File this under “arg.”
Senator Sanders has proposed an important amendment to the US Constitution to address the “corporate personhood” issue. Many of you probably received the same email I did from the Senator’s office promoting the effort, entitled “Overturning Citizens United.”
In the email are links to the Democracy for America website, which attempts to drum up support on the issue. The site says “Last month, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.”
Here is the intro language to Sanders’ Joint Resolution proposing the amendment (emphasis added):
Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to expressly exclude for-profit corporations from the rights given to natural persons by the Constitution of the United States
The amendment specifies “for-profit” corporations.
Citizens United is a non-profit corporation.
As good and important an amendment as this is, it wouldn’t have applied to the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission specific case.
Many corporations over the years have formed their own ‘so-called’ non-profits as part of their ‘community action’ or ‘philanthropic’ images. (Marketing/PR) In some cases, I have noticed these corporate non-profits aiming their ‘mission statements’ at environmental, health care, and education issues. What that does is suck money away from 501C3 non-profits working on these and other issues. Kind of cute, actually. For instance, I believe Microsoft has a non-profit about education issues in the Third World–training Asians and Africans on computers…for??
Glad you brought this up, John. For, with that kind of loophole in Sanders’ bill, it would be easy for Halliburton and all the rest to form non-profits to ‘lobby’ Congress on issues and spend non-profit funds (some of it coming from people misled by these non-profit lobbying groups) on candidates. After all, an endorsement and donation from a non-profit looks a lot better than the same from the boardrooms of Wall St.
This must be adjusted in the final language of the bill. I mean, Jesus Christ! you could have a situation where our tax money goes to fund these non-profits. Maybe somebody better tell Bernie that THAT might be the whole point of that loophole.
It should be all of them, regardless of friend or foe.
IANAL, but I don’t see why corporations couldn’t be prevented from laundering donations through a non-profit. Under this amendment, corporations wouldn’t have most rights, which should mean pretty much all of their activities could be regulated without limit.
The latest move, for those that don’t read ‘lefty’ blogs, is that the RNC has filed to allow faceless multinational corporations to ‘donate’ unlimited funds directly to candidates without any reporting requirements.
That way a small business like Halliburton can have a level playing field against those unfair, pesky ‘special interests’, such as the American people.
Because directly buying politicians is an American Tradition.
http://thinkprogress.org/justi…
http://www.politico.com/blogs/…