The movement to amend the Constitution to guarantee the rights and protections within only to people rather than corporations has a rich history of Green Party involvement since its founding. Our own Ben Manski and David Cobb were founders. But at our September meeting, we had the privilege of reconnecting with a movement leader, George Penn, from Wisconsin United To Amend. Mr. Penn devotes his retirement years to getting money out of our political system. Paraphrasing the start of his talk, he asked us about some issues we found important like demanding an end to the endless wars, sound environmental policy, anti-poverty programming, and more. But he posed a question, “How’s that going?” He presented some studies to show why it is so difficult to make movement on popular issues: money talks, and corporations spend a lot of it to get what they want and having politicians deny us what we want.
Penn explained that in 2010, the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court decision affirmed corporations as people and money as speech. Spending on elections continues to increase from $6 billion in 2016 to `$14 billion in 2020. A Princeton University study found in 2015 that between 1990 and 2010, there was no correlation how popular a policy was with ordinary people and the legislation that was passed. It also found a very strong correlation between the popularity of policy among wealthy people and what was passed. More information can be found on their website.
The amendments that Wisconsin United To Amend (and other national affiliates) have offered as a solution are:
- Only human beings are endowed with Constitutional rights, not corporations.
- Money is not speech, and limiting it in elections is not against the 1st Amendment.
This broad coalition includes all kinds of groups including small businesses, faith organizations, and more. Wisconsin United to Amend is looking for more coalition partners continuously to stand behind its principles.
While the federal government has not entertained these amendments, the other way to codify this into law is community by community and state by state. Wisconsin has seen this introduced in its state house every session since 2013. Lots of cities across Wisconsin have passed resolutions telling the Wisconsin legislature to call this question, and 177 have done this across all states. The highest referendum vote was 91% in favor. The City of Milwaukee has not yet endorsed this proposal, so Milwaukee Greens have taken up the charge to help its introduction in Milwaukee as well as other nearby municipalities like Franklin.
If you would like to help to end corporate control of our government, join us today!