Wow! Not only is Vermont leading the way toward a model single payer healthcare program but it is now taking a stab at undoing the excesses associated with allowing a corporation to have citizens rights like the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.
n Vermont, state senator Virginia Lyons on Friday presented an anti-corporate personhood resolution for passage in the Vermont legislature. The resolution, the first of its kind, proposes “an amendment to the United States Constitution … which provides that corporations are not persons under the laws of the United States.” Sources in the state house say it has a good chance of passing. This same body of lawmakers, after all, once voted to impeach George W. Bush, and is known for its anti-corporate legislation. Last year the Vermont senate became the first state legislature to weigh in on the future of a nuclear power plant, voting to shut down a poison-leeching plant run by Entergy Inc. Lyons’ Senate voted 26-4 to do it, demonstrating the level of political will of the state’s politicians to stand up to corporate power…
…The Total Weirdness of Corporate Personhood
The corporate person is the product of some plainly weird metaphysics. This astonishing fictional “person,” accorded all the rights of a human, can split off pieces of itself to form new fictional persons, can marry many other similar persons in a process called a merger, is immortal, can change its name and identity overnight, and can aggregate gigantic streams of capital with which it somehow has the right to speak. Strangely enough, the corporate person, who has neither soul nor body, is at the same time owned by many other persons called shareholders who buy and sell its parts every day — it is owned, in fact, much the way a slave is owned.
Despite Vermont’s critical view of corporations it sports one of the nation’s lowest unemployment rates at 5.7% and poverty rate below the national average.
The controversial Citizens United decision is also being challenged with the DOJ. Common Cause, has filed a petition with the U.S. Department of Justice urging it to investigate whether Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas had a conflict of interest and should have recused themselves.
Common Cause alleges that both justices were paid guests at exclusive gatherings organized by Koch Industries, where conservative business leaders and elected officials secretly strategized around elections. The justices were among those who provided the critical votes in the 5-4 ruling, a ruling that has prompted an unprecedented flood of corporate expenditures on electoral campaigns over the last year.
