Money, Power, Citizenship and Justice In America

By, Glen Reaux

The 14^th amendment of the constitution was ratified in 1886.  It was intended to be a furtherance of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which was the first federal law to define citizenship and affirm that all citizens are equally protected by the law.  The Civil Rights act of 1866 was a post civil war law intended to guarantee citizenship and protect the civil rights for Africans brought to or born in the United States.   Section one of the 14th Amendment reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.  No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

This amendment defines citizenship and equal protection under the law for persons also known as human beings, living people.  There is nothing in this law that refers to artificial people, corporations, legal entities or anything else that is not a human being.

The founding fathers in drafting the constitution mandated the separation of powers as a checks and balance system.  This system was devised to protect against the possibility of tyranny.  The congress was created for the purpose of creating laws and acting as a watchdog over the executive branch.   The executive branch was tasked with the administration of government which included law enforcement and the provision of government services.  Congress created the laws and the president signed them forcing a partnership between the two branches.  The responsibility of the judiciary branch was to interpret the laws and determine the legality of legislation in relation to the constitution.  The judiciary does not have the right to create or modify laws.  However, in the case of Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad many legal scholars believe that the Supreme Court created a law not with its ruling but with a headnote.  A headnote is not the work of the Court written by the justices.  In this particular case, it was the work of the court reporter who gave his purported understanding of the decision, prepared for the convenience of the profession.  This court reporter was a former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company.  J.C. Bancroft Davis wrote the following:

One of the points made and discussed at length in the brief of counsel for defendants in error was that ‘corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.’ Before argument, Mr. Chief Justice Waite said: The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.

Analysis of this statement made by a former railroad president reveals two things, (1) the Supreme Court was predisposed to favor Southern Pacific Railroad because it was not open to arguments on the citizenship clause of the 14^th amendment which does not allow for corporate citizenship or personhood, (2) the headnote was written by a former president of a railroad which is a conflict of interest.  This headnote was not written by a justice nor is it a part of the Supreme Court ruling.  It is an opinion of a former executive of the railroad industry which benefited from the ruling.  This headnote has become accepted and perceived as a law by which citizenship was granted by the Supreme Court to corporations in the form of corporate personhood.  In this case, many respected legal scholars believe that the court acted outside of its authority and created law, a power that only lies within the purview of the congress.  Was this action on the part of the court to allow an openly conflicted court reporter to write, publish and attach his opinion to the court’s ruling negligent, without vision or is this the first recorded case of corporate money infesting the American judicial system?  At the least, it was a devastating impropriety.

Since 1886, this Supreme Court action (not a ruling) citing the 14^th amendment which was created for the purpose of guaranteeing citizenship for freed slaves has become the corner stone of a plethora of court cases, each leading to more corporate rights and protections.  These rights and protections have provided corporations with better protection under the law than human beings.

Corporate citizens cannot be incarcerated or suffer the penalty of death.  A human being has a limited lifespan while corporations can be immortal.  According to campaign finance laws, human beings have set limitations on the size of their campaign contributions.  Thanks to corporate personhood, the decision of the Supreme Court in the Citizens United vs The Federal Election Commission, has given corporations greater first amendment rights than people.  In this case the court ruled that a corporation’s campaign contributions are an expression of free speech and they are not bound by campaign finance laws.  The courts have given corporations greater rights than people.  If a person in the form of a corporation has greater rights than people, then corporations have greater protections under the law.   This is a violation of the equal protection clause aka the first paragraph of the 14^th amendment.

In an August 2018 article by the Georgetown Behavioral Health Institute, findings were published that purely places the blame for the opioid epidemic of the past two decades on corporate greed and negligence on the part of big pharma.  This epidemic has led to the addiction of American citizens to prescription pain killers.  In 2016 and 2017, 91,317 Americans died from opioid drug overdose.  There has been no criminal prosecution for these crimes.

A landmark case which highlights the abuse of the equal protection clause by big business is the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.  In this November 1998 agreement, the big four tobacco manufacturers agreed to pay more than $25 billion over the first 25 years of the agreement to states attorneys general of 46 states to cover the cost of medical expenses caused by the use of their tobacco products.  Criminal prosecution against these corporate personhoods was never pursued.

A very recent example of unequal protection under the law deals with the disastrous California wildfires of 2018.  The state has determined that these fires have been caused by negligence on the part of Pacific Gas and Electric which has a history of causing wild fires over the past two decades.  In November of 2018, the Camp Fire which was located in northern California burned 153,386 acres of land, destroyed 18,804 homes and commercial buildings, damaged 554 structures, killed 86 people and injured 17 others.  Three people are still missing.  The financial cost is projected to exceed $15 billion.  History has shown that in the past, human beings have been charged, tried, convicted and sentenced to decades in prison for crimes far less severe.  In our court system, the only remedy appears to be civil suits and not criminal prosecution.  In response to pending civil legal jeopardy, Pacific Power and Electric is lobbying the state legislature for protection against the consequences of their actions. This a far cry from 86 counts of negligent homicide and a trial which may have brought justice.  This justice is being denied to the family members of the deceased.   Government’s job it to speak for the dead and it does not.

In light of the opioid crisis, actions of big tobacco, devastation of the Camp Fire just to name a few, and the lack of consequences levied against corporate perpetrators it is obvious that the equal protection clause of the 14^th amendment is applied under a different and more favorable standard for corporate persons as opposed to natural persons or human beings.  Such atrocities have been created by the insane, unwise and possibly corrupt actions of our court system.  The Supreme Court has relegated the American people to second class citizens when compared to corporate America. The administration of this type of justice is a violation of the constitution, unequal protection under the law and provides no protections for natural persons against corporate criminals.  For you and I, this is justice in America.