Let’s say Bill issues his statement. He then issues his statement with his neighbor, who had also issued his own statement. Then they each individually issue statements with another neighbor, who, of course, had already issued statements both by himself and with each of his other neighbors.
That’s three people, speaking as if they’re 7 people, just because they’re smart about how they issue their statements. Add another one and… well, you get the idea (and it’s way too early for me to be doing this much math).
Why does the act of incorporating mean that your voice suddenly counts more than a singular individual’s voice?
And thanks to Citizens United, groups of people can speak much louder than an individual can… so why would individuals bother speaking on their own? It’s far more efficient just to join a bunch of corporations and have *unlimited *amounts of [DEL]money[/DEL] speech that they can spend on whatever political issue they want.
Except they don’t do that. Individuals are doing it. And sure enough, the usual suspects are moving the goalposts, saying that now individuals don’t have free speech rights if it goes against their view of how campaigns should be run.
Are you joking around? Corporations do in fact hold copyright onto any number of creative works. All major newspapers are owned by corporations and the rihts to their content are owned by the corporation, not the author; would it be okay for a government to pass a law prohibiting newspapers from publishing certain opinions?
Corporations, like cars or firearms have a function. These things can be useful, exhilarating and/or dangerous, even when used appropriately.
A corporation allows individuals to pool their resources in order to accomplish what would be impractical for them to attempt severally. There is some (faint) debate as to whether this should entail persistent incorporation: a few on the “real left” believe that a corporation should accomplish a specific goal and then be dissolved, which could in fact be a serviceable paradigm for market-based capitalism. The cultural challenge that would present, when one can look at the functional parallel to government, would be difficult to handle.
If there is redundancy with the speech rights of the individual and the speech rights of a corporation to which the individual is a party, it is not altogether beyond the pale. There are all manner of redundancies in society, for example, taxation.
The opportunity to use a corporation or non-profit to obscure the identity of the speaker is what troubles some, because no individual really has a practical right to anonymous expression. If a message is repeated a million times by a million different people, one might perceive it as carrying more weight than a message that is repeated a million times by a single source, though even that ideal has been shown to be questionable.
First, let me just say it’s refreshing to see a coherent argument from a user with a join date of Aug 2012.
Regarding the part of your post I emphasized, I’m not sure what you mean by “practical” right (as opposed to regular old rights), and it’s unclear to me why the 1st Amendment only guarantees speech where the speaker is identified. Nothing in the text says anything about the speaker having to identify himself.
The text of the 1st amendment simply says that Congress shall not abridge speech. it does not give exceptions for source or anonymity. In fact, our country has a tradition of anonymous speech going back to Thomas Paine.
Besides, I’m sure you guys don’t really believe that. Does that mean the Bachmann books lacked 1st amendment protections, since Stephen King was using a pen name and they were corporate funded?
Like it or not, the Citizens United decision was wholly consistent with the Constitution. It did not make corporations into people, it conferred no rights that did not exist before, and it’s not a radical departure from precedent.
I’ve said it before and will again - and I say this as no conservative - but had Citizens United been a left-leaning not-for-profit, right wingers would be outraged about it and left wingers would be saying what a logical decision it was. And it was logical. Political speech is the very type of speech the First Amendment was meant to protect, and it’s not limited based on who wrote the check to pay for it.
Corporations in the US are invested in by foreign persons and entities to a large degree. So when the corporation speaks in the US political sphere they are partly the voice of international wealth. There may be an argument to be made that that’s good (I would never agree with That) but freedom of speech in the US is the right of citizens not foreigners with gobs of money.
When people deride corporations they are not talking about small corporations owned by mom and pops. Don’t know why I have to say that since its obvious but there you go.
Irregardless of any legal historical reasons for something being permissible today does nothing to change the damage being done to our country and planet by corporations. Their influence is such that they are capable of securing tax funded advantages for themselves and write their own regulations, select the office holders for those agencies by proxy. The corrupt influence of power changing the game to stack the deck in their favor against the general population of the country is not a good thing. The competition is becoming: Get the most monopolistic advantages, get the most subsidy, eliminate any responsibility for pollution or consumer harm, eliminate the consequences for catastrophic market failure, set up a web of favors among the wealthy families of the world to trade advantages, diminish democracy everywhere, ect ect.
Democracies have the right and responsibility to stop forces that diminish their economies and demean their principles. Corporations are designed to only care about their own profit. This means they are obligated to do all the bad things I just listed (not even a comprehensive list). Even the externalities of possible destruction of the species must be ignored. Promoting war to sell more hardware might result in a nuclear holocaust? Sorry, we can’t worry about that. Energy industry and it’s efforts to block science and awareness might result in catastrophic global warming, poisoned oceans and land? Sorry, we can’t consider that. If we did our profits would suffer and our shareholders would throw out our leadership.
In the abstract talking about the constitutionality or small business la-di-da scenarios might be great abstract intellectualizing. In the real world these people are limiting our potential, exploiting us, putting us at risk for massively destructive failures, and killing all sorts of people around the world unfortunate enough to be born poor.
At the risk of a skimming accusation, have any right-wing idealogues in this thread brought up the Mom and Pop bugaboo? That would be really bizarre, since Mom and Pop each have the right to free speech already.
Unless the “thinking” is that political contributions from all three of Mom, Pop and Mom-and-Pop, Inc. are ways of getting around contribution limits, and that this result is good.
Or perhaps, since corporations have limited liability free speech by Mom-and-Pop, Inc. may have a cap on the financial liability for slander or libel.
Hmmm. These comments shed more light, were it needed, on the foolishness of full “personhood” for corporations.
I don’t know that corporations have “full personhood”, so much as there is no legal alternative to treating an organization that can act like a person as anything other than a person.
For example, if you oppose equal protection for corporations, which was what the original “corporations as people” court case was about, does that mean you favor unequal protection? It doesn’t make sense any other way. If it can talk like a person, it has the right to talk. if it can be prosecuted, it has the right to a defense. if it can seek redress in courts, it has the right to seek redress in courts.
