Abolishing Billionaires
by Abolishing Corporate Personhood
What is Personhood?
Personhood is the status of being considered a person in legal, ethical, and social contexts. Personhood defines and grants inherent rights, dignity, and protections. US fascism today is on a reckless charge to criminalize the personhood of immigrants, African Americans, women, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized groups.
Personhood arose to distinguish the essential human rights of everyone from the rights of mere property and objects under private possession.
Corporations are now considered a “political person”.
On January 21, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that First Amendment rights (freedom of speech, assembly, etc.) apply to corporations.1 The “Citizens United” decision enfranchised money as a political person and gave billionaires the power to influence elections using the power of their purse. Money poured into politics, giving privilege to the rich and poverty and criminalization to the rest of us.
In the US today, corporations and private property have far more civil and human rights than people.
The Epstein class – those billionaires that claim to own and control the world – is simply one ugly side of the system of private property.
Their personhood is legally guaranteed by wealth that extends its malign power into control over what we all need and use together. Every day they openly demonstrate their incompetence, stupidity, and thirst for slaughter. They can only destroy.
Every day, they gloat over the Genocide in Gaza and the War against Iran.
They spread war and the technology of surveillance across the world, including and especially into the United States. Personhood is a legal battleground today.
Using personhood to enhance life, not to enrich billionaires.
Beginning in the US in 2006, seven countries recognize forms of human personhood for Nature.2 Many ecosystems around the world declared their rivers and land-living entities “political persons”, thereby granting them personhood and codifying their management and protection.
In 2019, Toledo, Ohio, voters passed the “Lake Erie Bill of Rights” (LEBOR) with 61% approval, granting the lake legal rights to “exist, flourish, and naturally evolve”. Triggered by a 2014 toxic algae crisis, this voter-approved charter amendment allows citizens to file lawsuits on behalf of the ecosystem against polluters. In 24 hours, corporate forces began a campaign to abolish LEBOR, and they eventually won.
Abolishing the personhood of billionaires and corporations today is not a choice.
It is a necessity.
Every day, billionaire personhood expands, attempting to devour all of us. Private property is their Achilles heel. We can abolish and dismantle billionaire personhood by abolishing private property. This means going beyond reforming the legal system. It means abolishing the state.
We can do this! We must do this!
Everything for everybody!
Footnotes
1. https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/citizens-united-v-fec/
2. https://matadornetwork.com/read/countries-legally-recognized-rights-nature/
About The Author
