Monday, July 03, 2006

Corporations Aren't People

Joshua Holland of Alternet has a great idea for a Defense of Human Citizenship Amendment:

SECTION 1. Citizenship in the United States shall be conferred only on human beings. Neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that citizenship or the legal incidents thereof be granted to corporations, partnerships, proprietorships or trusts.

The passage of Measure T in Humbolt County, California last month represented an example of activists making some progress in the struggle to reign in the power of corporations.

Holland in the Alternet piece argues that the so-called left in America needs to be bold and borrow a page from Karl Rove's Scorched Earth Politics for Dummies, a strategy of which the proposed constitutional amendment campaign would be part.

The modern American "left," whatever and whoever that is, suffers from some powerful psychological barriers that make it difficult to get such campaigns off the ground. Probably the major psychological barrier is the tendency to blame the population for rejecting ideas that they have not even been exposed to. "The average person will never go for something like that," "that's too radical," etc.

Educating citizens about something like corporate power is difficult and not always rewarding, so I guess it makes sense that some "leftists" would adopt a psychological framework that would define the entire effort as not worth the time. Much easier to expend energy on the lesser evil candidate in a partisan race, I guess, since at least they "can win."

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