In his new column, “It Takes People Power to Make Clear That Corporations Are NOT People,” Jim Hightower urges us to fight against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling:
[T]he national media paid practically zero attention to another “personhood” vote that took place on that same day over a thousand miles from Mississippi. This was a referendum in Missoula, Mont., on a concept even more bizarre than declaring zygotes to be persons with full citizenship rights.
It was a vote on overturning last year’s democracy-killing decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the now-infamous Citizens United case. A narrow five-man majority had decreed that — abracadabra! — lifeless, soulless corporations are henceforth persons with human political rights. Moreover, said the five, these tongueless artificial entities must be allowed to “speak” by dumping unlimited sums of their corporate cash into our election campaigns, thus giving them a far bigger voice than us real-life persons.
Missoulians, of course, cannot single-handedly overrule the Supremes. But they can be in the forefront of a grassroots movement for a constitutional amendment reversing the Court’s perverse ruling. And that’s just what the people there did, with a whopping 75 percent of voters calling on Congress to send such an amendment to the states for prompt ratification.
