Preface to this Second Edition

Three years ago, with the original edition of Corporations Are Not People, I thought that the title might require some explanation. I am not sure that is still true.

When politicians from Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren to Arizona Republican John McCain join in unison to declare, “Corporations are not people!” and when a major presidential candidate has been ridiculed and rebutted for his pronouncement that “corporations are people, my friend,” it may be that the phrase now has some resonance.

In these past three years, the country has shared in the catastrophe that is Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Since the Supreme Court struck down our election spending laws to vindicate, in the Court’s words, the “disadvantaged class of persons” that are corporations, we have had a $10 billion election brought to us, often secretly, by a few corporations, unions, and billionaires. We have become all too familiar with Super PACs, dark money, and dysfunctional government.

As we, the people are losing our role in elections and representative government, we also are losing our voice and power in the courts: global corporations and activist judges have deployed the reasoning of Citizens United to create a new “corporate veto” in the courts over financial, health care, environmental, and energy laws, among others. Some corporations have even had epiphanies, and now claim First Amendment religious rights to evade the law.

This book explains how this happened in America and how we can fix it. On both scores, this edition has a great deal of new material. The danger of “corporate rights” and big money domination of our elections and government has accelerated rapidly in the past three years. You will find a lot of new information on that. At the same time, the growing response of so many Americans over the past three years is nothing short of historic. That story, and how you can help, is here, too.

Largely under the radar of a mainstream media that seems able to see only binary smack-down politics, Americans are coming together to accelerate several related engines of reform:

A vibrant national movement for a Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the Constitution to overturn Citizens United has moved “from pipedream to mainstream.” Six hundred cities and towns, and sixteen states, have enacted amendment resolutions by overwhelming, cross-partisan majorities. More than 160 members of Congress are now cosponsoring proposals for the Twenty-Eighth Amendment, and the president of the United States and former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens have expressed support;

A revolt is breaking out amongudges, law professors, lawyers, state Attorneys General, and others who are fighting back in the courts, determined to defend the Constitution’s purpose of enhancing rather than defeating the possibility of republican democracy;

From North Carolina to New York, Maine to California, and even in Washington, D.C., a vigorous demand to “get money out and voters in” is expanding, with small donor-public funding initiatives, voting rights for everyone, transparency and accountability reforms, and more reforms to make a democracy that works;

Reform of our corporate laws and new thinking about our economy have made more progress in the past three years than in many previous decades—one example alone being the more than twenty states that have enacted benefit corporation laws and the more than nine hundred new benefit corporations that eschew and will replace the “shareholders and CEOs above all” ideology that no longer works.

Corporations Are Not People is about why these engines of reform are so necessary and how you can help accelerate them to the scale that our country and the world urgently need.

I have been inspired by so many Americans who working to save our country. This edition is dedicated to all of them, and all author royalties will be donated to organizations helping them in their work.

Thanks to all of them, and to all of you who join this work, Citizens United will not stand, our Constitution will serve human beings and protect an effective democracy, and we will restore the promise of a republic governed by “We, the People.”

Jeff Clements

Concord, Massachusetts

July 4, 2014