Monday was World Cancer Day. Its aim is to unite people around the world to raise awareness and education about the disease and to pressure individuals and governments to take action.
We all know individuals who have or have had cancer - loves ones, friends, maybe ourselves. A friend of mine died from cancer over the weekend. My father died 30 years ago from brain cancer, contracted from who knows where. Maybe it was from inhaling toxic chemicals when he worked at the BF Goodrich Company in Akron - which may have also resulted in my birth defect. Goodrich used many toxic chemicals in the manufacture of rubber products and was one of the first corporations to develop vinyl chloride, a known cancer-causing chemical.
The rapid growth of abnormal cells that lead to malignant cancerous tumors triggered by exposure to chemicals, radiation or viruses can be devastating, Surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and hormone therapy are among the treatments, which have become more effective over time. Early detection is critical, especially to address tumors that spread, or metastasize, throughout the body, which are fatal.
Elimination of an entire malignant tumor is the ultimate quest of any treatment. No legitimate doctor would only, for example, remove some cancer cells when others could just as easily be cut out since remaining cells will simply divide and spread. Of course, sometimes if the cancer has spread too widely and deeply with no chance of its removal without causing great harm to the body, treatments are simply to extend life for a short period.
In no way to minimize the bodily effects of cancer - physically, mentally and emotionally - but cancer exists in other forms in our society, and is just as deadly if not aggressively treated.
The increasing power of corporations which is causing ever-greater harms to every aspect in our nation is among the destructive forms of cancer to our body politic - to the people of our country who collectively constitute the ultimate rulers - at least on paper as reflected by the first three words of the our Constitution's Preamble: We the People.
This increasing power or rule by corporations over people, policies and the fate of a livable planet itself originates from court decisions by activist Supreme Court Justices who decreed over that last two centuries that corporations should be anointed with the same unalienable constitutional rights as human beings. Rights intended exclusively for human persons under the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment (which was written to guarantee equal protection for freed black slaves) have been hijacked by corporations to apply to them. The Constitution's Contracts and Commerce Clauses have been perverted too - abused and misused to escape prior abilities of people and our elected representatives to protect our own and the health, safety and welfare of our communities.
Human rights have been trumped by corporate rights. The cancer this has caused to our society has not been limited to one part of the body politic, but rather has metastasized throughout our society. Corporate rule in politics, economics and culture extends to media, music and money; to elections, education and employment; to transportation, trade and telecommunications; to food, fashion and faith, to wellness, work and water; to information, incarceration and immigration; and, among many other arenas, to climate, campaigns and, yes, even to cancer.
Corporate constitutional rights is destroying healthy, human, self-governing individual and community cells. Our democratic republic is on life support.
Just as World Cancer Day raises awareness of cancer - its early symptoms, its impact and its treatment - and advocates for individual and governmental action, the same applies to the political cancer of corporate constitutional rights.
We must be aware of its forms and the harms they cause to the body politic. It's not enough to simply point out the anti-democratic corporate perversion of First Amendment free speech rights and the resulting harmful influences from the subsequent flood of corporate money into elections. We must be aware of all of the perversions and subsequent harms, many of which were were pointed out long ago in Why Abolish All Corporate Constitutional Rights by the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy (POCLAD).
Relatedly, it's not enough to simply take action seeking treatment to a sliver of the corporate constitutional rights tumor that is threatening what remains of our democratic republic (to the extent "democracy for all" ever existed in the first place).
Ending corporate constitutional rights must be complete. The grassroots movement Move to Amendis organizing for a constitutional amendment to end all never intended constitutional rights. Its We the People Amendmentwill soon be reintroduced in the new session of the U.S House of Representatives. Hundreds of organization support this effort and hundreds of communities have enacted municipal resolutions or ordinances following citizen-driven ballot initiative campaigns.
Every other group addressing this concern are only taking a scalpel to a sliver of the corporate constitutional rights tumor. Doctors who cut out, irradiate or treat in other ways only a portion of a malignant cancerous tumor only guarantees its later reappearance, which can be more widespread. "Doctors of democracy" can't afford to make this fatal constitutional amendment mistake.
Ending some corporate constitutional rights (i.e. First Amendment "free speech") as proposed by other amendment solutions such as HJR2, seems on the surface to be easier, but to do anything less than complete abolition -- as Move to Amend is working for -- will result in an ultimately terminal patient. That's where our democratic republic is rapidly headed unless we extend our awareness and action of cancer from the physical form to the political.
The 2019 theme of World Cancer Day is "I am an advocate and I will speak up." This should apply to ending all corporate constitutional rights.
Be an advocate.
Speak up.
And act up with Move to Amend.
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