Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights($50.00Value)

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Unequal taxes, unequal accountability for crime, unequal influence, unequal control of the media, unequal access to natural resources—corporations have gained these privileges and more by exploiting their legal status as persons. How did something so illogical and unjust become the law of the land? Americans have been struggling with the role of corporations since before the birth of the republic. As Thom Hartmann shows, the Boston Tea Party was actually a protest against the British East India Company—the first modern corporation. Unequal Protection tells the astonishing story of how, after decades of sensible limits on corporate power, an offhand, off-the-record comment by a Supreme Court justice led to the Fourteenth Amendment—originally passed to grant basic rights to freed slaves—becoming the justification for granting corporations the same rights as human beings. And Hartmann proposes specific legal remedies that will finally put an end to the bizarre farce of corporate personhood. This new edition has been thoroughly updated and features Hartmann’s analysis of two recent Supreme Court cases, including Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission , which tossed out corporate campaign finance limits. “If you wonder why and when giant corporations got the power to reign supreme over us, here’s the story.” —Jim Hightower, national radio commentator and author of Swim Against the Current “Beneath the success and rise of American enterprise is an untold history that is antithetical to every value Americans hold dear. This is a seminal work, a godsend really, a clear message to every citizen about the need to reform our country, laws, and companies.” —Paul Hawken, coauthor of Natural Capitalism and author of The Ecology of Commerce "Hartmann combines a remarkable piece of historical research with a brilliant literary style to tell the grand story of corporate corruption and its consequences for society with the force and readability of a great novel." —David C. Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World and Agenda for A New Economy Thom Hartmann is the nation’s leading progressive talk radio host, heard on over a hundred stations, as well as on XM and Sirius radio, and seen on live nationwide television via the Free Speech TV network. He is the bestselling author of eighteen books, including Threshold, Screwed, and Cracking the Code. The Battle to Save Democracy It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe people are really good at heart. —Anne Frank, from her diary, July 15, 1944 ON SEPTEMBER 2, 2009, THE TRANSNATIONAL PHARMACEUTICAL GIANT Pfizer pled guilty to multiple criminal felonies. It had been marketing drugs in a way that may well have led to the deaths of people and that definitely led physicians to prescribe and patients to use pharmaceuticals in ways they were not intended. Because Pfizer is a corporation—a legal abstraction, really—it couldn’t go to jail like fraudster Bernie Madoff or killer John Dillinger; instead it paid a $1.2 billion “criminal” fine to the U.S. government—the biggest in history—as well as an additional $1 billion in civil penalties. The total settlement was more than $2.3 billion—another record. None of its executives, decision-makers, stockholders/owners, or employees saw even five minutes of the inside of a police station or jail cell. Most Americans don’t even know about this huge and massive crime. Nor do they know that the “criminal” never spent a day in jail. But they do know that in the autumn of 2004, Martha Stewart was convicted of lying to investigators about her sale of stock in another pharmaceutical company. Her crime cost nobody their life, but she famously was escorted off to a women’s prison. Had she been a corporation instead of a human being, odds are there never would have even been an investigation. Yet over the past century—and particularly the past forty years—corporations have repeatedly asserted that they are, in fact, “persons” and therefore eligible for the human rights protections of the Bill of Rights. In 2009 the right-wing advocacy group Citizens United argued before the Supreme Court that they had the First Amendment right to “free speech” and to influence elections through the production and the distribution of a slasher “documentary” designed to destroy Hillary Clinton’s ability to win the Democratic nomination. (Some political observers assert that they did this in part because they believed that a Black man whose first name sounded like “Osama” and whose middle name was Hussein could never, ever, possibly win against a Republican, no matter how poor a candidate they put up.) In that, they were following on a 2003 case before the Supreme Court in which Nike claimed that it had the First Amendment right to lie in its corporate marketing, a variation