On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions.
We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United and other related cases, and move to amend our Constitution to firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule.
". . . corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their 'personhood' often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of “We the People” by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."
~Supreme Court Justice Stevens, January 2010
Human beings are undeniably part of and dependent on nature. History is filled with stories of people and groups who understood this reality and of others who ignored it, who didn’t care, or who arrogantly believed nature could be made subordinate to humanity.
Religious texts, mythologies and hymes on ecological awareness date back 5000 years. Caring for the natural world, the sacredness of wilderness and the need to control human’s negative impact on nature are among the earliest recorded human stories. “The goal of life is living in agreement with nature,” stated Zeno, the ancient Greek philosopher.
Conversely, anthropological evidence dating back even further documents animal and plant extinctions from human activity. Nomadic communities migrated after exhausting local resources, and once agriculture emerged, destruction of land, water, and climate increased.. Intensive farming led to deforestation, land degradation,soil erosion and desertification in the early civilizations of the Southern Arabian Peninsula, Central Asia, Central America, Peru, and Northern Africa.
The Industrial Revolution sparked a public reaction that helped give birth to the modern environmental movement. Massive coal-fueled factories in Great Britain, and later, the United States, produced unprecedented pollution, leading to the first first large-scale environmental laws in 1863 in Britain. The Revolution also sparked a deeper critique of industrial capitalism’s role in destroying the natural world.
The environmental movement is not easy to define given its global reach. Even within the United States, the focus of this piece, there is enormous diversity and range of organizations, individuals, missions, beliefs, goals, strategies, tactics and cultural elements. Any summary description of and cultural lessons learned from it, even from a U.S.-centric perspective, will be vastly incomplete.
This Earth Day, while the world pauses to honor our planet, we invite you to go deeper—to the root.
Because what’s killing the Earth isn’t just climate change. It’s not just pollution, deforestation, or rising seas.
OpEdNews Op Eds 4/14/2025
By Greg Coleridge
We at Move to Amend appreciate receiving emails and social media notices about the latest hideous corporate action or example of a corporation skirting public accountability. They simply add to our mounting evidence that corporations have too much political and economic power, and that the We the People Amendment is needed to unequivocally establish that the power and authority of people should be greater than the power of corporations.
More than usual communication was received recently when President Trump pardoned BitMex corporation, a cryptocurrency exchange that had pleaded guilty last year for violating the Bank Secrecy Act for doing business without establishing a legitimate anti-money laundering program. BitMEX was criminally fined $100 million in connection with its guilty plea, which was in addition to $130 million in previously imposed civil penalties.
Over the course of a powerful and packed week in Washington, DC, the Move to Amend national team and supporters met with members of Congress and their staff to build crucial support for the We the People Amendment (H.J.R 54): a constitutional amendment to end corporate constitutional rights and eliminate big money from our political system.
We have some exciting news to share with you—we’ve picked up 20 new co-sponsors since last month! That’s a huge step forward in our mission to pass the We the People Amendment (House Joint Resolution 54). We’re now up to 48 total cosponsors in Congress, and we couldn’t be more grateful for your continued support.
This is a major win, and it shows that our message is starting to stick. But here's the thing: we’re not done yet. Far from it.
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Move to Amend is a coalition of hundreds of organizations and hundreds of thousands of individuals committed to social and economic justice, ending corporate rule, and building a vibrant democracy that is genuinely accountable to the people, not corporate interests. We call for an amendment to the US Constitution to unequivocally state that inalienable rights belong to human beings only, and that money is not a form of protected free speech under the First Amendment and can be regulated in political campaigns. Move to Amend © Move to Amend
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