12 Oct 2009
Think Globally: Act Locally
At Thursday night's meeting of the Portland Metro Chapter, Helen Umberger proposed a campaign to deny legal personhood to corporations within the city limits. This radical proposal encapsulates in one idea what the Green Party, within our community and throughout the nation, can do to free us from the fetters of corporate control of political power.
Our political system is broken in large measure because it responds to the flow of money: "Money is the mother's milk of politics," said the prominent leader of the California State Democratic Party and Speaker of its House of Representatives Jess Unruh. Specific examples of the political power of money easily to override the wishes of most citizens in our present political institutions are so numerous that a bare recital of them would fill the remainder of this post.
The point is, the corporations use their fictional personhood to claim "free speech" gives them the right to inundate elctions with their millions of dollars in contributions; they already control the newspapers, radio, and television outlets, all of which brand as Unserious anyone lacking the millions only the corporations control.
Our political system gives "free speech" to corporations because the Supreme Court, in an 1886 decision -- but not an actual decision; rather, an insertion to the record put there by the court reporter -- awarded legal personhood to corporations. And subsequent legal decisions, so sensitive to the interests of multi-million-dollar financial interests, have upheld that dubious decision ever since.
The national Green Party opposes this swindle. What Helen proposes is a legislative action, to be taken by our city's highest legal body, setting aside the grant of legal personhood within the boundaries of Portland. Several municipalities in Maine and New Hampshire have already taken this action: if we could accomplish it in a major city, for the first time, it would be a significant step toward repairing our broken political process.
by Michael Meo