Occupy the Courts (against corporate personhood)

[shannon]

This doc is a synopsis of issues related to this event. We are holding a planning meeting from 4pm-6:30pm at the Gypsy to iron out some details. We also will be looking for volunteers to take on a few tasks related to the event.

Attachments:

[Official Occupy Tulsa]

It needs a little bit of grammatical correction.

"over $1 million individual donors" should be "over 1 million individual donors".

Some human beings have no conscience, no ethics and no concern for family or community, so that tends to weaken the argument it is included in the way it is currently stated. I recommend this instead:

"The sole purpose of a corporation is to amass profit and consolidate wealth. They are legally required and structurally designed to make money at any cost. This makes them dangerous to the welfare of the people. A corporation has no capacity to think and thereby no means to make moral and ethical judgments, and no purpose but to amass money. The structure of a corporation separates humans from their actions. They destroy responsibility and hijack decision-making. They make humans do things collectively that they would never do as individuals: poison water, deny healthcare, and destroy the planet. A human being, on the other hand, is able to reason, has the capacity to make moral and ethical decisions, and has more and greater driving motives than maximizing profits. "

The statement "Corporations had to use unelected, unaccountable judges to give them rights." should be removed because it is a weak argument. We too need those "unelected, unaccountable judges" to grant and uphold our rights. And suggesting a branch of the government to be illegitimate with such words would not help our case.

I also recommend this be added:

"Corporations can't sit on juries, nor should they ever be allowed to, because Corporations are not related to living beings in either structure or sensation, and so corporations and humans are not peers. Likewise, they should not also be permitted to vote or to provide money as "speech" because a corporation is not the peer of a human."

The statement "A person is a private entity with rights and sovereignty. A corporation is a public entity with obligations and responsibilities." is circular to this discussion. You can't use the point you're trying to prove as evidence. Also, it suggests that a person does not have obligations and responsibilities.

The statement "The American Revolution was explicitly anti-corporate, and the revolutionaries made sure that corporations were tightly controlled." again requires proof.

The statement "Judge-made law is not democracy. We didn’t elect the Supreme Court justices, but they get to decide who does and doesn’t count in our democracy. Congress and the People should decide those issues. " should be reworded to read: "The Supreme Court is not a legislative body. Supreme Court justices are not elected and therefore do not have the authority to write and pass laws affecting the operation of the government."

If you include my earlier suggestion, then completely discard the line that says: "The sole purpose of a corporation is to amass profit and consolidate wealth. They are legally required and structurally designed to make money at any cost. This makes them dangerous to people and democracy. " and "The structure of a corporation separates humans from their actions. They destroy responsibility and hijack decision-making. They make humans do things collectively that they would never do as individuals: poison water, deny healthcare, and destroy the planet."

--C. J. Williams

[shannon]

This doc is from the Move to Amend website, so we wouldn't have any way to edit it. It is also a list of talking points, not educational material, so it doesn't cite the sources of information. As for the other points... The concise message of the Move to Amend coalition is this.. Corporations are not people, money is not speech.
The fact that some people have no conscience does not change the fact that a corporation would never have one.
Judges are to enforce laws, not to create them. Legislating from the bench occurred when corporations were called persons and when regulations of the Federal Election Commission were overruled in the Citizens United decision. It is not calling the branch illegitimate, it is pointing out that they overstepped and that the checks and balances need to start functioning by amending the constitution through the legislative branch.
I'm not following your circular logic reasoning. People and corporations are two different things. Characteristics of two are described separately, but there is no reason to think that the description is mutually exclusive. The point is that corporations should be providing a service, not running the country.

[Official Occupy Tulsa]

My point was about wording. Since those are each separate speeches to be made involving more than what is shown, then clearly much of my statements don't apply. I was addressing it as a complete document, not as a schedule of speech titles. As speeches, many of those titles are quite long and unfortunately named. However, that is unimportant to what is actually said in the speeches, assuming those speeches don't end up simply talking about these points as part of a document that is the very schedule we see here. If that's the case, then my points apply.

The point about it being circular was in regard to what I thought was the purpose of the document that is actually a schedule (hopefully only a schedule).