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on the money with the business of russia news business. oh i'm tom arbonne in washington d.c. and this is the big picture. coming up tonight on the big picture it's friday so that means it's time for conversations with great minds tonight i sit down with jeff kline mts to talk about the impact that the citizens united decision is having on our mockers also from the state of the union to the g.o.p. debate and everything in between we've got it all. and it's big picture rubble and

bank of america will modify your mortgage but at what cost how will their decision affect your freedom of speech. for tonight's conversations of great minds i'm joined by jeff months jeff is the former assistant attorney general of massachusetts and has been fighting on behalf of people business and the public interest for more than twenty years currently he's the co-founder and general counsel for the organization free speech for people which is a national nonpartisan campaign with the mission of overturning the supreme court's citizens united decision and fighting back against corporate personhood this is a movement that is nearing a tipping point in america as tens of thousands of people rallied in front of court houses across the nation earlier this month on the two year anniversary of the citizens united decision to protest corporate personhood and too much corporate

influence in our democracy and as an issue the comedian stephen colbert has taken to its logical absurdity with his super pac including his most notorious super pac ad about mitt romney the serial killer. if mitt romney really believed what gracious are people my friend. and mitt romney is a serial killer. mitt the ripper. as a result as a result of corporate personhood and the supreme court decisions like citizens united our democracy frankly is in peril and jeff clements as someone who can help us he's the author of the new book corporations are not people he joins us now welcome thank you tom good to be here great to have you with us before we get into the end of the book what what got you into the law and into the massachusetts a.g.'s office well it's a long story i'll give you the short version and i was actually out of college

a canvas there with greenpeace really and i was going door to door in places of rural virginia to suburban washington d.c. and other places like that talking about environmental protection and the balance of people and and corporate power even then that's really what the environmental movement is about how we make it a more just better society for all of us and i went to law school because i saw that's where the battles were taken the we could talk about it but in the meantime the courts and the law were actually creating the results we all lived with and i wanted to have a more tools frankly to be involved in that and that effort and so i i went to law school tried to keep up the fight and when i was practicing law in my first few years scott harshbarger an attorney general of massachusetts at the time was

leading this effort to take on the tobacco industry with many other state agencies across the country and i want to be part of that and so i banged down the door to let me in and i worked on the tobacco case in the mid ninety's in the a.g.'s office there so it's great that this is so great. in your in your own words what is corporate personhood this your book corporations are not people you know it was quite well i start the book with some acknowledgement that to be real. we need a book to say corporations are not people i think most americans know that the reason it doesn't few who don't and unfortunately five of them are on the supreme court and so what corporate personhood is is a notion that corporations have taken on you've served are really the rights that belong to the people and when the due process clause and the equal protection clause and other aspects of the constitution use the word person the corporate

lawyers have hammered away for years as as you know more than anyone to take the rights of people and so that's the fight against corporate personhood now it shouldn't be confused with the state law of treating corporations with a metaphor of personhood so we we can sue them they can sue they can sign contracts and so forth but we the people make those laws when delaware corporate law is made it's made by the delaware state legislature and if if we the people decide a person metaphors useful one for some purposes that's fine but that has nothing to do with the constitution and so we confuse those two at our peril as the supreme court showed in citizens united well corporations along with other institutions governments churches typically it's been those three suppose you could throw in unions or non-profits. all the way back to seventeenth century british common law have had

a person who had status as you point out so they could pay taxes on property sue and be sued but it's always been a unique status separate from that of natural persons humans like you and me. when did that start to break down before. well you know it is. in my view it's constantly blurry and if we're not careful and so this has been a struggle in the american our american story back to the beginning and the revolution as it. the tea party from my hometown of boston was about throwing the india corporate tea into the harbor exactly they had a special privilege from the british crown and. the settlers the colonialists wanted to be able to trade with whomever they chose and not have to deal with the corporate monopoly that the british were imposing on at the time and that is a refrain throughout american history andrew jackson was fighting the first bank of

america i know you can talk more about the current iteration of bank of america but that idea that corporations get special privileges from the government and then use special privileges to leverage that advantage leverage the wealth and try to get more power i think is a constant story it's one of those things that go with a corporate charter is a threat and i think we always understood that and ok surely we forget it or we lose some battles like with santa clara in the gilded age took away our constitutional rights because we didn't keep an adequate eye on corporate power but we pushed back with the progressive era the new deal again in the sixty's and seventy's we had to push back and now we have to do it again i think this idea that the line gets blurred it will happen if we don't manage what in the book i call corporations are there a tool not a person nothing more exotic than a tool and they're like gasoline or guns they have purposes but if you don't keep

an eye on them they get out of control. i don't think most people understand what a corporate charter is or why the state charter laws even what state charter laws are you know setting aside all the. oddities of things like the charter mongar end of the nineteenth century or something but what is a corporate charter and and out of that i guess doesn't that define what is a corporation i think yes and. corporate charter is quite simple actually you can incorporate without government permission and if there is no such thing as a corporation exist in nature a group of people cannot get together and form a corporation without government rules and the charter that comes from government anyone is free to associate you're free to start a business you can form a partnership we can do all kinds of activity we can organize as a church or

a religious institution or a nonprofit but if we want to be a corporation you have to go to the government by definition under the law and all of our states have state incorporation laws and. many many people know when you want to incorporate you actually go down to the secretary of state so you do it online now and you get what is it a corporate charter and it's. because i want to put it that way because they're not people of course exactly you get you get what the state what the people of the state have decided are the privileges and benefits that come with incorporation and we used to remember they come with responsibilities and duties back to the public to and that's losing and i mean what's the reason why we would even have a charter law why would why would a state in the first place the corporations today are very different than they were

in the era of jefferson and washington. we didn't have i mean the early corporations were created in the early nineteenth century to do things like the erie canal i mean they were not. until after the civil war with so why would in the modern sense why would we even. i have a court well there's a good policy reasons for it and i do. before i go there let me say that i have some debates with my libertarian friends about citizens united and corporate power and so forth and i. know self-respect and libertarian would go down and ask the government for all these privileges and some of them actually are saying you know you're right maybe we should abolish corporations and take you know you shouldn't have limited liability and all of the government favors that come with a corporate charter basically and so i actually don't agree with that though i

think corporations do serve a useful purpose limited liability is it sounds like oh that's not good people get limitations on their liability but it does help bring capital to places where we need it to bring investment where it might not happen otherwise it does it is useful to have perpetual life so that when a president of a company is is fired or moves on the company doesn't have to disband and you know lay off the workers and return the money to the investors and start all over again that has some continuity which is useful so there are good policy reasons for it. but that's certainly open to debate that's that's what we should that's the kind of debate we should have if we are going to give limited liability should we give it to coal companies that are taking five hundred mountains and politico and appalachian dumped in the mountains into the streams for twenty five hundred miles of streams are gone now that kind of limited liability maybe is not such

a good idea should be p. shareholders really be exempt from the disaster in the gulf of mexico no liability for when they got the profits for years of safety cut in there's a good debate to have and we maybe we should be exploring if we are going to have corporations what are the rules that we the people write for them and it seems that they've been writing the rules. themselves for a long time i think that's right through through lobbying and through corporate through influence of all efficiency i think that's right in the worst thing about citizens united in this constitutional speak corporate speech corporate rights is now when we try to write some rules they get struck down by the of the century the corporate takeover of our bill of rights so even when we're stepping up to say well no we're going to put some controls and and balance in the system we have this sort of corporate theory that allows the courts to strike those laws down i want to get into the the modern iteration of this you track it back to lewis paul i think it's

a brilliant analysis let's get to that right after the break ok we'll be right back more conversations with great minds with jeff clements coming up right after this break. from the. video.

welcome back to conversations with great minds i'm joined by jeff clements co-founder and general counsel of the group free speech for people and author of the new book corporations are not people let's get back to a brilliant book with a forward by bill moyers i should add and a blurb on the back from tom hartman. i find myself in good company who was lewis paul lewis powell was really the father of the new corporate rights movement he was a lawyer in richmond virginia in the one nine hundred sixty s. he joined the board of directors of the philip morris tobacco company the cigarette company he was on the board of about a dozen other big corporations corporate lawyer and in about nine hundred seventy after witnessing twenty million people twenty million americans come out into the streets to demand better controls on earth day april nineteenth seventy to demand

better balance about air pollution rivers catching on fire toxic waste basically corporate corporations externalizing everything poisonous and toxic and keeping the profits american said enough and we got a wave of environmental reform the first e.p.a. clean water act clean air act endangered species act and so on an incredible wave of reform with richard nixon in the white house lewis powell a corporate lawyer in richmond virginia looked at this and was appalled democracy was working he called it the attack on the free enterprise system and he wrote a memo to the chamber of commerce outlining a multi-year corporate funded organized corporations to fight back and to fight back really against democracy working and putting some kind of balance into our into our system of economic system and the amazing thing about this memo i

talk about in the book how explicit and detail that was from using activist minded courts he called it to create corporate rights to change the political legal and economic structure of america that was his goal and the amazing thing is six months after writing this memo to the chamber of commerce president nixon appointed him to the supreme court and he got a chance to do just that did. did nixon in your opinion no the paul was all about this kind of stuff you know let's because it causes so many things came out of this away from heritage and cato and all these think tanks and federalists. or did nixon just think he was a because he had been asked before to be on the supreme court he turned it down yeah and at the time nixon actually had two nominations that had gone south that were turned down by the senate so it isn't clear at least to me whether nixon had a plan when he put powell on the court although i've heard a theory about the first two nominations being set up so he could get powell but i

i don't know about that and so i have to say he had to know lewis powell was well known he was head of the american bar association various stablished lawyer as i said on the boards of all of these companies well known in virginia and nationally as a distinguished lawyer frankly just always corporate lawyer who's a very soft spoken southern gentleman he was indeed everything everything you hear about him he's described as you know mild mannered and gracious and i'm sure he was he just had a very corporatist sort of state of mind but you know the same day nixon nominated lewis powell he had to open and he nominated william rehnquist the conservative and these two actually turned out to be very different justices the conservative who we think of as the conservative william rehnquist actually wrote dissent after dissent against lewis powell corporate rights decisions and lewis powell who we think of as this moderate mild mannered judge turned out to be the revolutionary who created

a whole new theory of corporate speech which had never existed in america up to that time. the son in law he was it was brilliant you know he just he pointed back to santa clara that's right he said you know this court without benefit of discussion or debate you know just created this but. now i'm. this is your turn. one of your chapters one of the chapters in your book ask the question did corporate power destroy the working american economy what were the what are the things that came out of the paul memo that we can explicitly track back to it and it's been nearly forty years now what impact. on our economy in our culture can we. connect those dots draw lines from. my view is almost everything eventually comes back to the powell memo and

these corporate rights decisions and it's not a simple simple tracing back to that it's really about whether lewis powell succeeded in doing what his memo said that the chamber of commerce and corporate america should do which is change the legal social and economic structure it wasn't just about winning a few supreme court cases it was about change in american culture and that is i think what they succeeded in doing so i think we now see the results not only in our democracy after citizens united but in the food we eat the water we drink the wars we fight. almost throughout our society i talk about schools essentially being corporate ties now and the economy i think what we see in the economy is once we accept the lewis powell theory the chamber of commerce theory that corporations are just like people and have rights rather than being tools that serve us rather than we are tools that serve the corporations once flipped around everything was beyond

debate so if corporations wanted to start up at all the benefits and privileges of a corporation but put all the jobs in to sweatshops overseas or into dangerous factories in china that would be just fine. according to the law so so many things what happened is we changed. from thinking that you know good jobs good wages pensions unions things that actually helped america and american middle class get strong that those were expenses had to be cut that those were burdens on competitiveness we were just led to accept driven to accept really because when we tried to enact laws to change that they were struck down we were turned a century into another market place in the world rather than something unique where we could have build in a merican middle class and in fact even worse i think countries like europe are

actually doing better at protecting their middle class than we are now because of this clearly and and the. this concept of corporations as persons and and speech or money as being something other than property as has been speech. how do we. you know you call for an amendment to the supreme court or to the constitution to to basically say ok the supreme court doesn't you know they can they can no longer make these loose poll like rulings because we're going to amend the constitution how do we get to their. well we get there like americans have always gotten there so this isn't. i do propose as many others do great groups out there free speech for people move to him and public citizen common cause people the american way a lot of americans are coming together to say this is not about tinkering this is not about a little legislative fix we are facing

a fundamental structural problem that's been created by the corporate right's doctrine and we need to overturn that doctrine with the fundamental structural reform which is a constitutional amendment so it's no different it's no more difficult than it was in the progressive era when they passed and ratified four constitutional amendments one wasn't so smart the prohibition you but the other three were really good and one things we take for granted now women get to vote we elect our senators we have a progressive income tax relief congress has the power to have a progressive income tax when the court said no congress can't do that we had an amendment to say oh yes we can we the people can do that and that's where we are now we need two thirds of congress to vote on it and eventually and be ratified by three quarters of the states but how we get there is out in the states and the cities and the towns and that is happening right now we have resolutions once going

to the floor of the new mexico house on tuesday just passed out of committee today a resolution calling on congress to send the people's rights amendment to the states for ratification we've got montana supreme court pushing back saying well in montana anyway we're going to regulate corporate money in our elections and that will probably make its way to the supreme court so we just have all of these different places where americans are coming together to say enough we are this is breaking our country it's breaking our democracy we the people means we the people and we need to get back to that article three of the constitution defines the court the judiciary and section two of article. as the the supreme court itself that specific court the high court will operate within. the use of the word regulation of congress or within basically within rules defined by congress for the exact wording wouldn't be possible and the last president to really seriously take the

seriously as franklin roosevelt. would have been possible instead for congress to pass a law saying that the supreme court does not have the power to say that corporations are persons well you know that even more politically impractical in my view it is more politically impractical because it's asking congress to do something but i also actually believe that the supreme court it's a dynamic process so yes con the supreme congress has the ability to define the jurisdiction of the supreme court congress has some ability to define the numbers of justices on the court which is why we had franklin roosevelt's so-called court packing plan there is a healthy tension that the elected branches should bring to the supreme court from the president to the congress and you know when president obama called out the supreme court two years ago after citizens united and that was considered shocking no that's not shocking that's that's how our system is supposed to work the supreme

court has incredible power as a noun elected body to decide what the law is in deciding cases and that's an extraordinary power that should be exercised judiciously and they have overstepped they have they have overstepped and become so pro corporate that it's appropriate that congress and the and the president keep some tension there but in the end though i think what's most the biggest check and balance on the court that the framers gave us was article five the amendment process and we've used it seven times to overturn supreme court cases the supreme court decided women did not have a right to vote we overturned that. many other examples so in the end the ultimate interpreters of the constitution are we the people the supreme court has a job to do to decide cases and we should leave them to do their job but when they blow it and it becomes a chronic sort of catastrophic slow motion catastrophe for the country we have the duty to use our authority. under article five to amend the constitution to say the

supreme court you've gotten off track we get back on the road to a country of equal people equal free people who can govern ourselves and corporations are not among those people they are merely a tool as you say. thank you so much very glad to be here. to watch this conversation again as well as other conversations with great minds go to our website conversations with great minds dot com. after the break talking taxes and immigration has dominated the g.o.p. debates of late. things about these issues and more in tonight's big picture.

and broadcasting live direct from the heart of moscow this is archie glad to have with us let's take a look at your top headlines syria's revolt of almost a year edges closer to the capital as armed opposition fighters tighten their control of the outskirts of damascus meanwhile the united nations security council is considering another motion on a possible resolution to the conflict but with sharp differences among members on how to end of the prolonging the bloodshed. libya's new leaders are accused of

torturing and killing detainees or by humanitarian aid organization medicines sans frontiers it is pulling out of misrata after seeing evidence of gross abuses of detainees raising questions among human rights groups about the people nato helped bring to power. plus a cyber uproar thousands gather outside the polish presidential palace in the country's seventh day of protests against an international web anti-piracy pact which activists say threatens internet freedom and which warsaw has signed up to a french m.e.p. has also quit over the so-called. calling the controversial treaty a charade. and coming up in about thirty minutes time my colleague carrie johnston will be here with a full look at your news but right now it's time to go back to washington for part two of the big picture.