You want the forty five page lecture, or the TL:DR? Durable goods vs Cheetos? Got a feeling you already know this stuff, John, but just couldn’t resist…
As has been noted several times in this thread, some people simply don’t understand, or refuse to understand, the difference between a “legal person” and a human being.
Also noted already in this thread, fortunately all the SCOTUS justices do, even if they might disagree on the precise definition.
You may want to go look up “corporation” it is a legal structure and does not need to be for “making money”
I for one am very very glad corporations like the ACLU and the NAACP had free speach rights.
We are in a far better world without seggrigation etc…do to “sociopathic” corporations.
In 34 words you succeeded in demonstrating a truly amazing amount of error.
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You seem to be implying that the Constitution gives the right of free speech to “persons.”. It does not. It prohibits the government from abridging free speech.
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You still don’t demonstrate an understanding of what a legal person is, which means you’re not equipped to debate the issue. Not understanding the difference between a legal person and a natural person, and then claiming to have an informed opinion on this issue, is like not understanding the difference between an atom and a molecule and claiming to have an informed opinion on chemistry.
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A “sociopath” is not “someone who is only interested n making money.”
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A corporation, as has been pointed out again and again, does not necessarily have to seek to make or maximize a profit anyway. In fact, the very corporation at the heart of this ongoing debate, Citizens United, is a not for profit corporation.
The question being “at which end of the horse do you wish to put the cart?” It is hard to imagine how you can have an industrial economy without consumers, and how a consumer economy can be seen as stable without significant domestic industry is equally vexing, if not moreso. Tomes are not called for here, just full clarification as to how the distinction you are making makes sense. Or is it just boilerplate?
It was a simple question. If you can’t answer it, you could just say so. And no, I don’t know what you mean by those terms.
Only a small set of properties of these economies are truly relevant to my point. Rather than tap out a quick little Ph.D. thesis…
An industrial economy is the “old fashioned” kind of economy, founded on “heavy” industry, the kind of economy Stalin tried to build in one or another of his Five Year Plans. For our purposes, the important characteristic of the industrial economy is the relative unimportance of labor. Labor is a raw material, a commodity. The line worker is unlikely to ever buy a metric ton of pig iron.
A consumer economy is based upon that same worker as customer, the economy is geared towards domestic production. This creates a schism, business values the customer, but regards labor as an expense, a hindrance to profit. Each business makes its own decisions, of course, independently. But if all such businesses act in their rational, immediate self interest…or worse, act in collusion to undermine the economic power of the worker, they are undercutting their own market. And, of course, each business must make such similar decisions, because their competitor will, and eat their lunch and their employees lunches as well.
It isn’t necessarily a conspiracy so much as a herd of determined lemmings marching. But the net result is an economy geared to produce goods no one is in a position to buy. I believe I’ve heard it referred to as the “Wal-Mart Dilemma”. Pay shit wages, buy cheap products made with cheap labor, sell the cheap products to people who cannot buy anything else. Repeat until doomed.
There is nothing original or startling in any of this, its pretty rudimentary stuff.
Thanks.
So, was that earlier post supposed to be an explanation as to why unions should have a collective right to free speech, but for-profit corporations shouldn’t? Is there any difference in this situation if the country has an industrial vs a consumer economy, by your definition?
Again, this is an honest question trying to understand what you are getting at with your post.
So what you are saying is that in an industrial economy, the laborer approximates to livestock from which a resource is extracted in a fairly consistent manner, and those workers fend for their basic needs in East End or whatever while the captains, sergeants and corporals of industry carry out durable trade amongst themselves and their businesses, maintaining some sort of caste-barrier against the workers? That the consumer economy removes the caste-barrier, creating a diffusion of trade and a blurring of the resource dynamic of the workers by allowing them into trade cycle?
Of the things, in general, that people get upset about, what percentage of those have they thought all the way through?
0.000001%? Or even less?
To start at ground zero…
All human rights are abstractions, we made them up. There is no experiment possible to prove their validity. “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” is a very poetic way of saying no, we can’t prove it, we don’t have to prove it, we’re the Americans, fuck you if you don’t like it…
But nothing more than an abstraction, a gift we give one to another as civilized persons. And for all our vaunted reason, our most important principles are entirely irrational, based on feelings. Noble feelings, in my estimation, the sense of human commonality and decency. We give each other the freedom of speech and conscience because we are all human, and we assert that humans have these rights, because we say so.
All well and good. One thousand people have one thousand sets of human rights to be respected. But now comes the Supremes in their robed majesty and say, well, there’s more to it than that, those human rights extend to artificial entities, to legal fictions concocted for no other purpose but to grease the wheels of commerce and contract law.
And they can, of course, no one can prove otherwise. But I assert the fundamental distinction is the very fact of humanity, the possession of a navel. To extend the human rights to abstract entities, such as corporations, posits an absurdity, in my view. Do corporations have a right to freedom of religion as well? May they arm themselves in accord with the Second Amendment?
Further, this extension of human rights to business enterprises opens up a whole 'nother can of black mambas. If they were worms, we could fish with them, but no. We on the left reasonably suspect that the point of the exercise is to further empower a business and financial sector that already has far too much influence in our legislatures, they own one political party outright and have a half-interest in the other.
It is widely admitted that entirely unhindered capitalism is a disaster and a monstrosity. Hence, we should be very careful if we are proposing to alter the balance of power in favor of business, even more so than it already is. Government is the only possible overseer of business, short of divine intervention.
If by way of their monetary resources, they are able to tilt the balance of power towards those whose ideology values an unregulated business environment, we undermine the power of government to perform its regulatory functions, we set business on an even plateau with government. And only government will or can protect the people, since God appears to be elsewhere.
The Supreme Court decision in this is sophistic and legalistic, and bends an abstraction to its favored ends. They cannot prove that it is so, and we cannot prove that it isn’t. I know if finds favor with such as Sen. Brown (R-Citigroup) and Sen. Lieberman (I-AIG). But we want a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. There is no necessity for a more generous interpretation of “people” simply to place more power in the hands of those who have too much already.
How did you justify excluding Fox, ABC while restricting the ACLU, Unions and non-profits?
Why was News Corp given an exemption under the law?
Why is that not handing power to the large media companies?
You make the charge that it was sophistic, under the law that was struck down who does the government get to gag? whoever they don’t like? We know the Unions were gagged, as were non-profits. If I bought a newspaper do I have the right to speak, even though the “freedom of the press” was a right of ANYONE to publish?
No comprendo, amigo. Under your proposed system, do unions have the right to free speech, but corporations do not? That is is all I was trying to understand from that earlier post.
And again we have to wonder if this means that corporate artistic output can be censored, like movies and books?
Thank you, people often praise my succinct way of writing.
Skynet will be glad to hear that!
Please. I’ve gone over this with Lance Armstrong to no fricking end already. Yes, I know, corporations are legal fictions designed to allow rich guys to minimize risk, since there had to be some kind of “entity” which could own things, get sued, etc., hence the fictional entity that is a corporation. I get that, I really do.
Now, every time the topic comes up about some corporation doing something awful that causes a great deal of human suffering (think of Bain Capital and some of its exploits) the conservatives and libertarians on this board are always quick to post something to the effect that, “A corporation’s only responsibility is to make money for its shareholders, you can’t judge it in human terms! Ethics and human welfare are not the province of corporations!”
I also understand that corporations can be public advocacy organizations like the ACLU, or public service organizations like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. So limiting the speech on corporations can be problematical. Why, even limiting the amount of MONEY that can be spent of speech is problematical, to hear Lance Armstrong tell it.
Oh, it’s all so very reasonable and so very legal, Rick, but … let’s head over to the real world, shall we? The vast majority of corporations are not about public service or advocacy, they are about making money, plain and simple. The biggest, most powerful corporations are all about that. The ACLU and PBS and Citizens United are tiny little drops of clean water in a huge, viscous black, oily lake of greed. And what would the money-only organizations advocate for with all that speech we have given them? ANY FUCKING THING THAT MAKES THEM MORE MONEY!
Of course, what else? That is what corporations are all about! And if human lives degrade or American society goes to hell or for that matter the ECONOMY goes to hell, it does not matter: the corporation’s only responsibility is to do (and advocate) that which makes more money for its shareholders. As it should be! Nothing else matters, or should matter, to a corporation.
And so, via these very reasonable, very legal increments we find ourselves in a positions where amoral organizations whose only motivation is sheer, overwhelming GREED have the loudest, most powerful voices in public discourse … because they have the most money, and it is money that determines how many people you can reach how often via mass media.
You say that being interested only in making money does not make one a psychopath, and you’re KIND OF right, a psychopath is a person who has no sense of right or wrong, no sense of human empathy, no ability to connect emotionally with others, because their brains just aren’t wired that way. And who ever heard of a corporation that didn’t have all those qualities in spades?
A corporations as a legal entity is a PRETTY FREAKING GOOD analog for psychopath that cares only for making money. See Bain Capital, the tobacco companies, and well … so many others.
And so, Rick, by all these tiny degrees we are persuaded to give up democracy, any sense of ethics or human feeling we might have, because you know, that’s the legal and proper thing to do. Give over our democracy to the plutocrats who own and control the greedy, psychopathic corporations. Considerations about whether or not the “people” that are corporations should be able to use their enormous wealth to influence our elections are silly and misinformed. Because simple, pithy statements like mine are not legally accurate.
You go right on believing that Rick, if it makes you feel good.
Such passion. It has it’s place, but not in a debate.
And SkyNet is a part of a work of fiction. I hope you don’t think that constitutes some kind of rational argument. Else I’ll have to start quoting Animal Farm.
Please…leave that apostrophe out of “its” used as a possessive…please…
Meh. If the worst thing that happens to you today is that you encountered someones typo, then consider yourself blessed.
But the Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot do that. You should be thrilled.
U.S. courts have ruled, time and again, that commercial speech CAN be restricted. It is a fundamental principle of the interpretation of the First Amendment that the determination of whether or not speech can be restricted is based on what type of speech it is, not on who is saying it.
Providing it is not overly broad or unreasonable, the government can restrict commercial speech. What they have said, again and again, is that you can’t restrict political speech. Of course one can engage in political speech to advance your monetary interests indirectly, but that remains the distinction, and it’s a perfectly reasonable one. That’s the kind of speech the First Amendment was meant to protect. It’s the most important kind of speech there is, freedom-wise.
If you hand the government the power to restrict speech based on who’s saying it, I am 100% certain that will be horribly misused, probably within, oh, a month.
A psychopath is, by definition, a human being. Corporations are not human beings. A corporation is not a “psychopath” any more than a sofa or a submarine sandwich is a psychopath.
Every Western democracy has the concept of legal personage. I don’t see democracy receding. If anything, it seems to me the Internet’s opening up the channels of communication to the little guy more than ever before.
Corporations do use political speech to make money. They also use it to defend their money from other interest groups that want to take it away.
Let’s take a look at a possible situation: seniors want cheaper drugs. So the AARP goes to congress and wants a price control bill. The drug companies obviously don’t want a price control bill.
So in your ideal world, is the AARP allowed unlimited advertising, while the drug companies must remain silent?