#2 - "I'll believe a corporation is a person when Texas executes one".....

In the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court of the United States declared that a corporation is an individual.  Please read the Constitution.  The preamble says, “We the People”.  Amendments start with, “The right of the people”; “No person”; “All persons”; “The right of citizens”; “The rights of citizens”; etc.  No where in the constitution does it ever give rights to a corporation. 
 

We know that corporations and their terminology existed at the time the Constitution was written.  In fact the Constitution, Article II, uses corporate terminology, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America”.   Yet our founding Fathers did not include rights for corporations.   If they had meant corporations to be treated like people, they were careful framers and would have included them in the Constitution.

The flood of money that the Citizens United case allowed corporations to pour into PACs is always quoted as the serious consequence of that decision.  Please note that I do not say it’s an unintended consequence.  I believe the majority activists on the Supreme Court knew exactly what they were doing.  But there are other much more serious consequences of decreeing that a corporation is a citizen.

Take the case of the Nebraska.  Since corporations are individuals they have paid to take over legislatures as in the State of Nebraska.  The legislative politicians there, bought and paid for, decided they would cede to oil companies that power which has always been reserved for government – it is the power of eminent domain.  Eminent domain permits government to “take” land it needs for the publics good, paying a fair price for it.  The corporate legislature of Nebraska passed a law giving oil corporations the power to take land if they needed it.  And take it they tried for the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to Texas.

Republican spin masters loudly blame President Obama for stopping the pipeline.  It isn’t true.  The President didn’t stop the pipeline, the Republicans did. The Congressional Republicans stopped it by trying to rush it through requiring an approval deadline in a tax bill.  That tax bill didn’t pass so their deadline did.  The President then put a hold on the pipeline to honor the wishes of the State of Nebraska whose Republican Governor, Dave Heineman, managed to delay the pipeline by a series of special sessions of his legislature.  Why would the Republican Governor do this? 

First, he stopped it because the environmental evaluation had not been completed.  There are concerns about oil leaking from the pipeline and fouling the Sandhills or the Ogallala Aquifer that runs underneath and provides drinking water to 1.5 million people.

Less known is that Republicans, Democrats, Tea Party and Libertarian people in Nebraska, many of them farmers, banded together.  They decided that they didn’t want a corporation to take away the land that their ancestor had purchased and farmed for generations.  When Nebraska and Montana and South Dakota have worked out their problems with the environmental problems of the pipeline the federal government will do its due diligence.  The decision about the pipeline will be made on the basis of serious studies.

But least you believe that the Keystone XL pipeline will bring down our gas prices, it won’t.  All of that oil is simply going down to Texas refineries.  After refining, it will be piped into ships for China.  “Canadian oil won’t replace imports from hostile countries because Texas refiners are serving global demand rather the domestic need,” according to retired Brigadier General Steven Anderson, the US Army’s logistician in Iraq from 2006-2007.  He also said the pipeline will “set back our renewable energy efforts for two decades, much to our enemies’ delight.”

Drill baby, drill makes a great bumper sticker but it’s terrible policy.  It pollutes air; it pollutes water, it makes rich people richer and it has no benefit for those of us who drive in America.  Make no mistake, all of that Canadian drilled and Texas refined oil will keep China booming.