Gulf Oil Spill

One of the most frequently asked questions we receive is, "How can I help?"

There are immediate action steps you can take even if you do not live in the Gulf. We are currently distributing petitions to have chemicals like Corexit REMOVED from the EPA's Oil Spill Contingency Plan Product Listing. Click here to download the petition. Please cisculate for signatures then mail to the address at the bottom of the form.

We desperately need to take back control of our country from corporate influence. Become informed about the doctrine known as Corporate Personhood. Read the informatin below and the visit the Move To Amend web site.

Join the Movement - Abolish Corporate Personhood

Human rights are being trumped by corporate rights and privilege. This democracy crisis lies at the heart of the climate crisis, economic meltdown, campaign finance abuse, globalization, and other societal ills that undermine our sovereign self-governance. It’s time to make human rights count more than corporate profit.

Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor noted in the oral argument in Citizens United, “[Judges] created corporations as persons… There could be an argument made that that was the court’s error to start with… [imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics.” For centuries corporations were considered entities apart from their human owners yet were recognized as “artificial persons” under the law for certain privileges associated with doing business, such as creating contractual obligations. During the Industrial Revolution, corporations proliferated and their owners pressed for real rights as popular movements for more human rights swept the nation. In 1886, the Ninth Circuit construed the post-Civil War amendment intended to protect newly freed African Americans, the Fourteenth Amendment’s right of “equal protection of the laws,” to apply to a railroad corporation. In fact, one of the most unfortunate legacies of the federal judiciary in the post-Reconstruction era was its tendency to construe the Civil War amendments written by the Radical Republicans not as they were intended to protect the rights of African Americans and other people but instead, perversely, to give new rights to corporations in ways that undermined the power of ordinary people.

Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court has blurred the distinction between real and fake persons (corporations) by handing out other human rights to artificial persons, including the battery of First Amendment rights leading to Citizens United. This usurpation undermines the ability of citizens to assert control over corporations, whose primary value is of economic profit, thus preventing communities, states, and nations from achieving a sustainable future. Corporations, particularly global corporations, have amassed enormous wealth and power which, when combined with being granted human rights and fundamental freedoms that cannot be easily limited, have hijacked our Republic. We cannot achieve a sustainable future without a real democracy. It’s time to change the rules.

To find out what you can do, visit the Ultimate Civics website and support the Campaign to Legalize Democracy.