We do not have to live with this. We can put the American project back together again.
First, though, we need to see where Citizens United came from and how much we have lost to the triumph of corporate power. Most of the ï rst six chapters of this book examine these themes from diï erent perspectives. In Chapter Three, I digress to examine what a corporation actually is as a matter of law and fact. This may be a digression, but it lies at the heart of why corporations can have no constitutional rights superior to the rights of the American people to make laws governing corporations. Corpora- tions are not merely private entities, owing no duties to the public. Corporations are legal creations of government.
I close with three essential steps to roll back corporate dominance of government: (1) a twenty-eighth amendment to the Constitution that will overturn Citizens United and corporate rights and restore people's rights; (2) corporate accountability and charter reform to ensure that corporations better reï "ect the public policy reasons for which we allow the legal beneï ts of incorporation, such as limited liability, in the ï rst place; and (3) election law reform, including increased public funding, greater transparency, and an end to legal political bribery.
-- -- --
Citizens United confronts us again with the basic question of American democracy--what do we mean when we say, as we do in the opening words of the Constitution, "We, the People"? That question drives the central narrative of the American story, and it is why a constitutional amendment campaign to reverse Citizens United is so important now.
Amendment campaigns are how we make the American vision of equality and liberty a reality. Amendment campaigns are how we accomplished much that we now take for granted:
-- All people are equal.
-- Every citizen of every gender, race, and creed gets to vote and participate in our society.
-- Women are equal and may vote just as men vote.
-- The poor can vote, even if they don't have money for a poll tax.
-- Millions of men and women who have lived eighteen, nineteen, and twenty years, old enough to die for their country in war, may not be barred from voting.
-- We can, if we, the people, choose to do so, enact progressive income taxes and not place the tax burden only on middle-class and working families.
-- We elect the individuals who serve in the U.S. Senate, rather than watch from the sidelines while corporate- dominated political bosses appoint them.
Not one of these principles was established without Americans working for and winning constitutional amendments.
Now we need to work together again, to campaign for a fundamental proposition, encourage a national conversation, and force votes in towns and cities, state legislatures, and Congress, so that people and our representatives state where they stand on this question of our time: Must the American people cede our rights and our government to global corporations? I hope this book will show why this question is so important and how Americans can succeed in restoring our free republic, with equality for all.
Finally, a word about nomenclature. I am not "anticorporate," and this book is not "anticorporate," whatever that means. When I refer to "corporations" and "corporate power" and the like, I am talking about large, global or transnational corporations. Size matters. Complexity and power matter. Whether corporations operate in the economic sphere without dominating the political sphere matters.
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