<SNIP>
reestablishment of white supremacy there.
Of the 14th Amendment cases
brought before the Supreme
Court between 1890 and 1910,
19 dealt with African Americans,
288 dealt with corporations.
1882
1886
The Railroad Tax Cases <1882>
In one of these cases, San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific
Railroad, it was argued that corporations were persons and
that the committee drafting the 14th Amendment had intended
the word person to mean corporations as well as
natural persons. Senator Roscoe Conkling waved an unknown
document in the air and then read from it in an attempt
to prove that the intent of the Joint Committee was
for corporate personhood. The court did not rule on corporate
personhood, but this is the case in which they heard the
argument.
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific
Railroad <1886>
“The court does not wish to hear argument on the question
whether the provision in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution,
which forbids a State to deny to any person within
its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to
corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.” This
statement by the Supreme Court before the hearing began
gave corporations inclusion in the word “person” in the 14th
Amendment to the Constitution and claim to equal protection
under law. (The case was decided on other grounds.)
http://www.californiademocracy.org/corporations/resource/timeline.pdf<SNIP>
hrough all those great events, and following on to the enormous problems facing the world today, the curious means by which U.S. corporations gained the same freedoms and protections as living people remain a constant shadow. Hartmann describes the law that never was:
No laws were passed by Congress granting that corporations should be treated the same under the constitution as living, breathing human beings, and none have been passed since then. It was not a concept drawn from older English law. No court decisions, state or federal, held that corporations were “persons” instead of “artificial persons.” The Supreme Court did not rule, in this case or any case, on the issue of corporate personhood. In fact, to this day there has been no Supreme Court ruling that could explain why a corporation—with its ability to continue operating forever, a legal agreement that can’t be put in jail and doesn’t need fresh water to drink or clean air to breathe—should be granted the same Constitutional rights our Founders explicitly fought for, died for, and granted to the very mortal human beings who are citizens of the United States.
American corporations are now real people simply because they are real people. The persistent efforts of generations of corporate agents have spawned a legal “person” far larger and more powerful than any flesh-and-blood person can hope to be. And to this overwhelming power we have ceded the rights and protections our ancestors fought so hard to take away from it and give to us, rights intended as our chief defense against overwhelming power.
Fifty years later, Supreme Court justice Hugo Black would remark, “I do not believe the word ‘person’ in the Fourteenth Amendment includes corporations…Neither the history nor the language of the Fourteenth Amendment justifies the belief that corporations are included within its protection.” Later still, Justice William O. Douglas made the same point. Writing of corporations as real persons, he said, “There was no history, logic or reason given to support that view.”
http://www.pulsethebook.com/index.php/index.php?tag=corporate-personhood<SNIP>
recently discovered that in 1886 the Supreme Court ruled no such thing. The “corporations are persons” was a fiction created by the Court’s reporter. He simply wrote it into the headnote of the decision. In fact, it contradicts what the Court itself said. And we’ve found in the National Archives a note in the hand of the Supreme Court Chief Justice of the time to the court’s reporter saying, explicitly, that the Court had not ruled on corporate personhood in the Santa Clara case.
Nonetheless, corporations have claimed the human rights the Founders fought and often died to bequeath to living, breathing humans. And, using those rights, they’ve usurped our government to the point where our domestic policies are now based on what’s best for the corporations with the largest campaign contributions, and our foreign policy has become a necessary extension of that.
http://alternativesmagazine.com/24/hartman.<SNIP>
Corporations tried unsuccessfully for one hundred years to get Congress to grant them rights. Then the error of Supreme Court clerk was used to implement their request:
"the Supreme Court ruled no such thing in 1886. The 'corporations are persons' ruling was a fiction created by the court's reporter. He simply wrote the words into the headnote of the decision. The words contradict what the court actually said. There is, in fact, in the US National Archives a note by the Supreme Court Chief Justice of the time explicitly informing the reporter that the court had not ruled on corporate personhood in the Santa Clara case." -- Thom Hartmann, Dinosaur War, The Ecologist, December/January 2002 Issue
http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-3513-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=3313&messageID=68802&start=-1<SNIP>
Legally, corporations are accorded some corporate personhood, i.e. Constitutional rights similar to those held by persons. Contrary to accepted legal precedent the U.S. Supreme Court did not rule on this question in the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad.
In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886), Justice Harlan delivering the opinion of the court said the question regarding whether a corporation is a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment is an issue upon which the Court “did not deem it necessary to pass.”
In the head notes of the case prepared by Supreme Court reporter J. C. Bancroft Davis, there is the sentence: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution … .” Because of illness, Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite never reviewed the head notes.
Thus, without any deliberation, decision or ruling by the United States Supreme Court, the United States law has proceeded since 1886 with an accepted legal precedent based on the mistake of a clerk who reported something that never occurred.
http://www.houseofethics.com/corporation/index.html<snip>
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.
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/01/int05004.html<snip>
In his spellbinding Chapter 6—“The Deciding Moment”—Mr. Hartmann tells how corporate personhood was achieved.
Orthodoxy has it the Supreme Court decided in 1886, in a case called Santa Clara County v. the Southern Pacific Railroad, that corporations were indeed legal persons. I express that view myself, in a recent book. So do many others. So do many law schools. We are all wrong.
Mr. Hartmann undertook instead a conscientious search. He finally found the contemporary casebook, published in 1886, blew the dust away, and read Santa Clara County in the original, so to speak. Nowhere in the formal, written decision of the Court did he find corporate personhood mentioned. Not a word. The Supreme Court did NOT establish corporate personhood in Santa Clara County.
In the casebook “headnote,” however, Mr. Hartmann read this statement: “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment…which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Here, anyway, corporate personhood was “provided”— in the headnote, instead of the formal written decision of the Supreme Court. But that’s not good enough.
What is a “headnote?” It is the summary description of a court decision, written into the casebook by the court reporter. It is similar to an editor’s “abstract” in a scientific journal. Because they are not products of the court itself, however, headnotes carry no legal weight; they can establish no precedent in law. Corporate personhood, Mr. Hartmann discovered, is simply and unequivocally illegitimate.
The court reporter for Santa Clara County was Mr. John Chandler Bancroft Davis, a graduate of Harvard Law School.
Mr. Hartman has in his personal library 12 books by Davis, mostly original editions. They display Davis’s close alliance with the railroad industry, and they support persuasively Mr. Hartmann’s argument that Davis injected the personhood statement deliberately, to achieve by deceit what corporations had so far failed to achieve in litigation.
If Davis knew his headnote was legally sterile, though, we can only speculate about his tactics. Perhaps he thought judges in the future would read his headnote as if it could serve as legal precedent, and would thereafter invoke corporate personhood in rendering court decisions. That would be grossly irregular, and it would place corporate personhood in stupendous legal jeopardy if it ever came to light. But something of that sort must have happened, because corporate personhood over time spread throughout the world of commerce—and politics.
Mr. Hartmann doesn’t fill in this blank, but his daylighting of the irregularity will be the eventual undoing of corporate personhood. Its alleged source in Santa Clara County is a myth, a lie, a fraud. Corporate personhood simply cannot now survive, after Mr. Hartmann’s book, a rigorous and sustained legal attack.
Sustained it will have to be, for years or decades or even longer: corporations will fight the attack bitterly, but we now know corporate personhood has utterly no basis in law.
http://www.commondreams.org/views02/1226-04.htmedit: to add a couple more
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