Certain Alien Rights are going to Former Aliens

While gas and grocery costs are rising despite the Day One promises.

Feb 10, 2025

“Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

Abe Lincoln predicted that in 1864. 22 years later the wheels were set in motion.

Corporations first became ‘persons’ in an 1886 Supreme Court case called Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific. There, the Reporter of Decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States is the official charged with editing and publishing the opinions of the US Supreme Court both when announced and when they are published in permanent bound volumes of the Official Records of the Supreme Court.

In 1886 that guy was Bancroft Davis, the former president of the Newburg and New York Railway, who wrote: "The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

In fact the court had evaded any decision on the 14^th Amendment argument and Davis made this entry on his claim that this was conveyed to him by the Chief Justice in a conversation they had, plus an opening statement by Chief Justice Morisson Waite that wasn’t confirmed by any of the other Justices. All subsequent SCOTUS rulings on corporate rights as persons were based on that reporter’s claim, not on anything that was included in the court’s actual ruling.

And the little known Waite was the seventh guy Ulysses Grant offered the position to.

That’s not how legal precedents are supposed to be set. In this case, a non-Justice likely to have a favorable bias towards railroad companies due to his previous experience agreed that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to corporations, though the originalist intent of that amendment was to grant America’s freed slaves human rights.

(From Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis)

I think it essential to add that similar claims came before courts hoping that the 14^th Amendment granted women human rights too, but it would be another 33 years before women even gained the right to vote. But could they own and manage property? Since 1835 several states began permitting women to do that, but only due to the incapacity of their husbands, which didn’t extend to single women at all. It was 1869 when Massachusetts and Illinois allowed married women equal rights to property and custody of their children.

In 1890, Wyoming was the first to grant suffrage and Utah provided those rights in 1896. In 1920, the women gained the full right of suffrage in all states. Grudgingly, the states complied.

In 1959 California outlawed employers from forbidding women to wear pants. The 1960s saw a number of states granting women equal rights and some gave women equal pay rights. In 1970, Hawaii was the first state to allow women to obtain an abortion on her own request, though some had previously allowed rape, incest and/or health as legal abortion reasons. Going back to pre-US government days, restrictions on abortions were mainly due to physicians’ claims that it would endanger the health of the women and not due to religious and moral opposition.

Understandable as all surgeries had high mortality rates. The works of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister – one of whom recognized a big difference in outcomes during childbirth (high mortality) by his medical students and much lower mortality rates where midwives assisted with births. The midwives practiced things like washing their hands and disinfecting any towels and tools. Everyone else might cross-contaminate patient after patient spreading joy to all the dastardly germs they were spreading.

It was 1875 when clean hands and sterilization of surgical tools became widely practiced by surgeons due to Lister’s research but decisions about abortions required the consent of husbands still.

Returning to 1970, Florida passed a law granting women the right to own property in their own names and to manage and sell it without their husband’s consent. Between 1968 and 1972 multiple states began reversing abortion and contraceptive restrictions, until the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. (which the SCOTUS affirmed in multiple appeals since).

In 1974 women gained the right to get a credit card in her own name, in 1984, marital rape became outlawed. In 1972, Congress passed the ERA and in the 10 years after, it only gained ratification in 35 states, falling 3 states short. All should be aware that from 1940 till 1980, the Republican Party platform supported the passage of an ERA.

But opponents argued that women would then be drafted and serve in combat, there’d be unisex bathrooms, same-sex marriage would become legal and importantly they claimed women had already obtained Equal Rights via the 14^th Amendment. Which courts have ruled the opposite ever since.

The point of this long digression is that corporations became persons in 1886, Black citizens wouldn’t get full access to similar rights for another 80 years and women agitated and lobbied for 85 years to gain all the property rights corporations got – plus control of their own bodies between 1973 (Roe v Wade) and 1984 (marital rape outlawed).

So corporations gained their personhood way before the others because essentially, a SCOTUS secretary biased in favor of railroads wrote something down that was never ruled by the Supreme Court.

All the arguments against the ERA have since come to pass without its passage except women aren’t being drafted. Another source of opposition began arising in the mid-1970s when conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews and Evangelical Churches began to raise it as a moral issue based on their notion that a zygote was a person and had more rights than women.

But that old ruling granting personhood to corporations has since provoked further rulings benefiting the really wealthiest corporations. Antitrust rulings are rare now, corporate taxes are low to non-existent (Tesla has paid zero for several years now), they own and control nearly all major media news (so guess how well that works for them), the SCOTUS is stacked with 5 conservative Catholics – a majority – in part because billionaire conservative Catholics like Lenny Leo and Harlan Crow plus evangelist ministers bought and paid for the current court.

Conservatives also got a ruling in Citizens United v FEC (2010) that largely ended bipartisan campaign spending limits, made money into a free speech issue so corporations, unions and wealthy individuals could create groups that could literally buy election outcomes, giving donors anonymity from voters, so long as they followed a simple set of rules to pretend no quid pro quo was involved.

John Paul Stevens, leading the four dissenting Justices, Included this: “"A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold."

Which is exactly what’s occurred with Elon Musk’s contribution of a quarter billion dollars to help Trump gain a narrow win.

Wikipedia: “Legal entities like corporations, Stevens wrote, are not "We the People" for whom our Constitution was established. Therefore, he argued, they should not be given speech protections under the First Amendment, which protects individual self-expression and self-realization. Corporate spending is the "furthest from the core of political expression" protected by the Constitution, he argued, citing Federal Election Commission v. Beaumont. According to Stevens, corporate spending on political advertising should be regulated as a business transaction, and evaluated on whether it conforms to the wishes of shareholders.”

SCOTUS would then make SuperPACs legal in Speechnow.org v FEC (2010) and in McCutcheon v FCC (2014) it took down the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 which imposed a limit on contributions an individual can make over a two-year period to all national party and federal candidate committees, ruling it unconstitutional 43 years after it had been the law. Clarence Thomas added his opinion that ALL contribution limits are unconstitutional.

It was 5 years after Citizens United and 1 year after McCutcheon that Donnie Dorko announced he was running for dictator, expanding his lifelong crime spree. Six years later, he instigated a coup attempt with some of the participants getting transportation to the day’s events by Clarence Thomas’ wife.

Elon is hardly alone in buying the 2024 election to eliminate regulation, weaken the education of our citizens, cut health protections for people around the globe, change energy an environmental rules to aid the warming of our planet and to get inferior white male candidates chosen for positions that superior candidates – by virtue of talent, competence and experience – are denied for not being a white male. Plus providing more tax cuts for the top 5% of profiteers while pushing the greater tax burden onto middle class families.

Elon’s PayPal partner Peter Thiel succeeded in getting JD Vance his Senate seat and now, the Vice Presidency. Though Musk was kicked out of PayPal for a management style of bully/lie/temper tantrum that pissed everyone off, he’s doing rather well for himself as the richest guy in world history and as America’s First Fuehrer.

Musk and Thiel spent a fair amount of their formative years in South Africa under apartheid. Musk left just as its biggest supporter, the USSR, was crumbling, to avoid the military draft, just one year before Mandela was freed after 27 years in prison. So neither, of course, are racist (wink-wink-know-wut-ah-mean?).

Abe Lincoln’s fear was confirmed and Justice John Paul Steven’s prediction accurate but another even older guy had some concerns as well:

“The distrust of corporations ran so deep that Thomas Jefferson proposed, unsuccessfully, that freedom from monopolies be included in the Bill of Rights. He later wrote, “I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” ”

Because the American Revolution was not just a rebellion against King George III, it was also a rebellion against the monopoly of the British East India Company that began with a rather soggy tea party near the coast of Boston.

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