Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People" - And How You Can Fight Back [Paperback]

Thom Hartmann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 14, 2010

Was the Boston Tea Party the first WTO-style protest against transnational corporations? Did Supreme Court sell out America's citizens in the nineteenth century, with consequences lasting to this day? Is there a way for American citizens to recover democracy of, by, and for the people?

Thom Hartmann takes on these most difficult questions and tells a startling story that will forever change your understanding of American history. Amongst a deep historical context, Hartmann describes the history of the Fourteenth Amendment--created at the end of the Civil War to grant basic rights to freed slaves--and how it has been used by lawyers representing corporate interests to extend additional rights to businesses far more frequently than to freed slaves. Prior to 1886, corporations were referred to in U.S. law as "artificial persons." But in 1886, after a series of cases brought by lawyers representing the expanding railroad interests, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations were "persons" and entitled to the same rights granted to people under the Bill of Rights. Since this ruling, America has lost the legal structures that allowed for people to control corporate behavior.

It's time for "we, the people" to take back our lives. In this revised and expanded second edition, Hartmann incorporates specific examples from today's headlines, and proposes specific legal remedies that could truly save the world from political, economic, and ecological disaster.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Beneath the success and rise of American enterprise is an untold history that is antithetical to every value Americans hold dear. This is a seminal work, a godsend really, a clear message to every citizen about the need to reform our country, laws, and companies."--Paul Hawken, author of Natural Capitalism and The Ecology of Commerce

"Hartmann combines a remarkable piece of historical rersearch with a brilliant literary style to tell the grand story of corporate corruption and its consequences for society with the force and readability of a great novel. I intended to take a first quick glance and then couldn't put it down."--David C. Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World

"Unequal Protection should be in the hands of every thinking American. If we do not awaken soon, democracy will be replaced by a new 'Third Reich' of corporate tyranny. To be aware of the danger is the responsibility of each of us. No one has told us the truth better than Thom Hartmann. Read it!"--Gerry Spence, author of Give Me Liberty

About the Author

National radio host THOM HARTMANN is the award-winning, best-selling author of fourteen books currently in print in more than a dozen languages on four continents. Hartmann is also an entrepreneur, an internationally known speaker on culture and communications, and an innovator in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, and economics. The former executive director of a residential treatment program for emotionally disturbed and abused children, he has helped set up hospitals, schools, famine relief programs, and communities for orphaned or blind children in India, Africa, Australia, South America, Europe, Israel, Russia, and the United States. Thom is the host of a wildly popular national radio program on the Dial-Global network, which is broadcast during radio prime time on stations from coast-to-coast and on satellite radio. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Louise.  You can find him on the Web at www.thomhartmann.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers; 2nd edition (June 14, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1605095591
• ISBN-13: 978-1605095592
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #49,173 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #91 in Books > Business & Investing > Business Life > Ethics

More About the Author

Thom Hartmann, who started in radio in 1968, is also an internationally known speaker on culture and communications, an author, and an innovator in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, and economics. The co-founder (with his wife, Louise) of The New England Salem Children's Village (1978) and The Hunter School (1997), he has led national innovations in the areas of residential treatment for abused children and private/public education for learning-disabled children. Hartmann is the four-time Project Censored Award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of nineteen books currently in print in over a dozen languages on five continents. He is the former executive director of a residential treatment program for emotionally disturbed and abused children, and has helped set up hospitals, famine relief programs, schools, and refugee centers in India, Uganda, Australia, Colombia, Russia, and the United States through the German-based Salem International program. Formerly rostered with the State of Vermont as a psychotherapist, founder of The Michigan Healing Arts Center, and licensed as an NLP Trainer by Richard Bandler (who wrote the foreword to one of Thom's books), he was the originator of the revolutionary "Hunter/Farmer Hypothesis" to understand the psychiatric condition known as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). A guest faculty member at Goddard College in Vermont, he also synthesized the "Younger/Older Culture model" for describing the underpinnings - and possible solutions - to the world's ecological and socio-political crises, suggesting that many of our problems are grounded in cultural "stories" which go back thousands of years. His most recent books are "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class," "The Edison Gene," "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call to Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?"

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Small businesses take note: Corporate personhood hurts you as well, June 23, 2010

By 

Mary Bell Lockhart (TEXAS, US) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People" - And How You Can Fight Back (Paperback)

Thom Hartmann has, once again, provided an informative, rational and readable view of our world, its problems and what to do about them. This time its an update of his previous work on the domination of large corporations by virtue of "corporate personhood." He steps through the principles of the founders of our nation and then through Supreme Court decisions, or lack thereof, bringing history alive by quotes, photos and anecdotes about the people involved and why they acted as they did. He factually documents the negative impact corporate personhood has had on real persons and the society in which we live. Readers should sit up and take notice, however, that Hartmann reveals herein that it is not just ordinary humans who now have unequal protection under the law. Small and local businesses too have been trampled under the feet of the "big boys" of the economy. Those who advocate free market capitalism and who endorse corporate personhood often claim the purpose of helping small businesses or strengthening local economies. Just the opposite is the actual impact of these economic policies, as he clearly and amply demonstrates. Finally, he pulls in the comments of modern-day capitalists who have learned that removing the standing of corporations as persons under the law will not destroy big business either. In fact, in the long-run, it will ensure broad-based growth of the economy, as the capitalism without regulation that results from corporate personhood is not sustainable.

This can be the reference book for a new movement, a truly "populist" movement to place "We, the People" back in charge. Let's go for it! Yes, we need to return to the principles upon which our country was founded. Corporations are NOT people!

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Readable, entertaining and definitely eye-opening, November 1, 2010

By 

Elaine Cohen "elainecohen" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People" - And How You Can Fight Back (Paperback)

In 2009, "the transnational pharmaceutical giant Pfizer pled guilty to multiple criminal felonies. It had been marketing drugs in a way that may well have led to the deaths of people ... [Pfizer] paid a $1.2 billion 'criminal' fine to the U.S. government ... as well as an additional $1 billion in civil penalties... None of its executives... saw even five minutes of the inside of a police station or jail cell ... in the autumn of 2004, Martha Stewart was convicted of lying to investigators about her sale of stock in another pharmaceutical company. Her crime cost nobody their life, but she famously was escorted off to a women's prison. Had she been a corporation instead of a human being, odds are there never would have been an investigation."

This punchy opening of this surreal book by Thom Hartmann gets you hooked from the very first line. It's true. What are corporations if not the actions of the people who work in and for them? If a corporation does wrong, simply writing a check to the government doesn't seem to cut it when the people responsible for the wrong-doing retain their jobs, pay-checks, privileges, and avoid punishment under the law. Hartmann explains, in great historical detail, how corporations became "persons" under US national law with rights equivalent to those of "natural persons" (you and me, flesh and blood, individuals); including the First Amendment right of all persons to free speech, the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, the Fifth Amendment protection against double jeopardy and self-incrimination and the Fourteenth Amendment right to non-discrimination. Moreover, Thom Hartmann, blow by blow, explains how corporations have exploited these rights to advance their own interests, or at least, those of the "persons" who stood to benefit, at the expense of the common good and the people of the United States.

It all began, apparently, in 1886 when the Supreme Court Justice Morrison Waite pronounced judgment in a case of the Southern Pacific Railroad versus Santa Clara country, about the taxation levied on this corporation by the County. The lawyers claimed that the railroad corporation was entitled to the same rights as a "person". The court reporter noted in the written record of the case that, "The defendant corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." This written record, Thom Hartmann goes on to show, was actually an error and not the explicit intention of Justice Waite. Nonetheless, this record set the tone and served to legitimize all subsequent claims to corporate personhood for the rest of history until the present day. Further, Hartman postulates that this was all a big conspiracy engineered by the railroad lawyers who stood to make significant financial gain through defending more corporations in this way. The story is as incredible as it is outrageous and has the reader in a state of both disbelief and indignation. Surely the whole basis of corporate law in the US couldn't have been derived from little more than a mistake? This is quite fascinating and the arguments are succinctly articulated with references to original documents and records of the time. If we are to believe this author, the entire legal infrastructure governing corporations may well have been a complete farce, opening the floodgates for unchecked corporate abuse of the law as it was originally intended.

Hartmann deals with many controversial and poorly understood issues relating to the power of corporations over the human rights of individuals, providing detailed case studies of an array of events and actions in relation to corporations. The reading is riveting, and even though we have heard many of these stories before, the "get to the real truth" approach of the author makes this compelling reading. We read about the events leading to the Boston Tea Party, which was a protest against the power of the East India Company, who had successfully lobbied to support the Tea Act which gave the East India Company full and unlimited access to the American tea trade as well as tax exemptions, thus helping to drive other tea-traders out of business. Hartmann recounts the astounding story of why the Marc Kasky case against Nike's "right to lie" in their marketing materials in the name of freedom of speech was never tried in court. Other chapters include the exposure of issues such as the lawsuit by the Texas beef barons against Oprah Winfrey for commenting that she would avoid eating hamburgers after an outbreak of mad-cow disease, the concentrated corporate ownership of the not-so-free press, corporate support for political campaigns, the limitations of federal authorities to carry out spot checks on businesses to assess health and safety compliance, comparisons of US versus European law and the application of the precautionary principle which is not law in the USA, the use by politicians and companies of Professional Blog Warriors who blast the Internet from all corners to make campaigns more effective, the complication of global corporations doing business across borders, military spending and corporate interests and more. All these stories show how the power of corporations threatens the basis of democracy and the protection of the human rights of "natural" persons. John Ruggie would feel extremely validated, reading this book.

As a non-lawyer, I found this book immensely readable, despite several long legal texts used to provide substance to the author's presentation of the issues. These cases are sometimes so incredible that they defy belief. Thom Hartman is "the (US) nation's #1 progressive radio talk show host" as well as being an award-winning well-respected author of over 21 books (he also works for humanitarian causes). He appears in this book to have conducted thorough research, though make no mistake about his intention: to convince us that we must get our rights back from corporate predators who not only do not deserve them but also abuse them. His concluding chapter offers suggestions as to how we might go about doing this, including references to democracy campaigners and organizations, such as the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund or ReclaimDemocracy.org. Whether you believe in the conspiracy theories or the "hegemony of corporate personhood", or whether you do not, this book is certainly a recommended read. It is entertaining, using a dramatic story-telling pace to recount history, and very thought-provoking indeed.

This review first appeared on [...] on 20th September 2009

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fine survey suitable for debate, September 17, 2010

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People" - And How You Can Fight Back (Paperback)

The second updated edition of UNEQUAL PROTECTION: HOW CORPORATIONS BECAME "PEOPLE" - AND HOW YOU CAN FIGHT BACK updates and features Hartmann's analysis of two recent Supreme Court cases which tossed out corporate campaign finance limits. While this analysis deserves a spot in any business library, it also is recommended for social issues collections considering the legal and social remedies possible to end corporate 'rights' entitling them to the same rights as human beings. A fine survey suitable for debate.