'Corporations Are Not People' ..... a book review by Thom Hartmann

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Corporations Are Not People

Wednesday 1 February 2012
by: Thom Hartmann, Truthout | Book Review




Most Americans don't realize that the idea that "corporations are people" and "money is speech" are concepts that were never, ever considered or promoted or even passed by any legislature in the history of America. Neither were they ever promoted or signed into law by any president - if anything, the opposite, with presidents from Grover Cleveland in 1887 to Barack Obama in 2010 condemning them.

And Congress and the executive branch are the two of the three branches of government that are elected by the people, and thus the only two to which the founders of this country and the framers of the Constitution gave the right to create laws.

The Supreme Court is so much not supposed to create law, that Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution even says that it must operate "under such Regulations as the Congress shall make."

Nonetheless, as I pointed out in 2001 in my book "Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became People," the Supreme Court itself has invented, out of whole cloth, the doctrines of corporations as people and money as speech. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthout.org/corporations-are-not-people/1328107954