Kindle Edition of Corporations are not People

I’ve started reading Corporations are not People by Jeffrey Clements and with a forward by Bill Moyers.

On this post, and many other blogs (1,2,3 for example), the “reform” of education in the interests of corporations and private foundations has led to situation that many of refer to as the “corporate take-over of schooling” in America.  It’s a serious situation, and one that is visible in the NCLB Act, vouchers, school choice, high-stakes testing, the Common Core State Standards movement, charter schools.

But there is a movement to halt these reform actions—perhaps not a single movement, but a distillation of a number of threads or strands of revolution that we on the Internet, and on the streets of American cities.

Recently, Jeff Clements, co-founder and General Counsel of Free Speech for People, a national, nonpartisan campaign to strengthen self-government and democracy in America by reversing Citizens United v. FEC and corporate rights doctrines, has published a book entitled Corporations are not People.

Here is a synopsis of the book, taken from the Amazon website, which will lead to a Kindle version of Jeff Clements book:

The January 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision marked a culminating victory for the legal doctrine of corporate personhood. Corporations, as legal persons, are now entitled to exercise their alleged free-speech rights in the form of campaign spending, effectively enabling corporate domination of the electoral process.  Jeffrey Clements uncovers the roots, expansion, and far-reaching effects of the strange and destructive idea, which flies in the face of not only all common sense but, Clements shows, most of American legal history, from 1787 to the 1970s. He details its impact on the American political landscape, economy, job market, environment, and public health—and how it permeates our daily lives, from the quality of air we breathe to the types of jobs we can get to the politicians we elect. Most importantly, he offers a solution: a constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United and tools readers can use to mount a grassroots drive to get it passed.  Overturning Citizens United is not about a triumph of one political ideology over another—it’s about restoring the democratic principles on which America was built. Republican president Theodore Roosevelt and conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist both vocally opposed the idea of corporate personhood. Community by community, state by state, we can cross party and ideological lines to form a united front against unchecked corporate power in America—and reinstate a government that is truly of, by, and for the people.

I will report more on the contents of the book, and how it relates to science education, and the content of this blog, The Art of Teaching Science.  In the meantime, I recommend the book to you.