Our goal is to build a popular movement and pass a constitutional amendment to reinstate the primacy of human rights over corporate rights.

We are working to:

Inform people of the need to abolish corporate persons.

Encourage and assist citizen-driven efforts to pass ordinances.

Coalesce these efforts into passing state laws to trigger a national movement for a constitutional amendment.

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Dear Campaigners,

It is time for Americans to once again practice real democracy. We will all need to participate if We The People are to regain control over corporations ñ a legal business structure originally created by society to serve society. This organizing packet will help you become part of the popular movement to abolish "corporate personhood."

At Ultimate Civics we believe human beings and not "property" (corporations) are entitled to constitutional rights. The abuse of our rights as natural persons by huge corporations has undermined sovereign self-governance in America, and brought us to the democracy crisis we now face.

The time to undertake this effort is now. In September, 2009, during arguments on a campaign-finance case, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor suggested the high court may have erred over the last hundred years by bestowing human rights on corporations. She said, judges "created corporations as persons... There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics." Her remark immediately focused national attention on the issue of "corporate persons," a principle that many of us have individually been questioning for decades.

A week later a New York Times editorial (9/22/09) noted, "The question at the heart of one of the biggest Supreme Court cases this year is simple: What constitutional rights should corporations have? To us, as well as many legal scholars, former justices and, indeed, drafters of the Constitution, the answer is that their rights should be quite limited ñ far less than those of people."

The purpose of our organizing packet is to share the tools and information needed to build a national campaign to amend the U.S. Constitution to abolish corporate personhood. The Ultimate Civics team acknowledges the many activists and groups who have worked on this issue in the past. We are striving to build on their work and capture this historic moment to challenge the overwhelming political power of todayís corporations.

We invite your participation.

The Ultimate Civics Team