Jeffrey D. Clements Discussing Why Corporations Are Not People

Description

Presented by the Mechanics' Institute Library in conjunction with City Lights Bookstore and Free Speech For People, Equal Justice Society, and Rainforest Action Network.

The January 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision marked a culminating victory for the legal doctrine of corporate personhood. Corporations, as legal persons, are now entitled to exercise their alleged free-speech rights in the form of campaign spending, effectively enabling corporate domination of the electoral process.

Jeffrey Clements uncovers the roots, expansion, and far-reaching effects of the strange and destructive idea, which flies in the face of not only all common sense but, Clements shows, most of American legal history, from 1787 to the 1970s. He details its impact on the American political landscape, economy, job market, environment, and public health—and how it permeates our daily lives, from the quality of air we breathe to the types of jobs we can get to the politicians we elect. Most importantly, he offers a solution: a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United and tools readers can use to mount a grassroots drive to get it passed.

Overturning Citizens United is not about a triumph of one political ideology over another—it's about restoring the democratic principles on which America was built. Republican president Theodore Roosevelt and conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist both vocally opposed the idea of corporate personhood. Community by community, state by state, we can cross party and ideological lines to form a united front against unchecked corporate power in America—and reinstate a government that is truly of, by, and for the people.


Jeffrey Clements is the co-founder of Free Speech for People, a national, non-partisan campaign to challenge the creation of Constitutional rights for corporations, overturn Citizens United v. FEC, and strengthen American democracy and republican self-government. He is the author of the Corporations Are Not People (Berrett-Koehler, 2012). Jeff, an attorney, has represented people, businesses and the public interest since 1988.

Jeff served as Assistant Attorney General and Chief of the Public Protection & Advocacy Bureau in the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office from early 2007 to 2009. As Bureau Chief, he led more than 100 attorneys and staff in the enforcement of environmental, healthcare, financial services, civil rights, antitrust and consumer protection laws. Jeff also served as an Assistant Attorney General in Massachusetts from 1996 to 2000, where he worked on litigation against the tobacco industry and handled range of other investigations and litigation to enforce consumer protection and antitrust laws.

In private practice, Jeff has been a partner in the Boston law firms of Mintz Levin and Clements & Clements, LLP, which he founded in 2003. He also has practiced in Maine, where he has represented clients in a variety of litigation and in investigations and prosecutions by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Maine Attorney General’s Office.

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