Move to Amend and Efforts to End Corporate Rule -- One decade after "Citizens United"

"Green Sunday": Move to Amend and Efforts to End Corporate Rule

On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission", the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. The Supreme Court’s misguided principle failed to recognize that corporations are legal fictions and only human beings are people. The corruption resulting from this and previous Supreme Court rulings has consolidated our political system into a single party plutocracy – a single “Business Party” with Democratic and Republican wings controlled by corporate money. Move to Amend formed in response to "Citizens United". We have built a Congressional coalition around the “We the People Amendment” (HJR48) that will reject the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in "Citizens United" and other related cases, and move to amend our Constitution to firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights. This forum will address the history of corporate rule, including more recent consolidation of corporate power ushered in with neoliberalism, and describe how HJR48 is a good first step in revoking corporate rule and establishing that “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”


Lawrence Abbott is a retired Teamster, and Wildlife Biologist working as a Seasonal Political Organizer for the AFL-CIO Alameda Labor Council, and as a volunteer Organizer for Move To Amend, MoveOn, and Indivisible SF/East Bay.

Phoebe Anne Sorgen is a delegate to the Green Party USA National Committee. A long time organizer for a nuke-free, just and sustainable world, she was 2005 Outstanding Woman of Berkeley and 2015 Tom Paine Courageous Spirit awardee. Years ago, she decided to focus on the overarching cure, getting the laws changed that gave profit-motivated corporations the power to ruin our world; so she serves on the Move to Amend Bay Area Steering Committee. She is currently also tackling 5G wireless telecom, an egregious symptom of the corporatocracy.

James McFadden is a UC Berkeley research physicist who facilitates the local East Bay Move to Amend steering committee. He is also an active member of the Green Party of Alameda County and several other political groups.

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Green Sundays are a series of free public programs & discussions on topics "du jour" sponsored by the Green Party of Alameda County and are held on the 2nd Sunday of each month.