“I’m Ben,” began Ben & Jerry’s founder Ben Cohen. “I’m a person.”
“I’m Jerry,” continued his partner, Jerry Greenfield. “I’m a person.”
“Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, Inc…” proceeded Cohen,
“…is not a person,” finished Greenfield, to laughter and applause.
A crowd packed into Christ Episcopal Church in Montpelier Tuesday night to hear Cohen, Greenfield, and others condemn the Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court decision, which gave corporations the same constitutional rights as people and allowed businesses to spend unlimited amounts of money on campaign advertising.
The panelists led a discussion about efforts to block the effects of that legal precedent on future elections, including the introduction of a proposed constitutional amendment that would deny corporations personhood and put limits on campaign advertising.
The audience responded enthusiastically to a stemwinder delivered by Move to Amend’s David Cobb, a talk he billed as a 10-minute overview of Constitutional law “and why the idea of a corporation being able to claim Constitutional rights is actually a perversion of the democratic promise of a republic in the United States of America.”
Cobb pointed out that states issue corporate charters. For the first 75 years of the nation’s history, he said, charters were used to hold corporations accountable.
“Corporate charters were only allowed for five, seven, ten years,” Cobb said. “They could only do certain things to get the privilege of limited liability.
“At the end of that time period, the corporate charter automatically dissolved. Not only that, all you could ever do was the very specific thing you had identified. You had to prove a public need that was not being met either by existing private businesses or public action… And get this–any time a corporation was ever found to act outside the public interest, do you know what happened to the corporate charter?” Here he drew his hand across the throat and concluded, “Dissolved! The corporate death penalty. It was used routinely the first 75 years of our country.”
Cobb argued that Americans don’t seem to understand that people control corporations and give them privileges — not rights. He said that a resolution introduced in the state senate could make Vermont the first state to urge Congress to pass a Constitutional amendment to limit corporate campaign spending and establish that corporations are not entitled to Constitutional rights.
A number of opponents of Green Mountain Power’s wind project in Lowell used the forum to criticize GMP during the discussion period, though forum organizers repeatedly steered the conversation back to the evening’s topics of corporate personhood and campaign finance reform.
Some audience members referred to corporations as sociopathic institutions (and one ridgetop wind opponent used the term specifically towards Green Mountain Power). The mental illness metaphor was made popular by the 2003 documentary The Corporation, which promoted the idea that if a corporation actually was a person, it would be diagnosed as a sociopath because corporations are legally bound to put profits to shareholders above human values like community and compassion.
Cobb said corporations are defined by “We the People” who live under the U.S. Constitution. He acknowledged that under legal doctrine the idea that a corporation’s only role is to provide a return to shareholders has become the status quo, and then he asked, “Do you know where that came from? A court created it.”
“What to me is most exciting about this moment is that we the people are beginning to have first-principle conversations about the economic engines that are the most dominant institutions of our time, that we have been taught and trained to obey… I believe we are in a pre-revolutionary time in the United States. I believe we are engaged in a conversation about, what kind of society do we want? How can we do the things we want to do?”
Audience members stuck around for more than half an hour after the forum, energized by the discussions and attracted by the four flavors of free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, scooped in part by Ben and Jerry, in person.
The forum was organized by the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG) and Clean Yield Asset Management.