By Joanne Zuhl, Staff Writer
Long, long ago, in a country not unlike our own — actually,
exactly like our own — people were people and corporations were corporations.
Today, however, we have corporate personhood, a
court-manufactured status that lets companies cloak themselves in some of the
same constitutional protections intended for flesh-and-blood humans. The
implications span countless laws, large and small, from manipulating taxation
to freedom of speech — the latter coming to a head in the Supreme Court case
known simply as Citizens United. That case blew the doors wide open on
corporate spending for political gain.
Enough is enough. Political commentator Thom Hartmann is now
leading the charge to bring back some of the common sense. He’s part of the
campaign Move to Amend, which has proposed a 28th amendment to the Constitution
to end corporate personhood.
Hartmann’s nationally syndicated radio program, The Thom
Hartmann Program, draws nearly 3 million listeners each week, making him one of
the nation’s most popular hosts on air. Oregonians will remember his show being
broadcast from the former KPOJ between 2005 and 2007. He now broadcasts out of
Washington D.C., within walking distance of Capitol Hill.
On the side, he is the author of several books on historical
and political topics, including the “Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate
Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights.” In it, Hartmann outlines the history
and effect of corporate personhood. and offers solutions. On April 26, Hartmann
returns to Portland for a lecture on the issue and the national movement to
amend the constitution to end corporate personhood.
Hartmann is a scholar on the issue, documenting the series
of actions stemming from the early 1800s that built up to the prevailing
attitude today that money is free speech and corporations are people. Here’s
where our conversation hit the 21st Century in the wake of Citizens United:
Thom Hartmann: We’re now stuck with a situation where
corporations are corrupting our political process aggressively, and so are very
very rich people, because money has been ruled not to be property, but to be
speech, and so rich people have lots and lots of speech, and corporations have
been ruled to be people with rights under the First Amendment, when in fact, we
all know that they’re not natural persons and the First Amendment was not
written for corporations, it was for natural persons.
It seems the only way to solve this problem —— because the
Supreme Court has taken this bizarre position that has evolved over the years
increasingly in the direction of a corporate state —— is to amend the
Constitution, to simply say corporations do not have the rights of natural
persons, do not have the rights under the Constitution other than creatures of
law as artificial persons, and that money is property, not speech. And that’s
what Move to Amend is promoting and I think that that’s the right way to go.
J.Z.: What has the damage been from Citizens
United?
T.H.: We have massive amounts of money flowing into
our political process in ways that are virtually untraceable. Much of it coming
from corporations and persons and perhaps even governments outside of the
United States whose interests may not even be congruent with the United States.
Under Citizens United, Osama bin Laden could create an
American corporation and channel money through it and create a PAC and support
political candidates. And for all we know, al Qaeda actually has done that.
It’s entirely possible.
J.Z.: The amendment talks about prohibiting
influence on elections and politics. How could this be monitored or enforced?
T.H.: Well,
you’re never going to be able to do this perfectly, human beings being as they
are. But once you allow Congress to pass laws that regulate money in politics,
I think that there will be a very rapid bipartisan consensus that it is something
that should be done and be done quickly.
Right now, the average member of the House and Senate has to
spend roughly half of all their time raising money. There are offices in the
building where I do my radio program that are rented by members of Congress. I
constantly bump into them in the elevator, and they come over at noon and
they’re there until 6 p.m. just dialing for dollars. Every member of Congress
has one of these places where every day they just sit on the phone begging for
money. Republicans and Democrats alike hate this … I think that you would
very quickly see people willing to redo McCain-Feingold, only far more
aggressively and far more effectively, to regulate the money in their elections
and we might even get publicly funded elections.
The second part is, if we are to say that corporations are
not persons, this has huge ramifications beyond politics. It would mean that
many of the remedies that corporations have been using to assert their power
over “we the people,” whether it’s genetically modified foods or corporate
secrecy and privacy rights, or corporate rights to lobby —— fill in the blank
—— would all be subject to congressional action.
If Congress no longer needs to desperately go to them for
money and Congress were to pass laws stopping the revolving door for staff,
then I think you could see a very cleaned-up political process where we return
to something that we’ve been close to on occasion in this country.
J.Z.: Critics would say that it still comes down
to the voters. Don’t we still elect our representatives?
T.H.: Arguably. But there is a reason why the
advertising industry is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar, perhaps
trillion-dollar, industry. It works. If you run enough ads for a particular
drug, or cosmetic, or soap, its sales will overwhelm that of its competitors.
And similarly, if you run enough ads for a particular politician, that
politician is going to get elected. It’s pretty simple math.
J.Z.: One version of this proposed amendment
states that it shall not affect the media from reporting facts to the people.
Why is that in this amendment?
T.H.: That’s in there because you don’t want to amend
the Constitution in a way that directly contradicts the Constitution. There is
only one industry that the framers felt needed protection. It wasn’t making
cannons, or battleships, or armies. They didn’t think that was so important. It
wasn’t buggy whips or transportation. It was the press. They felt that the
press was actually an agency of the government. It was the Fourth Estate. This
was the ultimate power of the people to be well informed and thus make
appropriate choices about who was going to govern them and how.
So that protection of the press is enshrined in the First
Amendment. If you are going to amend the Constitution in a way that limits
money, speech and corporations, and the press by and large are corporations,
it’s just prudent to make it very clear that we are not infringing on freedom
of the press.
J.Z.: This
amendment is gaining momentum. I’ve read that 13 states are supporting some
version of Congressional action against corporate personhood. Are you hopeful
this will happen anytime soon?
T.H.: I am. I think people are so fed up, I think we
will see this resolved in five to six years, maybe less. It is picking up
steam. State after state, county after county, city after city —— pretty much
wherever this is presented as a ballot issue, people overwhelmingly vote for
it. And not people of any one party. Republicans vote for it. Democrats vote
for it. Libertarians vote for it. This is not a partisan issue, this is a
common sense issue.
J.Z.: Speaking
of partisan issues. Congress recently voted down even minor efforts to augment
gun-control laws, despite the fact that more than 90 percent of the public
polls in favor of the changes. What’s your position on what happened?
T.H.: I think we just saw a very clear example of the
power of a small group of corporations, who were never named, by the way,
because they have a front group, the NRA. You saw the power of a handful of
very large, very powerful, very wealthy corporations who make a lot of money
selling guns and ammunition. You saw their power to threaten and intimidate
members of Congress. It’s that simple. And it’s a great example of why we need
to overturn Citizens United. … It doesn’t just affect politics. It also
affects corporate control of our lives.
J.Z.: Looking at the larger picture, what is your
prognosis for progressive politics? There are a lot of cynics, despite the
re-election of President Obama.
T.H.: Things have gotten radically better in a whole
variety of directions. Can you imagine how George Bush would’ve reacted to the
Boston bombing once it came out that these brothers were Muslim? We’d be
invading Chechnya or in a nuclear war with Russia. Thing could be a lot worse,
and they were a lot worse.
I think that, frankly, we expected Franklin Roosevelt when
we elected Obama and there were some very big differences between Franklin
Roosevelt and Barack Obama. The first was that when Roosevelt came into office,
the Americans had seen almost four years of a God-awful depression that was
clearly caused by nine years of Republican policy and was made worse by four
years of Republican austerity as a reaction to it. And there was no debate
about what needed to be done. In fact, Hoover himself in his last months began
moving in the direction that FDR eventually went with the New Deal and trying
to stimulate the economy, borrowing money and spending it. So FDR had an
absolute consensus behind him. He had a wind behind his back. Even Republicans
were lining up with him in many cases.
Two, he had an absolutely overwhelming majority in both the
House and the Senate. There was basically no piece of legislation he couldn’t
pass. The problem he had was the Supreme Court; they kept knocking down things
that he passed. So in 1937, he tried to pack the court, and just that threat
caused the court to change their behavior.
So when Obama came into office, we hadn’t had four years of
mind-boggling pain. What we had had was a few months of a freak-out, and Obama
actually got that under control fairly quickly. Not as good as he arguably
could have, but he stopped the bleeding. The pressure was off.
I am personally of the opinion that because we have not seen
any genuine transformations or repairs to the financial systems, or to our
trade systems, or to our industrial systems or economic policies, there is
going to be another crash. When that crash happens, it is going to be big. It
is going to be bad. Republicans are going to do everything they can to make it
happen before the next election and blame it on the Democrats. Although that
may backfire because people are getting it that Republicans are driving this
austerity agenda. It’s going to take something like that to flip the House. Remember,
there were only two and a half months during the Obama presidency that he had a
filibuster-proof Senate. It was nine glorious weeks!
So, if we can reclaim the House in the election of 2014 and
hold the Senate, then Harry Reid rolls back the filibuster, then we can get a
lot done the last two years of the Obama presidency. That means we can’t sit
around being the circular firing squad complaining about the things we don’t
like. It’s fine to talk about them, but to do so in a way that causes people to
become discouraged or cynical about the political process is exactly what the
Republicans want us to do.
J.Z.: Are you looking forward to visiting Oregon
again?
T.H.: Oh yeah. I love Oregon. What was originally
going to be one 1-hour speech has turned into a couple different presentations
in a couple different cities. So I am not sure what I am going to be doing
beyond that. I will be visiting with my three kids. Dalo’s Ethiopian Restaurant
is the one thing I know I’m going to do while I’m there. It’s my favorite
restaurant in town. So I’d like to give a shout-out to them.
How to get involved
-Attend the Move to Amend Northwest
Regional Grassroots Democracy Convergence on May 3-5, in Portland, with David
Cobb and many other speakers
-Go to
www.oregonrestoresdemocracy.org to sign up on this coalition website to stay
informed, to get involved with their “rolling legislative lobbying” and to find
out about upcoming events
-Call or write the
legislators on the House Rules Committee asking them to ensure a work session
on HJM 6 and then to move it out of their committee to the House for a vote
This article appears in 2013-04-26.