URGENT ACTION NEEDED
SENATE TO VOTE MONDAY
September 8, 2014
The Only Way to Revoke
‘Corporate Personhood’
Is Through a
Constitutional Amendment
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Take Action HERE: http://tinyurl.com/CorpsNotPersons

Who cares if corporations are legally “people”? You do. It changes the entire legal framework you live under and it’s not good for you or yours.
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Are corporations “persons” or are they legal fictions?
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The Supreme Court in recent years has been clearly on the side of “personhood” for corporations. (As a personal note, as a libertarian, I don’t see how legal fictions can have rights.) The owners of that fiction may have rights, but the fiction does not. The fiction does not speak, and if it takes its shareholders’ funds and speaks with those funds, it has used its corporate privilege, granted by the state, to deprive its owners of their rights. Since the usual owners of large, publicly-held crony corporations are large pension funds and insurance companies that have a fiduciary responsibility to their beneficiaries, this scheme effectively robs the real owners-in-interest of their free speech rights.
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Thus, the Citizens’ United Case allows the artificial “person” the same right to engage in political speech as though it were a voting citizen. It takes from the shareholders their speech rights and grants them to an artificial “person.”
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In the opinion of many, the Supreme Court made a mistake in this case, and some members of the Senate want to correct that, the right way, by constitutional amendment. They are responding to strong public sentiment.
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Thanks to public outrage, the Senate of the US is scheculed to vote on Monday, September 8, 2014, on Senate Joint Resolution 19 to overturn the cases that appear to create “personhood” for the crony corporations.
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When the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC and McCutcheon v. FEC, they opened the floodgates to unlimited, unaccountable spending by billionaires and wealthy corporations in our elections, reducing you and me to absolute insignificance in the decision-making process in DC and in our State Capitols. While rich individuals have the same right as any other real person to expend any amount of their own funds on expressing themselves, when they take the funds of their corporations and apply that to politics, we have the untenable situation of a state-granted privilege (the incorporation) being used to fund speech at the expense of those who don’t have the corporate privlege.
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All Americans, rich or poor, must be able to participate meaningfully in our governance process — not just billionaires and wealthy corporations. If the Supreme Court somehow can’t find that in our constitution, SJR 19 will add it.
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Senate Joint Resolution 19

“Section 1. To advance democratic self-government and political
equality, and to protect the integrity of government and the electoral
process, Congress and the States may regulate and set reasonable limits
on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to
influence elections.

“Section 2. Congress and the States shall have power to implement
and enforce this article by appropriate legislation, and may
distinguish between natural persons and corporations or other
artificial entities created by law, including by prohibiting such
entities from spending money to influence elections.

“Section 3. Nothing in this article shall be construed to grant
Congress or the States the power to abridge the freedom of the
press.”
https://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/19/text
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[Note: The Foundation does not necessarily endorse any of the proposed language and does not take postions on specific regulatory language except incidental to educating decision makers. Personally, my fellow Trustees and I are deeply troubled by Section 3 including only the Freedom of the Press and not the Freedoms of Speech, Association or Petition for Redress of Grievances. There is a legal principle called “expressing the one excludes the other” such that listing only Freedom of the Press could be construed to mean that SJR 19 is intended to directly amend the First Amendment.]
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We’ve set up a Web Form Action Item so you can help us educate decision makers about Senate Joint Resolution 19, an amendment aimed at restoring our right to fair and open elections. Congress has an obligation to regulate the electoral process to prevent any special interest having undue influence.
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Fill in your information and send a loud, strong message to Congress that corporations are NOT persons and that governments serve us, the governed, not the other way around.
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Oh, yes, share this as widely as you possibly can. A simple click sends letters to all of your elected representatives who can act in support of this Constitutional Amendment and those who need to be put on notice this the Will of the People is that people are people, corporations are not.
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Let’s distinguish here, however, between [1] commercial corporations which use other peoples’ money for gain and [2] private associations, such as churches, unions and NGOs (like Natural Solutions Foundation) which exist to express, in private association, the joint concerns of their members. Such private associational speech should never be restricted.
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Here is the message we have at the Action Item, but you can change it to suit your beliefs:
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Dear Elected Decision Maker:
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I strongly support the concept behind Senate Joint Resolution 19 and urge you to co-sponsor and strongly support legislation which removes personhood from artificial entities such as publicly-held business corporations, while protecting the free speech rights of members of private associations that happen to be incorporated.
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I am writing to you as my elected representative to alert you to my strong opposition to the concept of corporate personhood and everything that derives from it. It is essential that we do everything in our power to reverse the impact of the Supreme Court’s rulings in Citizens United v. FEC and McCutcheon v. FEC. These wrong-headed decisions opened the floodgates to unlimited, unaccountable spending by billionaires and wealthy corporations in our elections, thereby restricting the free speech rights of private persons who have their investments distorted by publicly-held corporate political spending.
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All Americans should be able to participate in our representative institutions — not just corporations and the elite.
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Thank you for your strong legislative and political support in reversing these decisions through legislative means, including amending the Constitution.
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I will be following your actions on this issue closely.
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So there it is: are corporations “persons” or legal fictions? Let us settle this issue in keeping with the constitutional processes of the Federal Republic. And that is what SJR 19 would do.
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Yours in health and freedom,
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Ralph Fucetola JD
Natural Solutions Trustee
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