to Amend is calling on supporters to "reject the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.”
© 2012 Matthew Emmer -- All Rights Reserved
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