We the People Eugene

You guys are doing great work!

Are you working with other groups on organizing an event to coincide with the October 6 occupation of Washington?

It seems to me that this would be a great way to get signatures for your petition drive(s).

I strongly recommend that you involve yourself in local politics. The people in the Tea Party are already monitoring state and local governments. Do likewise.

Now that “Occupy Wall Street” is gaining momentum and attention, perhaps WE Can All Join As ONE Movement, for we are the 99%.

Corporate personhood is not legal, I REPEAT , NOT LEGAL.
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.

Can I be placed on your email contact list, please? Also, having just found out about this organization last night at the Move to Amend-Corvallis group, I will attend this month’s potluck on 11/13. Looking forward to working with you.

Thank you for organizing this. I’m planning on attending the next meeting: 12/11.

Happy Thanksgiving!
Trudy