Corporations Should Not Buy our Elections

We, the undersigned, support passage of a local resolution stating that corporations are legal entities, not people, and thus they do not deserve the same rights and protections as people, specifically the right to use their wealth to influence elections under the guise of “free speech.”
Furthermore, we oppose the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court decision which unleashed a torrent of corporate money into our political process, amounts unmatched by any campaign expenditure totals in United States history, threatening to dilute and outweigh the free speech rights of ordinary citizens, because of the vast financial resources corporations can spend to influence elections, compared with ordinary people.
We encourage the City Council of Raleigh, NC to publicly support state and federal legislative action to defend democracy from the corrupting effects of undue corporate power by increasing disclosure of political money, providing candidates with an option for voter-authorized public funding, and amending the United States Constitution to establish that: (1) only human beings, not corporations, are endowed with constitutional rights, and (2) Money is not speech, and therefore regulating political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting political speech.
*A citizen advocacy effort of The Raleigh Action Collective, a branch of the Occupy Movement