Forum Post: LA and Occupy LA Agree: It's Time to End Corporate Personhood

What’s the issue that unites the occupiers and the city they’re occupying? Getting corporate money out of politics.

On December 3, just two days before Occupy L.A. was evicted by police, the General Assembly of the occupation passed a unanimous resolution calling for a constitutional amendment to end corporate personhood.

Today, the City Council of Los Angeles also voted, also unanimously, for a resolution making the same appeal.

So what’s this issue that's uniting occupiers and the city they’re occupying? Corporate personhood is the legal concept that underpins rulings like the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v the Federal Election Commission; it means that corporations are considered people under the law, with the constitutional right of free speech. Since the courts have also defined money as constitutionally protected speech, the upshot is that corporations are empowered to spend unlimited amounts of money trying to influence the political process.

In order to reverse Citizens United—and a long line of other rulings supporting corporate rights over human ones—the resolutions passed by Los Angeles and Occupy L.A. call for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly stating that corporations are not people and money is not speech.

http://www.truth-out.org/la-and-occupy-la-agree-its-time-end-corporate-personhood/1323356911