WE BELIEVE that our Constitution guarantees sovereign power over our nation's fate to "We, the People," the human inhabitants of this land, and entrusts its future to our mindful care and living will. WE BELIEVE our democratic rights as persons, as affirmed in the Bill of Rights, the 14th Amendment and modern Civil Rights laws, rank among our species' hardest won and most precious evolutionary achievements, and should properly be enjoyed by all humankind, including incorporated workers. WE BELIEVE the corporate virtues of hierarchy, subordination and synchronized obedience befit primitive despotic states more than free societies, and that children primarily instructed for incorporation will be dangerously ill prepared to exercise or defend our precious liberties and rights. WE BELIEVE the word 'person' as used in the Constitution clearly means a human adult, a man or woman, a living, breathing individual citizen.
WE BELIEVE our nation's founders were deeply aware - and wary - of large corporate entities, since their revolt was largely provoked by Britain's tyrannical chartered corporations (the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Companies, the Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland Companies, etc.); and that they purposefully omitted any role for these bodies in either politics or governance. WE BELIEVE our ancestors saw that bodies which cannot feel or value love, family, justice, spirit, sensuality or the green surround are too primitive to deserve any voice whatever in social policy-making, let alone the final word.
WE BELIEVE our founders wisely entrusted the power to create, control and dissolve corporate bodies to the citizens of each state, who could best judge their true costs and benefits. WE BELIEVE corporate bodies are thus in fact not fellow citizens, but our subjects - subject to our sovereign will, and can never rightfully equal citizens in practice or theory nor surpass us in political power.
WE BELIEVE that like the Sorcerer's Apprentice we heedlessly animated these artificial servants to build our roads, canals and schools, but now watch aghast as they assume lives of their own and the right to overrun our world.
WE BELIEVE vast corporate bodies are indeed largely pathological, that their unbounded growth and rapacity cause or worsen most ills now afflicting our air, water, food, health, democracy, spirituality, sensuality and evolutionary future.
WE BELIEVE we cannot ever regain sovereign control over these bodies or restore our eco-social health until we strip away the illegitimate personhood immunities that fortify and shield them.
WE BELIEVE with Justices Black and Douglas that the 1886 Supreme Court's mindless grant of personhood to corporations is not morally, legally or rationally defensible, and that neither that Court nor any other has ever had the Constitutional authority to so radically pervert the meaning of democracy, 'we, the people' or our founders' clear intent. We believe, for example, that large corporations' personhood claims:
WE BELIEVE that despite this threat, We - the real People - still retain enough intelligence, craft and power to reclaim our land and future from corporate domination, if only we awake and act in time.
THEREFORE ON BEHALF OF OUR PLANET, SOCIAL JUSTICE AND POSTERITY, we pledge to end corporate personhood and to support the democratic primacy of natural persons everywhere. |