Corporate Power - Racial Equality - The Supreme Court

This video features some moments from an event called, "Corporate Power -The Legacy of Santa Clara" that took place on 4/20/2011 at The Ohio State University, Moritz Law School, Saxbe Auditorium. The event was sponsored by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.

Greg Coleridge (of Move to Amend Ohio) was the moderator of the event and helped to organize the event along with Stephen Menendian, Shannon Zee Cross, and Lauren Kinsey.

The speaker's panel was composed of:

-john a. powell, Williams Chair in Civil Rights & Civil Liberties at the Moritz College of Law and executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State

-Jennifer Brunner, attorney at Brunner Quinn and former Ohio Secretary of State

-Wendy Patton, senior associate, Policy Matters Ohio

-Stephen Menendian, attorney/senior legal research associate, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.

In this video, after opening comments from Greg Coleridge, Professor john a. powell speaks on the topic of corporate power. He reveals how the Dred Scott case in 1857 was a case not just about slavery, but also about corporate constitutional rights/corporate power. He explains that after the Civil War (1861-1865) and Santa Clara (1886), the Supreme Court (because of the attitudes of the Supreme Court Justices) used the Civil War Amendments that were intended to protect blacks, as a tool to restrict the rights of blacks and expand the power of corporations.

He points out that throughout the history of the Supreme Court, when the Justices expanded corporate prerogative/corporate power they simultaneously decreased the rights and power of blacks. At the end of the Lochner Era the equation went in the opposite direction and the rights of blacks were protected while the power of corporations were decreased. Then in the 1980s business interests became organized and waged a semi-covert war to erase the democratic advances of the New Deal Era and return to the Lochner Era. The used the Supreme Court as their main tool to achieve this power shift. The Citizens United Decision is one symptom of how far this pro-corporate movement has gone.

In order to tip the scales back toward justice and equality we need to be as organized as the people were in the 1920s and 1930s as they worked to create the New Deal Era. We need to realize we are fighting a war against those with concentrated wealth and power, who advance corporate power as a means to advancing their own economic interests at the expense of democracy, equality, fairness and freedom.

Gaining a constitutional amendment to abolish the legal fiction of corporate personhood/corporate prerogative may be an important part of this process, however we must also keep in mind that the attitudes of the people on the court determine how laws on the books are enforced. Even though the Civil War was fought and the Civil War Amendments were gained, those pro-equality amendments were used by the people on the court to stifle equality and advance corporate power. They ruled that way until the end of the Lochner Era, when FDR put pressure on the Supreme Court to favor human rights over corporate rights.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Santa Clara
• Dred Scott
• john a. powell
• Kirwan