(A quiet, pithy reference to the history of Vermont’s leadership. – promoted by NanuqFC)

According to A History of Vermont (1916), almost immediately after Fort Sumter was fired upon and the Civil War began:

Towns voted to raise money on their grand list, and subscribed to equip the militia and support the families of volunteers…[The Legislature] voted seven dollars per month pay in addition to the thirteen dollars offered by the [Federal] government ; had provided for the relief of the families of volunteers in cases of destitution, and had laid the first war tax, — ten cents on the dollar of the grand list.

Vermonters could have shrugged their shoulders and said it wasn't their problem. Our little state was far away from the fighting, yet we responded to the call with great aplomb and sacrifice so that we might preserve the Union and, true to our abolitionist history, set other people free.

While we're perhaps known for a certain amount of rugged individualism, we don't shirk our  responsibility to each other.  Sometimes it takes the form of helping replace the cemetery fence.  Or dropping off canned goods at the food pantry.  Or holding special events to raise money for people whose children are sick.

That's all well and good, though sometimes things happen that require more concerted effort from a larger community to deal with. For instance, right now our tax dollars are helping victims of Hurricane Isaac in Louisiana. Last year they helped Vermonters hit by Hurricane Irene.

We were lucky in Franklin County, feeling very little of Irene's fury, but people headed down south to help out folks who lost their homes and businesses. And when Fletcher suffered from road washouts a few months before that, state government and the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave us a boost when our relatively small Town budget would have been overwhelmed by necessary repairs.

Our Founders established the Constitution to “form a more perfect Union”—which Vermonters died defending a couple generations later—and to “promote the general Welfare.” They recognized we're all in this together, and we honor their foresight as we take care of our neighbors just down the road and far to the south of us.

ntodd

The trivia questions in this month's Fletcher Newsletter were essentially picked at random, but their very real connectedness has been weighing on my mind for a while.

1. How many acres did each original landholder have to clear to retain property rights?
2. How many school districts did Fletcher have in 1880?
3. When did Fletcher first get electricity?

They all boil down to one word: community.

1. Answer: 5 acres (plus build a modest house) within 3 years (more or less after the Revolution).

I found that requirement to be very interesting.  The State granted land to people, but they had to do actually something with it. D Gregory Sandford (VT Historical Society) wrote:

Rather than promoting settlements of unfettered individuals creating farms in isolation across the landscape, early charters envisioned town centers, built around public meetinghouses, churches, and, in a very few cases, a town common…Private ownership and use of land were bundled with civic obligations to the community…The idea that civic rights and obligations followed private ownership of the landscape remained within all subsequent town charters…The scope of these obligations changed with time, though each offered a vision of community.

Note that civic obligation to community, which is right in line with our constitution's Declaration of Rights:

Article 9th: That every member of society hath a right to be protected in the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property, and therefore is bound to contribute the member's proportion towards the expense of that protection, and yield personal service, when necessary, or an equivalent thereto, but no part of any person's property can be justly taken, or applied to public uses, without the person's own consent, or that of the Representative Body.

Liberty comes not from unfettered freedom, but rather from rights and responsibilities within society.  That fundamental combination is explicitly codified in our founding documents.

2. Answer: 10 districts in a town of about 1000 people!

There was quite a lot of discussion last year about school consolidation, with Fletcher possibly no longer having its lone school any more in favor of merging with neighboring Fairfax.  While we ultimately rejected that option, it would've only been practical in this modern age of buses and carpools.  Consider this excerpt from A History of Fletcher Vermont:

The Beers Franklin County Atlas (1871) shows ten districts with a school in each.  For reasons unknown, there is no District 10, but there is District 11 in the northeast part of town…The buildings were so spaced throughout the town that no child, theoretically, would need to walk more than two miles to school, one way…Consolidation of schools gradually took place from the early 1930s, the Great Depression, through the next three decades until the new school was constructed ¼ mile south of Binghamville in 1962.

From the beginning of our Republic, education has been extremely important, as Ira Allen noted in hisHistory of Vermont:

The greatest legislators from Lycurgus down to John Lock, have laid down a moral and scientific system of education as the very foundation and cement of a State ; the Yermontese are sensible of this, and for this purpose they have planted several public schools, and have established a university, and endowed it with funds, and academic rewards, to draw forth and foster talents.

So it should come as no surprise that this, too, is codified in our constitution:

Section 68: [A] competent number of schools ought to be maintained in each town unless the general assembly permits other provisions for the convenient instruction of youth.

Our town decided a few decades ago that we no longer needed 10 districts, and more recently decided that we still valued having one school for “convenient instruction.”  We were able to make an informed collective decision thanks to our School Board's due diligence, and these community members continue to work with our veteran principal and experienced school staff to tackle difficult issues in these difficult times.

3. Answer: East Fairfield got electricity in 1923; East Fletcher in 1939, Metcalf Pond in 1940, Buck Hollow in 1941.

I think the important takeaway from this trivial fact is that with the exception of East Fairfield, where PELCO (now part of CVPS) provided service from the Fairfax Falls generating station it built, most of Fletcher didn't get electricity from a for-profit company.  History of Fletcher again:

Other parts of town received their first electric service from Vermont Electric Cooperative, Inc. which was initially financed by a federal agency, the Rural Electrification Administration.

Private interests bypassed us because we weren't “worth it,”  but FDR saw the value of universal electrification, as did Vermont Governor George Aiken.  The latter was, fittingly, a Republican not only in terms of party affiliation but also in the original sense of the word.  Gordon Wood wrote in The Creation of the American Republic:

Republicanism, with its emphasis on devotion to the transcendent public good, logically presumed a legislature in which various groups in the society would realize 'the necessary dependence and connection' each had upon the others…each man must somehow be persuaded to submerge his personal wants into the greater good of the whole. This willingness of the individual to sacrifice his private interests for the good of the community the eighteenth century termed ‘public virtue.’

Roosevelt and Aiken recognized it was often necessary to consider the common good, so went to great lengths to make sure even rural communities such as ours had electricity.  Of course Aiken was educated in Vermont where our constitution's section on schools begins:

Laws for the encouragement of virtue…ought to be constantly kept in force…

Education and civic virtue are intrinsically linked, and are the foundation of our success as a community.  That is most assuredly not a trivial thing.

ntodd

PS–I plan on serializing this over the summer in the Newsletter.

Freep on the vax compromise:

Dorian Yates of Strafford is among those who has been vocal as part of a group called the Vermont Coalition for Vaccine Choice…and said she thinks a majority of Vermonters support parental choice on vaccinations.

Yates said she opposes the conferees’ agreement even though it keeps the philosophical exemption in law. The bill offers no firm definition of vaccination rate to give her assurance how it will be measured, she said.

It's risible enough that these folks are't happy with getting to keep the unconscionable “philosophical” exemption (now called “personal”, which also upsets them).  But then they say that they “think” a majority of Vermonters support them.  How unfortunate that there's no polling data available for the state, but I don't “think” we would deviate too much from the national norm: 69% of Americans think vaccination should be mandatory, and 82% of scientists.

That's the big problem: they “think” they know a lot things, but give lie to any real knowledge almost as soon as they open their mouths (or browsers).  While I've been called “irrational” and “naive” regarding this topic, I'm not sure it's credible coming from people who assert that this compromise by our representative legislature imposes “martial law” and is a form of “violence” (really, with no provision of fines or prison for non-compliance, you're expecting jackbooted thugs to break down your door?).

I don't find the complaints about how the Health Dept determines immunization rates to be any more compelling than their cries of tyranny.  First of all, it's a damned good thing that the Leg allows the agencies to set goals and respond to public health needs without micromanaging. I've also looked at the same data the anti-vaxxers have–I have no qualms about how it's been reported, and apparently most legislators concur.

What's more, I find it curious that the Vaccine Philosophers tout high immunization rates as a reason to allow them exemptions.  In other words, please allow us to avoid the risks we fear while benefitting from your taking those same risks.  It's an individual NIMBY syndrome, putting the entire public health at risk.  But hey, go ahead and exercise that choice: you can educate and care for your children in your own backyard!

Having talked about this with a wide array of people of late, inevitably the issue of cultural memory has come up.  I would very much be interested in the demographic breakdown of vax resistance since most of the older generations appear to support mandatory immunization while refuseniks seem to be younger.  A divide between people who remember the outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics before vaccines eliminated or mitigated the most common, devastating illnesses and those of us who have enjoyed lives more or less free of preventable disease?

It brings to mind Jared Diamond's Collapse:

In many prehistoric societies the mean human generation time—average number of years between births of parents and of their children—was only a few decades. Hence towards the end of a string of wet decades, most people alive would have had no firsthand memory of the previous period of dry climate. Even today, there is a human tendency to increase production and population during good decades, forgetting (or, in the past, never realizing) that such decades were unlikely to last. When the good decades then do end, the society finds itself with more populationthan can be supported, or with ingrained habits unsuitable to the new climate conditions.

Not an exact analogy–external factors versus our own choices–but consider that if you've never experienced the pre-vax bad times, you might take for granted a world that's fundamentally safe from historical infectious monsters.  Our health security will go the way of the last tree on Easter Island if people keep chopping at our herd immunity because they've forgotten how we got here.

ntodd

PS–Sorry that I lied about being done with this…

2nd reading ofJRS15 passed the VT Senate 26-3:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives:

That the General Assembly expresses its disagreement with the holdings ofthe U.S. Supreme Court in Buckley and in Citizens that money is speech and urges Congress to adopt Senate Joint Resolution 29, and be it further

Resolved: That the General Assembly urges Congress to consider therequest of many Vermont cities and towns to propose a U.S. constitutionalamendment for the state’s consideration that provides that money is not speechand corporations are not persons under the U.S. Constitution and that alsoaffirms the constitutional rights of natural persons, and be it further

Resolved: That the General Assembly does not support an amendment tothe U.S. Constitution that would abridge the constitutional rights of any personor organization including freedom of religion or freedom of the press, and be it further

Resolved: That the Secretary of State be directed to send a copy of thisresolution to the Vermont Congressional Delegation.

The proposed Amendment (S.J.Res.29):

`Section 1. Congress shall have power to regulate the raising and spending of money and in kind equivalents with respect to Federal elections, including through setting limits on–

• `(1) the amount of contributions to candidates for nomination for election to, or for election to, Federal office; and
• `(2) the amount of expenditures that may be made by, in support of, or in opposition to such candidates. 

`Section 2. A State shall have power to regulate the raising and spending of money and in kind equivalents with respect to State elections, including through setting limits on–

• `(1) the amount of contributions to candidates for nomination for election to, or for election to, State office; and
• `(2) the amount of expenditures that may be made by, in support of, or in opposition to such candidates. 

`Section 3. Congress shall have power to implement and enforce this article by appropriate legislation.'.

Of course Franklin County's GOP Senator voted against it:

Mr. President, This resolution is overly broad and linguistically imprecise.Were the Congress to enact a constitutional amendment based upon thisresolution as drafted, it could lead to unintentional consequences that wouldthrow into question two hundred years of law and precedent.

I'm sure similar arguments were made against the 14th Amendment as well.  Of course, there were actually unintended consequences: corporations have been given more protection under it than African-Americans!  So I can see why Sen Brock would be worried…

ntodd

I never made an investment decision based on the Tax Code.

 – Paul O'Neill, former Bush Treasury Secretary and CEO of Alcoa

Following up on yesterday's post on the tyrannical, illegal, communistic Cloud Tax, I've been bothered by a number of things about the overall coverage and hyperbolic reaction to the discovery that the Tax Dept tries to interpret and apply the tax code.

The second Freep article on the subject particularly raised red flags for me:

Dealer.com used its position Wednesday as one of the leading tech companies in the state to focus attention on a stealth 6 percent tax on cloud computing that few businesses in the state were aware of, but that has emerged recently in the form of six-figure retroactive tax bills resulting from state tax audits.

…

As the Free Press reported Monday, among those affected by the cloud computing tax is Inntopia, a Stowe-based business offering online resort reservation services to ski resorts that is appealing a bill of nearly $100,000. Inntopia President Trevor Crist said he had no reason to know the tax department had issued a bulletin in September 2010 that addressed sales tax and computer software, because the department simply posted the change on its website.

Nobody likes getting a big tax bill–heck, even folks who believe taxation is necessary for a civilized society complain about such things.  But as I said yesterday, I have very little sympathy when it comes to stuff that's been in operation literally for years.  It ain't a stealth tax when the information has been publicly available all that time.

I'm rather surprised to hear that anybody in the business community would appeal to ignorance in this context.  Surely there are professional accountants and lawyers in their employ whose job it is to keep up with applicable tax code?  The information was indeed public, so one would expect your employees/contractors charged with tax issues would carry out their responsibilities of due diligence.

Continuing:

Sen. Vince Illuzzi, R-Essex/Orleans, said at Wednesday’s press conference that the tax bulletin never went through the legislative process as it should have.

“A cloud tax was never intended by the general assembly,” Illuzzi said. “Any tax bulletin has to go through the legislature. That didn’t happen with this bulletin.”

This really stopped me in my tracks.

First, why the need for the big press conference and blitz in the Free Press?  None of the reporting has suggested there's been much work by businesses trying to contact the Legislature to resolve things and being rebuffed and abused the way, say…public sector workers in Wisconsin had been.  It appears the anti-tax patriots leapt right on their horses to raise the clarion call against encroachments of liberty by tyrannical tax collectors.  Even to the point of quickly establishing a Facebook page to garner grassroots support because we all know how defenseless IBM is.

As far as the intentions of the Leg, fair enough.  This does, however, illustrate the folly of having legislators try to anticipate every new innovation in a fast-moving field, as well as the law of unintended consequences.  The way I've read the statutory language, cloud computing certainly appears to be taxable even if the folks in Mount Peculiar didn't know that it existed (and they'd essentially described it).  Whenever they deal with matters like these they ought to tread very carefully, though experience tells us it's almost inevitable that lawmakers will trip over something technical, especially when the Internet is involved.

One of the big puzzles for me was the Senator's comment about bulletins needing to go through the Leg.  I don't have a history of every one to see if the previous 53 had, but in combing the statutes I found no such requirement.

3VSA (Administrative Procedures) does say:

Where due process or a statute directs an agency to adopt rules, the agency shall initiate rulemaking and adopt rules in the manner provided…

However, 32VSA (Taxation and Finance) says:

In the administration of taxes, the commissioner may [my emphasis]:

(1) Adopt, amend and enforce reasonable rules, orders and regulations in administering the taxes within the commissioner's jurisdiction.

Parsing “may” versus “shall” and other language is much like the whole angels dancing on a pin thing, but it has real impact.  To resolve my confusion, I wrote to Sen Illuzzi and he responded very quickly, pointing me to a provision in S.173, an amended bill currently in the Senate:

Sec. 2. 32 V.S.A. § 3201(f) is added to read:

(f) Any written guidance that interprets federal or state tax statutes orregulations and that the department of taxes considers binding on any taxpayeror groups of taxpayers shall be considered a rule subject to the provisions of3 V.S.A. §§ 836–845.

So in fact, there was no requirement for the Tax Dept to have their bulletins vetted.  That really makes a lot of sense since the Leg can delegate some authority to Executive departments (within the limits ofnondelegation doctrine), and the tax code is cumbersome enough that the people who administer it need to have some ability to interpret it without checking with lawmakers at every turn.  So long as the law provides general provisions and as much detailed instruction as possible, it's up to the Tax Dept to make it work.

There are a few variations on the bill Illuzzi mentioned, by both Dems and Republicans in the House and Senate, so it remains to be seen how his will all sort out.  I'm not entirely convinced the provision above is necessary, nor do I see much wisdom in exempting cloud computing from sales & use tax, but the Leg is doing their job and that's cool.  Bottom line from all this for me is that despite a lot of hypeventilating, the Tax Dept did not err in procedure or interpretation of statute, and whatever problems that have cropped up are being dealt with in ways consistent with the rule of law and our constitution.

A concern that has nothing to do with the law per se is how corporations like IBM and Dealer.com are playing this game.  It's not surprising that they'd complain about a tax levvied on their services, but this brouhaha seems like just the tip of the proverbial iceberg in what we can expect this election season.  Who needs SuperPAC money when you can pick an issue, throw stuff onto the Internet and get everybody in a lather?

Really, is IBM going to be hurt by a sales tax and unable to compete?  Will people stop buying their services because there might be a tax?  Would they really stop innovating because the state might expect a small slice of revenue?  No, no, no, no, etc.

The timing strikes me as odd.  Oh, I get that these retroactive tax bills were the catalyst.  It's of interest to me, though, that this is happening right after the state budget was passed, the session is nearing its end and campaign season is about to begin.  

Many of the comments I've seen blame the Governor for the tax as though he's some big socialist trying to illegally tax the air, despite the fact that prescribed legal processes were not ignored and this tax language had been around since the Douglas administration.  The press conference wasn't necessary to highlight some egregious, long-standing abuse: it sounded more like a (not overly) subtle attempt by corporate interests to paint the Governor as a typical tax-and-spender in dire economic times.  

Are people really going to fall for that?  Based on the media coverage and reaction I've seen online, the answer seems to be yes, their judgement can be clouded by a few simple tricks.  There ought to be a tax on Facebook astroturf…

ntodd

(An interesting discussion.  I created a “fold” in the original text so that it would fit a little better on our front page. – promoted by Sue Prent)

Every tax, however, is, to the person who pays it, a badge, not of slavery, but of liberty. 

 – Adam Smith

There is a new menace to liberty: The Cloud Tax.  And by 'new', I mean it's a few years old, but this week it's gotten some press and a new Facebook page.

At the heart of this manufactured issue is a technical bulletin from the VT Dept of Slavery, er…Theft, uh…that is…Taxes.  These things “contain general information on a subject. They are not intended as advice with respect to a specific fact situation, but rather are intended to provide general guidance to the public on a topic. They often will be industry specific and provide information derived from several statutes.”

Note TB#54 was originally published in September of 2010, under Republican Gov Jim Douglas before the election.  Further note it refers to VT statutes, including an amendment to digital products definition that was passed by a special legislative session in June 2009, to wit:

Transferred electronically: means obtained by the purchaser bymeans other than tangible storage media.

Our sales & use tax law already included this: 

Tangible personal property: means personal property which may be seen, weighed, measured, felt, touched or in any other manner perceived by the senses. “Tangible personal property” includes electricity, water, gas, steam, and prewritten computer software.

So there is not some new tyrannical law or regulation created by the socialist Shumlin administration that they're now shoving down our throats.  This has been on the books for a few years, and the Tax Dept issued an informational document to clarify how it was being implemented.

The only new thing is businesses who have failed to collect the tax properly are complaining and rallying support for their cause.  Because, of course, if cloud services are taxed, nobody will buy them, and surely no innovator will ever try to develop new ones since they offer no other technical advantages in terms of efficiency, simplicity, etc.

Now on their Facebook page, having provided scant details to the people they've worked into a froth, there are all sorts of commenters asking how this could even possibly be legal and crying out: NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION!

Oy. 

Remember our state constitution:

Previous to any law being made to raise a tax, the purpose for which it is to be raised ought to appear evident to the Legislature to be of more service to community than the money would be if not collected.

Our duly-elected citizen legislators have debated and passed our tax code per their constitutional responsibilities.  We have, in fact, been represented through the entire process and it was decided years ago that the state would tax software services provided in a cloud environment so we might be able to pay for services that benefit the people as a whole.  They are certainly measurable, through usage of bandwidth and/or storage, for example, and are no more ephemeral or less useful than electricity or other such kinds of TPP.

The government has a general taxation power.  It is arguably unlimited, though obviously there are political and electoral constraints that keep it in check.

“Taxation without representation” (which is merely a paraphrase, BTW, of James Otis in 1765) does not mean that we must be directly consulted every time a tax is imposed.  We weigh in during elections, and we should be informing ourselves as good citizens of the republic before we cast our ballots.  I have very little sympathy for cries of tyranny about something that's been around for almost 3 years with an interceding election having been held.

There's plenty of good argument to be had about the wisdom of this tax.  Democrats and Republicans in Montpelier support a change, though I'm still not convinced this is a bad source of revenue.  Just lay off the ignorant “this is illegal” and “we're not represented” crap.

ntodd

PS–I still support the Federal moratorium on taxing Internet access, which is a different kettle of fish. 

Update: Freep calls it a “stealth tax.”  Makes me think they don't understand stealth or public info any more than Ron Paul does…

Further update: I've emailed Sen Illuzzi and cc'd the article's author, asking where in statute the Tax Dept is required to run bulletins through the Leg. 

( – promoted by JulieWaters)

(Excellent work, ntodd. Page break inserted so the front page is a bit more user-friendly –jvwalt) 

Bruce Shields at the Ethan Allen Institute is upset that people are mobilizing to reduce the influence corporate money has on our democracy.  Of course he wraps himself in the warm blanket of free speech, assuming his conclusion as his premise that corporations have such rights.

He does not begin well:

The [Saving American Democracy (SAD) amendment] effort hopes to overturn a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court case titled Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which the left claims first introduced the idea that corporations are people.

Strawmen shouldn't play with fire.  

“The left” has never made such claims.  We know that there has always been some sense of collective quasi-personhood under the law since corporations have existed, and we know that Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) gave us the fiction that corporations enjoy the same 14th Amendment protections that real humans do.  

We also know that Federal campaign finance law was gutted by Citizens United, and we're now reaping the whirlwind before the general election season has even started.  So people have mobilized to clarify some aspects of the Constitution through the amendment process.

In attacking the right of groups and associations of citizens to speak out in the election process, the left is mounting a frontal attack on the principle of free of speech and association.

Actually the right to free association will still exist–we're not proposing to get rid of corporations, or unions for that matter (in contrast to the fine Republican state governments attacking workers' rights).  And those individuals who make up those associations will still have their rights to speech.

As an aside, I'll observe literalists who like to point out there are no words like “privacy” in our Constitution, might also notice there is no specific right to “free association” in the 1st Amendment.  Yet such a right has been assumed for a long time, as documented in NAACP v Alabama:

Effective advocacy of both public and private points of view, particularly controversial ones, is undeniably enhanced by group association, as this Court has more than once recognized by remarking upon the close nexus between the freedoms of speech and assembly. De Jonge v. Oregon, 299 U.S. 353, 364 ; Thomas v. Collins, 323 U.S. 516, 530 . It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the “liberty” assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech. See Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652, 666 ; Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 324 ; Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 303 ; Staub v. City of Baxley, 355 U.S. 313, 321 . Of course, it is immaterial whether the beliefs sought to be advanced by association pertain to political, economic, religious or cultural matters, and state action which may have the effect of curtailing the freedom to associate is subject to the closest scrutiny.

Of course, when this was decided in 1958, states were actively engaged in denying individuals rights across the board, so group association and advocacy was an important part of overcoming institutional racism and oppression.  In the case of corporations, nobody is suggesting they don't have the right to do business–as Alabama was trying to do with the NAACP–merely that they have such enhanced ability to advocate for their own interests through massive fortunes so we need to restore some balance through Constitutional means.

Bruce continues:

Corporations have been recognized as persons ever since English courts of law first protected incorporation from royal prerogative in the 16th century. Incorporation protects the property and the rights of individual persons precisely because it affirms the social utility of a group of people organized to function as one person before the law. 

This principle was brilliantly enunciated by Daniel Webster in his famous brief and affirmed by the Supreme Court almost 200 years ago in the pivotal constitutional case, Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward. Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in the Dartmouth College case contains a detailed history and affirmation of corporate personhood and declares that corporate persons enjoy every right guaranteed in the Constitution. 

Indeed, Webster made an excellent case and referred to the Bill of Rights.  Yet in that decision, Chief Justice Marshall wrote:

A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it, either expressly, or as incidental to its very existence. These are such as are supposed best calculated to effect the object for which it was created. Among the most important are immortality, and, if the expression may be allowed, individuality; properties, by which a perpetual succession of many persons are considered as the same, and may act as a single individual. They enable a corporation to manage its own affairs, and to hold property, without the perplexing intricacies, the hazardous and endless necessity, of perpetual conveyances for the purpose of transmitting it from hand to hand. It is chiefly for the purpose of clothing bodies of men, in succession, with these qualities and capacities, that corporations were invented, and are in use. By these means, a perpetual succession of individuals are capable of acting for the promotion of the particular object, like one immortal being. But this being does not share in the civil government of the country, unless that be the purpose for which it was created. Its immortality no more confers on it political power, or a political character, than immortality would confer such power or character on a natural person…The objects for which a corporation is created are universally such as the government wishes to promote.

Justice Story made similar remarks in his concurrence, even citing Stewart Kyd, who wrote an early definitive treatise on the subject.  So there is clearly acknowledgement that corporations are artificial persons and only have rights insofar as they are extended explicitly by government–contrast to natural rights of natural persons which are not granted by government, but supposed to be protected by and from government.

What's more, I'm having difficulty finding in the opinions any assertion that corporate persons enjoy every right guaranteed in the Constitution.  The only basis of the ruling I can see is that Dartmouth had a contract and states cannot impair contracts per Article I, Section 10.  It seems Mr Shields is blowing smoke out of his ass on that one.

But what if corporations had the right to free speech?  All rights can still have natural, reasonable limits.  Just because you run a business doesn't mean you can engage in unfair or deceptive practices like false advertising, for example (any more than I can libel or slander Bruce Shields).  As is, it's certainly defensible to say that states and/or the Federal government have the authority to limit corporate campaign spending, contributions, what have you, since they could crowd out the voices of individual voters (the current Supreme Court's political biases notwithstanding).

Regardless, the whole point of a Constitutional amendment is to create the fundamental legal framework within which Congress can work.  So even if the Supreme Court said corporate persons have the exact same rights as actual people, if we add explicit language saying that's not the case, citing Court decisions is moot.

The Saving American Democracy petition ought to be renamed the Trash the First Amendment petition and rejected.

The 14th Amendment provides for equal protection under the law and has been used as the basis of incorporating the 1st Amendment against the states, meaning that freedom of speech, religion, assembly, etc, are sacrosanct at all levels of government.  The 1st Amendment wasn't altered, but was expanded.

Similarly, a potential 28th Amendment won't trash individual rights guaranteed in the 1st Amendment.  Rather, it would clarify that corporations, being artificial and limited, don't universally enjoy the same rights that we the people do.

We have altered the Constitution a number of times to improve it, or respond to changing and unanticipated conditions.  The 12th Amendment fixed our presidential election method due to the rise of political parties.  The 13th finally rid us of slavery that forced so many unholy compromises from the beginning.  The 16th resolved the conflict between different court decisions on the income tax.  To complain about amending the Constitution to adapt to a contemporary environment is to complain about the Constitution itself, which created this mechanism in the first place.

Our goal is to ensure the 1st Amendment will be preserved, and the rights contained therein will be reserved to natural persons, including individual members of corporations.  We're just not going to stand any longer for Bruce Shields' convenient fiction of corporate personhood dominating our political processes.

ntodd

(Bumped. Bulk of content transplanted under fold.   – promoted by kestrel9000)