Eliot Spitzer, Help Us Take On Corporate Personhood!

Eliot Spitzer is the former Attorney General of New York State. As Attorney General he took on Wall Street corruption. He got 1.4 billion dollars in fines. See Wikipedia

He was elected to Governor and was trying to take on the Bush Administration over predatory lending practices and had the backing of 49 Attorneys General. February 2008

One month later: FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

ALBANY - Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who gained national prominence relentlessly pursuing Wall Street wrongdoing, has been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month, according to a law enforcement official and a person briefed on the investigation.

One month after announcing that they were going to take on predatory lenders, the prostitution story surfaced. Shortly after, the Madame that ran the call girl ring was found dead, hanged in her mom's tool shed. Five months later, Wall St. collapsed.

Now that Eliot Spitzer has some time on his hands, I am asking him to take a look at crafting a law that would take away the right of corporations to be people. Something that would stand the test of the U.S. Constitution and something that a more well to do county or state could take on.

Measure T may be dead here in Humboldt County, partly because we can't afford to enforce it, but the idea lives on.

To Restore Democracy: First Abolish Corporate Personhood

This is from author Thom Hartmann

Thomas Paine said it best.
“It has been thought,” he wrote in The Rights of Man in 1791, “…that government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed; but this cannot be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.”

READ MORE TO FIND OUT HOW CORPORATIONS BECAME PERSONS WITHOUT A VOTE OR PROPER DEBATE.

Thom Hartmann points out how a county clerk added the idea of corporate person hood in a footnote that had no authority.

Hartmann writes:

The Supreme Court ruled on an obscure taxation issue in the Santa Clara County vs. The Union Pacific Railroad case, but the Recorder of the court - a man named J. C. Bancroft Davis, himself formerly the president of a small railroad - wrote into his personal commentary of the case (known as a headnote) that the Chief Justice had said that all the Justices agreed that corporations are persons

Measurt T may be gone but the idea behind it is just getting momentum.

Thom Hartmann also does a nationally syndicated radio show on Air America, weekdays from 9am to noon Pacific which can be heard on kgoe 1480 in Eureka.

Dozens pack Board of Supervisors in Protest over Settlement of Measure T

Today, about 50 people turned out to voice dissent over the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors decision to settle with opponents of Measure T. Measure T was passed by 55 percent of the vote here in Humboldt County California. Measure T seeks to keep corporations outside of the county from influencing local county elections.

David Cobb of Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County said that 35 people spoke out against the decision by the Board of Supervisors and another 15 people didn't want to speak but were there to support of the measure. Cobb said that only 2 persons (not corporations), (or maybe they were), spoke out in favor of settlement. Measure T says that corporations are not persons and therefore don't have the same rights under the law as citizens do.

What's next? Read More.