Links to Information About Corporate Personhood

• The Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood vs Democracy by William Meyers

  Corporate personhood is the idea (legal fiction, currently with force of law) that corporations have inalienable rights (sometimes called constitutional rights) just like real, natural, human persons. That this idea has the force of law both resulted from the power and wealth of the class of people who owned corporations, and resulted in their even greater power and wealth.

• The Real History of 'Corporate Personhood': Meet the Man to Blame for Corporations Having More Rights Than You

  From Justice Powell’s memo to the Chamber of Commerce : But independent and uncoordinated activity by individual corporations, as important as this is, will not be sufficient. Strength lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.

• How Wall Street Occupied America – Bill Moyers

  The Chamber of Commerce, in response to the memo, doubled its membership, tripled its budget and stepped up its lobbying efforts. It’s going stronger than ever. Most recently, it called in its agents in Congress to kill a bill to provide healthcare to 9/11 first responders for illnesses linked to their duty on that day.

• The Fascinating History of How Corporations Became "People"

  At a 2010 conference, former Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Florida, put the potential impact of Citizens United in stark terms. “We’re now in a situation,” he told the crowd, “where a lobbyist can walk into my office…and say, ‘I’ve got five million dollars to spend, and I can spend it for you or against you. Which do you prefer?’”

• Ending Corporate Personhood Teach-in at Occupy Rochester
  Move To Amend's David Cobb does a teach-in with members of Occupy Rochester on Corporate Personhood: what it is, how it got started and why we need to outlaw it. Discussion includes Move To Amend's strategy of a Constitutional Amendment banning, not only corporate personhood, but money equaling speech. Recorded on November 30, 2011.

• David Cobb: Human Rights in the Era of the Corporate Person
  David Cobb was the Keynote Speaker at the Human Rights Day Celebration in Rochester, NY on November 30, 2011.