“The greatest political reform of our time will be to abolish the legal
concept of ‘corporate personhood’ and the inherently anti-democratic
equation of money with political speech,” says Bill Moyer, the energetic
founder and executive director of the Backbone Campaign, the grassroots movement to embolden Americans to push back against corporate power and political corruption.

Across the country Friday, that debate was opening up.

Pushing back against an activist US Supreme Court that has given
corporations carte blanche to warp not just our politics but the
republic itself, grassroots reformers and activists have used the
one-year anniversary of the court’s lawless decision in the
Citizens United v. FECcase
to argue that democracy itself is endangered when corporations are
allowed spend without limitation or accountability to influence
elections.

The
Citizens United ruling eliminated century-old
restrictions on corporate spending to support favored candidates and to
oppose those who might side with consumers, environmentalists, labor
unions and communities.

The corporations recognized the opening given them by the hyper-partisan majority on the high court and seized it.

“The outrageous, misguided and illogical
Citizens United
decision has empowered corporations and endangered our democracy.
Secretive corporate and billionaire donors exerted an outsized influence
over Election 2010,” explains Public Citizen executive director Robert Weissman.
“Their spending now casts a pall over all lawmaking, because any
members of Congress who challenge corporate interests know they now risk
facing a barrage of attack ads in the next election. And all parties
agree that 2010 was just a warm-up for 2012. This is no way to run a
democracy. That’s why a growing movement is working for passage of a
constitutional amendment to overturn
Citizens United.”

That movement was making itself heard Friday in dozens of cities and towns across the country,
from a “Get Corporations Out of Politics” gathering on the village
green in Hyannis, Massachusetts, to a “Rally to Legalize Democracy” in
Kent, Washington, to a “Wake for Democracy” in Madison, Wisconsin —
where dozens of activists braved temperatures hovering around zero to
cheer speakers on the steps of the State Capitol.

In Washington, a “For the People” Summit
coordinated by Moyer and supported by a cross-section of reform
groups—including the Alliance for Democracy, American Independent
Business Alliance, Backbone Campaign, Center for Media and Democracy,
Changing the Game, Code Pink, Coffee Party USA, Common Cause, Democracy
Matters, Democrats.com, Fix Congress First, Free Speech For People,
MoveOn, Move to Amend, PeaceMajority Report, People for the American
Way, Progressive Democrats of America, Public Citizen, and the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom—heard Harvard Law School
professor Lawrence Lessig and
leaders of the movement to amend the Constitution in order to renew the
founding faith that free speech in a human right that must be shouted
down by corporate spending.