Thom Hartmann For Buzzflash: Why Isn’t PG&E Getting the Death Penalty?
June 17th 2020
corporate personhood (Hollywata)
By Thom Hartmann
Pacific Gas and Electric, known as PG&E, just pled guilty to killing 84 American citizens.
When they want to buy politician’s favors and votes, they claim that they are a “person,“ but when they admit to killing real human persons, they claim that they are just a corporation and therefore nobody can or should go to jail.
Corporate Personhood is a lie.
It was a lie when corporations argued that the Supreme Court had given them personhood in 1886 when in fact it did not.
It was a lie when the Supreme Court itself quoted a clerk’s headnote to claim the Court had given them personhood.
It was a lie in 2010 when, in Citizens United, the Court used Corporate Personhood to allow even foreign corporations to own American politicians and the political process.
Corporate Personhood has completely destroyed our American political process.
That doctrine, along with the parallel doctrine, that the Supreme Court also created, that “money is speech“ when that money is used to promote political positions or buy politicians,have turned America from a democracy into an oligarchy.
Americans are sick of living in an oligarchy.
The 1980 “Reagan revolution” begin 40 years of shifting political power from people to massive corporations and billionaires.
The result has been the destruction of the American middle class, the destruction of small and medium size businesses, and the destruction of our environment and our democracy.
Enough. It’s time to either amend the Constitution or expand the Supreme Court to reverse these two Supreme Court-created doctrines.
No more Corporate Personhood, and no more phony assertions that money is the same thing as free speech.
PG&E should get the corporate death penalty for killing all these Americans. The company should be dissolved, its assets sold, and its directors put in jail.
Americans have had enough. We want a democracy instead of an oligarchy.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.