Legal Aid of North Carolina

Global corporations have become too wealthy and powerful, at the expense of the common citizen. Through a coordinated system of Enron-like campaign contributions to both the Democratic and Republican parties, the wealthy insure tax breaks and special privileges for themselves and their companies. Even as profits have risen, corporate tax rates have steadily gone down since the 1940’s, directly resulting in the underfunding of essential programs and services that rely on tax revenue. A prime example is how medical, education, and social services promised to children by current law are never fully funded. In addition to tax breaks, Enron-like corporate campaign financing insures other pro-corporation policy decisions that ultimately put families and children at greater risk of needing the very services that are now less readily available. The vast majority of citizens do not want our state and federal government to break promises to our children.

We have been warned for nearly 200 years that big corporations will warp democracy:

• Thomas Jefferson, 1816: 
  "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, an bid defiance to the laws of our country."

• Abraham Lincoln, 1864: 
  "As a result of the [civil] war, 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. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war."

• Standard Oil of New Jersey v. United States, U.S. Supreme
    Court (1911): 
  "All who recall the condition of the country in 1890 will remember that there was everywhere, among the people generally, a deep feeling of unrest. The nation had been rid of human slavery – fortunately, as all now feel – but the conviction was universal that the country was in real danger from another kind of slavery sought to be fastened on the American people: namely, the slavery that would result from aggregations of capital in the hands of a few individuals and corporations controlling, for their own profit and advantage exclusively, the entire business of the country, including the production and sale of the necessities of life."

• Franklin D. Roosevelt (U.S. President 1933-1945):  
  "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in essence, is Fascism – ownership of the government by an individual, by a group, or a controlling private power."

Ratified in 1865 after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment promised equal rights to all persons. The central purpose was to insure recognition and respect for the human dignity of every individual, including newly freed African Americans. Soon thereafter, this grant of constitutional protection to every person was perverted into a protection for non-living corporate entities. Today, real persons have less political and economic power than do fictional "persons" like IBM or General Electric.

• Connecticut General Life Insurance Company v. Johnson,
     Treasurer of California, U.S. Supreme Court (1938):  
  "Of the cases in this court in which the Fourteenth Amendment was applied during the first fifty years after its adoption, less than one-half of one percent invoked it in protection of the Negro race, and more than fifty percent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations."

Corporate wealth and power has warped and is destroying our democracy. Consider this: 

• Among industrialized countries, the U.S. ranks 16th in efforts to lift children out of poverty.  In contrast, the U.S. ranks 1st in the number of millionaires and billionaires and in defense spending and military technology. 

Real people must defy this corporate rule and reclaim the power and values embedded in the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution.  We, the People, are entitled to self-government and democracy so we can provide for the needs of all children. 

Use your First Amendment rights to demand full funding for the Medicaid, Special Education, and Adoption and Safe Families Acts. Doing that is patriotic and ensures our national security.

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Advocacy Makes a Difference
by Martin Luther King,Jr.

"Cowardice asks the question,
Is it safe?
Expedience asks the question
Is it politic?
Vanity asks the question,
Is it popular?
But conscience asks the question
IS IT RIGHT?

And there comes a time when one must take a position that is 
neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must make it 
because his conscience tells him it is right . . ."