You're probably right that nothing will get done. We can't impeach Bush/Cheney when their lies are fresh as new-mown hay.
But here's a summing up of that old lie that has had us by the neck (to be polite) for so long:
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/01/int05004.htmlBuzzFlash: What changed after the Revolution? You date the rise of "corporate personhood" to the post Civil-War era and the 14th Amendment. Can you briefly explain?
Thom Hartmann: Well, I've described how corporations were held on a short leash by the states after the Revolution. And they largely stayed that way until after the Civil War. During the Civil War, Lincoln had lifted many limitations on corporate size and behavior in order to get more war materials. He also hugely subsidized the railroads to expand across America, to transport munitions and soldiers. By the late 19th century, over 180 million acres of American land had been given, free and clear, to the railroads for their expansion. They'd become the largest and most powerful corporations -- both in terms of wealth and in terms of their ability to control transportation -- that America had ever seen. They completely transformed the face of America, and transformed our politics as well. So it was in this environment that the railroads began to try to influence or corrupt government to enhance their own power and profits. But government fought back. When Santa Clara County sued the Southern Pacific Railroad, that was the beginning of the end. …..For example, in 1873, one of the first Supreme Court rulings on the Fourteenth Amendment, which had passed only five years earlier, Justice Samuel F. Miller minced no words in chastising the railroads for trying to claim the rights of human beings.
The fourteenth amendment’s "one pervading purpose," he wrote in the majority opinion, "was the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppression of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him."
But in the 1886 case, we are told by over a hundred years' worth of history books and law books, the Supreme Court decided that corporations were, in fact, persons, and entitled to human rights, including the right of equal protection under the law -- freedom from discrimination.
What was really amazing to me was that when I went down to the old Vermont State Supreme Court law library here in Vermont, and read an original copy of the Court's proceedings in the 1886 "Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad" case, the Justices actually said no such thing. In fact, the decision says, at its end, that because they could find a California state law that covered the case "it is not necessary to consider any other questions" such as the constitutionality of the railroad's claim to personhood.
But in the headnote to the case -- a commentary written by the clerk, which is NOT legally binding, it's just a commentary to help out law students and whatnot, summarizing the case -- the Court's clerk wrote: "The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
That discovery -- that we'd been operating for over 100 years on an incorrect headnote -- led me to discover that the clerk, J.C. Bancroft Davis, was a former corrupt official of the U.S. Grant administration and the former president of a railroad, and in collusion with another corrupt Supreme Court Justice, Stephen Field, who had been told by the railroads that if they'd help him get this through they'd sponsor him for the presidency.
I later discovered that the folks who run POCLAD -- the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy -- had already figured this out, and that there had been an obscure article written about it in the 1960s in the Vanderbilt Law Review, but it was, for me, like running down a detective mystery. So that was when the foundations for corporate power were laid in the United States, and they were laid on the basis of a lie.
Wish I could believe that the votes of two 18-year-olds, as well as my vote, would actually have *any* impact on who's going to be the American Prez starting in 2009. Neocon scum who control the voting process in a myriad of ways have decided that persons -- real persons -- are not equally protected with regard to having their votes count.