Only 19 Hours left to sign the petition for the City Resolution to End Corporate Personhood!

The following statement is from the Solutions Committee, supporting the General Assembly resolution stating that Occupy Portland wishes to help end corporate personhood.

The Occupy Portland petition for the City Resolution to End Corporate Personhood already has over 800 signatures, but we need more to convince City Hall to adopt stronger wording in their proposed resolution. Sign the petition here!

Attend the Rally!

On Wednesday (Jan 4) at 8:30am Occupiers will be rallying in front of City Hall to deliver this petition and signed postcards to City Council. You are invited to join the rally and occupy the council chambers as members of Move To Amend testify before the City Council in favor of a resolution which explicitly supports a constitutional amendment making clear that corporations are not people and money is not speech.

Wear red and bring signs (note: signs brought into council chambers can be no larger than 8 1/2 x 11)!

Background:

On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to spend unregulated and undisclosed sums of money on election campaigns. The Citizens United decision has led to unprecedented campaign spending on the part of multi-billion dollar corporations, drowning out the voices of We the People. When corporations have constitutional rights, peoples’ rights become meaningless. How can one human being’s power to speak compare to a massive corporation’s ability to speak?

Mayor Sam Adams has issued a proposed resolution of the Portland City Council supporting an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that makes clear that corporations are not people and money is not speech.

We need to thank the Mayor for introducing the resolution and request two primary revisions:

1. make clear that corporations are not entitled to ANY constitutional rights (currently the resolution says corporations are not entitled to the SAME rights as people)
2. remove reference to the proposed amendments currently sponsored by Oregon’s Congressional representatives as these amendments deal only with the issue of money as speech and not the issue of corporate personhood (i.e. these proposals need to be strengthened)

Click here to sign this petition and send a strong message to Portland City officials and Congress that we need a U.S. constitutional amendment that makes clear that only people are entitled to the rights of the U.S. constitution and money is not speech! An email will be sent with your message to Mayor Adams and the City Commissioners.

You can access the proposed city resolution here:
http://www.portlandonline.com/shared/cfm/image.cfm?id=377616

This entry was posted on January 3, 2012 at 1:32 pm and is filed under March Preparation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.