Unequal Protection Quotes

“The 20th century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“nation and the Framers of the Constitution. They were sufficiently worried about corporate power that they didn’t even include in the Constitution the word corporation, intending instead that the states tightly regulate corporate behavior (which the states did quite well until just after the Civil War).”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“But Hamilton lost the day, Jefferson won, and we have a Bill of Rights built into our Constitution that, as Hamilton feared, has increasingly been used to limit, rather than expand, the range of human rights American citizens can claim. And because it’s in our Constitution, the only way other than a Supreme Court decision to make explicit “new” rights (such as a right to health care) is through the process of amending that document.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. [It] says what the states can’t do to you. [It] says what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“the Constitution was designed not to give us rights but to prevent government from taking our rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“Humans are born with human rights. Those human rights are inherent—”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“June 2011 article in the Financial Times titled “Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Bankers’ ” noted, “The characteristics that make for good traders and investment bankers are pretty much the same as those that define psychopaths.”107”
― Thom Hartmann, The Crash of 2016: The Plot to Destroy America--and What We Can Do to Stop It

“ON SEPTEMBER 2, 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 and that definitely led physicians to prescribe and patients to use pharmaceuticals in ways they were not intended.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“If this trend continues, it’s probably just a matter of time before a corporation (maybe one of the many mercenary forces that emerged out of George W. Bush’s Iraq War?) claims the Second Amendment right to bear arms anywhere, anytime, and your credit card company’s bill collector shows up at your home with a sidearm.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“in previous decades a chemical company took to the Supreme Court a case asserting its Fourth Amendment “right to privacy” from the Environmental Protection Agency’s snooping into its illegal chemical discharges.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“for one hundred years people have believed that the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad did in fact conclude that “corporations are persons.” But this book will show that the Court never stated this: it was added by the court reporter who wrote the introduction to the decision, a commentary called a headnote.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“since 1886, the Bill of Rights has been explicitly applied to corporations. Perhaps most astoundingly, no branch of the U.S. government ever formally enacted corporate personhood “rights”: • The public never voted on it. • It was never enacted into law by any legislature. • It was never even stated by a decision after arguments before the Supreme Court.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“Traditional English, Dutch, French, and Spanish law didn’t say that corporations are people. The U.S. Constitution wasn’t written with that idea; corporations aren’t mentioned anywhere in the document or its Amendments. For America’s first century, courts all the way up to the Supreme Court repeatedly said, “No, corporations do not have the same rights as humans.” In fact, the Founders were quite clear (as you can see from Hamilton’s debate earlier) that only humans inherently have rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“I hold it to be impracticable”4 to try to define it or any right narrowly in a Bill of Rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“Instead of defining a few rights, Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 84, “Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing, and as they retain everything, they have no need of particular reservations.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“His concern was that if there were a few rights specified in the Constitution, future generations may forget that those are just examples and that the Constitution itself protects all human rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“The Constitution doesn’t give us rights: it restrains government from infringing on rights we acquire at birth by virtue of being human beings, “natural rights” that are held by “natural persons.” The Constitution holds back (restraining government) rather than gives forward (granting rights to people).”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“And those rights are not to be lightly infringed upon by government in any way. They’re explicitly protected by the Constitution from the government. We are, after all, fragile living things that can be suppressed and abused by the powerful.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“The clause that grants all “persons” equal protection under the law, in context, seems to apply pretty clearly only to human beings “born or naturalized” in the United States of America. But fate and time and the conspiracies of great wealth and power often have a way of turning common sense and logic on its head,”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“among men and not among angels; among men as intelligent, as determined and as independent as myself, who, not agreeing with me, do not choose to yield up their opinions to mine. Mutual concessions is our only resort, or mutual hostilities.”*”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“Other corporations have asserted Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination as well as asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment—passed after the Civil War to strip slavery from the Constitution—protects their right “against discrimination” by a local community that doesn’t want them building a toxic waste incinerator, commercial hog operation, or superstore.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“Corporations haven’t limited their grasp to the First Amendment; pretty much any and virtually every amendment that could be used to further corporate interests has been fair game.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“2003 case before the Supreme Court in which Nike claimed that it had the First Amendment right to lie in its corporate marketing, a variation on the First Amendment right of free speech. (Except in certain contract and law enforcement/court situations, it’s perfectly legal for human persons to lie in the United States.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back

“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 even been an investigation. Yet over the past century—and particularly the past forty years—corporations have repeatedly asserted that they are, in fact, “persons” and therefore eligible for the human rights protections of the Bill of Rights.”
― Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became "People"—and How You Can Fight Back