January 21, 2011 journal, should Wal-Mart be considered equal to the average American when it comes to voting. Does the Constitution cover corporations are just human beings? Among the many legacies from The pit of hell Bush left us in we can still smell the sulfur his right-hand man Karl Rove open the floodgates of political contributions to their party. Now Congress works for the corporations because that's where the money is. To hell with the people is their attitude. No dummy, it's the people that have the right to vote. The following article is by-John Stuart Mill "In 2003, after my book Unequal Protection was first published, I gave a talk at one of the larger law schools in Vermont. Around 300 people showed up, mostly students, with a few dozen faculty and some local lawyers. I started by asking, "Please raise your hand if you know that in 1886, in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons and therefore entitled to rights under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights." Almost everyone in the room raised their hand, and the few who didn't probably were new enough to the law that they hadn't gotten to study that case yet. Nobody questioned the basic premise of the statement. And all of them were wrong. We the People are the first three words of the Preamble to the Constitution; and from its adoption until the Robber Baron Era in the late nineteenth century, people meant human beings. In the 1886 Santa Clara case, however, the court reporter of the Supreme Court proclaimed in a "headnote"-a summary or statement added at the top of the court decision, which is separate from the decision and has no legal force whatsoever-that the word person in law and, particularly, in the Constitution, meant both humans and corporations. Thus began in a big way (it actually started a half century earlier in a much smaller way with a case involving Dartmouth University) the corruption of American democracy and the shift, over the 125 years since then, to our modern corporate oligarchy. Most recently, in a January 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John G. Roberts, took the radical step of overturning more than a hundred years of laws passed by elected legislatures and signed by elected presidents and declared that not only are corporations "persons" but that they have constitutional rights such as the First Amendment right to free speech. This decision is clear evidence of how far we have drifted away as a nation from our foundational principles and values. Particularly since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, over the past three decades our country and its democratic ideals have been hijacked by what Joseph Pulitzer a hundred years ago famously called "predatory plutocracy." The Citizens United decision, which empowers and elevates corporations above citizens, is not just a symbolic but a real threat to our democracy, and only the will of We the People, exercised through a constitutional amendment to deny personhood to corporations, can slay the dragon the Court has unleashed. The "Disadvantaged" Corporation In 2008 a right-wing group named Citizens United put together a 90-minute "documentary," a flat-out hit-job on Hillary Clinton (then a senator and presidential aspirant) and wanted to run commercials promoting it on TV stations in strategic states. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) ruled that the movie and the television advertisements promoting it were really "campaign ads" and stopped them from airing because they violated McCain-Feingold (aka the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002), which bars "independent expenditures" by corporations, unions, or other organizations 30 days before a primary election or 60 days before a general election. (Direct corporate contributions to campaigns of candidates have been banned repeatedly and in various ways since 1907, when Teddy Roosevelt pushed through the Tillman Act, which made it a felony for a corporation to give money to a politician for federal office; in 1947 the Taft-Hartley Act extended this ban to unions.) McCain-Feingold was a good bipartisan achievement by conservative senator John McCain and liberal senator Russ Feingold to limit the ability of corporations to interfere around the edges of campaigns. The law required the "I'm John McCain and I approve this message" disclaimer and limited the amount of money that could be spent on any federal politician's behalf in campaign advertising. It also limited the ability of multimillionaires to finance their own elections. But the law offended the members of the economic elite in this country who call themselves "conservatives" and believe that they should be able to spend vast amounts of money to influence electoral and legislative outcomes. In part, this belief is derived from a more fundamental-and insidious-belief that political power in the hands of average working people is dangerous and destabilizing to America; this is the source of the antipathy of such conservatives to both democracy and labor unions. They believe in "original sin"-that we're all essentially evil and corruptible (because we came out of the womb of a woman, who was heir to Eve's apple-eating)-and therefore it's necessary for a noble, well-educated, and wealthy (male) elite, working behind the scenes, to make the rules for and run our society. Among the chief proponents of this Bible-based view of the errancy of average working people are the five right-wing members of the current U.S. Supreme Court-John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy-who have consistently worked to make America more hierarchical, only with a small, wealthy "conservative/corporate" elite in charge instead of a divinely ordained Pope. And even though the Citizens United case-which landed in the Supreme Court's lap after the federal court in Washington, D.C., ruled in favor of the FEC ban-was only about a small slice of the McCain-Feingold law, the Republican Five used it as an opportunity to make a monumental change to constitutionally em- power corporations and undo a century of legal precedents. After listening to oral arguments in early 2009, the Roberts Court chose to ignore those arguments and the originally narrow pleadings in the case, expanded the scope of the case, and scheduled hearings for September of that year, asking that the breadth of the arguments include reexamining the rationales for Congress to have any power to regulate corporate "free speech."In this they were going along with a request from Theodore B. "Ted" Olson, the solicitor general under George W. Bush, and would now go back to reexamine and perhaps overturn the Court's own precedent in the Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce case of 1990. In that case the Court held that it was constitutional for Congress to place limits on corporate political activities; and in a 2003 case, the Court (before the additions of Alito and Roberts) had already upheld McCain-Feingold as constitutional.-Thus, on January 21, 2010, in a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that it is unconstitutional for Congress to approve, or the president to sign into law, most restrictions on the "right" of a corporate "person" to heavily influence political campaigns so long as they don't directly donate to the politicians' campaign or party. The majority decision, written by Justice Kennedy at the direction of Chief Justice Roberts, explicitly states that the government has virtually no right to limit corporate power when it comes to corporate "free speech." Kennedy began this line of reasoning by positing, "Premised on mistrust of governmental power, the First Amendment stands against attempts to disfavor certain subjects or viewpoints." It sounds reasonable. He even noted, sounding almost like Martin Lut