Unless the shareholder in question was responsible, why shouldn’t they be exempt from lawsuits? I think this undercuts your own argument. Corporations are made up of people, therefore the people who are responsible are those that are punished. It makes no sense to punish people who had nothing to do with the alleged transgression.
I see it as the exact opposite. It is a consequence of the corporation being recognized as simply a collection of people. Hence an analogous argument could be made that a corporation per se has no right to freedom of speech, but all the individual people that make up that corporation do. The net effect is the same. Corporations should be able to ‘say’ whatever they want within the bounds of legality, because otherwise, you are silencing innocent individuals.
The individual persons who form a corporate entity already have their human rights, each and every, and equal under the law. Well, that’s the plan, at least, and its taking a lot longer than we thought…
But if a collection of individual persons forms a conglomerate that itself has an individual share of rights, then those persons have a fraction more than their unincorporated fellow citizens. Not quite kosher, IMHO. OK, maybe “humble” is a bit of a stretch…
Read up on “general partnerships” and then get back to me.
Except it is not recognized as such.
That’s cute jurisprudence. Unfortunately it’s not the way it works. Corporations are able to “say whatever they want” because corporations are seen in the eyes of a law as an entity which has been granted certain constitutional rights.
I would like to see you apply this logic to voting and then justify why corporations are currently given no right to vote.
Tru dat, but that’s true for rich people generally. If I were a billionaire, I could hire a batch of lobbyists to advocate the repeal of the Federal Estate Tax.
And I think that supports my point: sure, a director of ADM could personally hire lobbyists to lobby for changes in laws that would benefit ADM. And that director is probably on a number of other corporate boards (it’s light work unless you choose it to be otherwise), and he could do the same for them. And he probably has issues that would benefit him personally, and issues that don’t benefit him personally but are just his personal axes to grind.
But just as it’s illegal at present in the U.S. for your employer to give you a $2000 raise with the understanding that you’ll give it to someone’s campaign, such a law banning corporate lobbying would presumably make illegal similar transparent backdoor attempts to pay for someone else to pay for lobbying.
I’d personally draw the line between for-profits and nonprofits. The logic of speech as investment with monetary return clearly applies to for-profit corporations, but not to nonprofits.
I’d be very much against “stop[ping] people from talking to other people.” People - even rich and well-connected people - should be able to do what they damned well please with their own time and money to influence the political process. But in the U.S., changing anything in a way that might gore some business’ ox is inevitably a major uphill battle. Part of that’s undoubtedly our cockeyed legislative system with far too many choke points (it’s impressive how few countries other than the U.S. have gone with a bicameral legislature, just to pick one for-instance), but a lot of it is the fundamentally uneven competition between people and corporations in terms of getting their concerns heard by legislators.
What does this mean?
There have been cases where corporate interests have dumped millions of dollars into a state legislative race, because the legislator in question wanted to regulate factory farming. Made the guy look only a bit worse than Satan by the time they were done. Not sure who was supposed to wake up and smell the coffee.
Can you be specific? Seriously, if the nations of western Europe, Canada, etc. allow the same sort of corporate influence that is allowed in the U.S., but you guys have all managed to get stuff like UHC and mandatory paid vacations and stuff despite it, there may be some lessons to be learned here.
Corporations do vote. They get one vote for every employee and shareholder. If they were recognized as a legally separate quasi-person, then we would expect to see them granted a legally separate quasi-vote. Alas, they are not.
I don’t have any elections to cite, but who’s been funding the tea-baggers?
It seems to me it’s corporate lobbyists. Are the tea-baggers having honest debate or spreading the lies of their handlers (such as “Steven Hawking would be dead if he was British”)?
Are all these lies good for discourse into what is the best healthcare system or destructive to the democratic process? Seem like it’s destructive to both sides. I am strongly pro-healthcare reform and public option, but even I can see how frustrating it must be for the anti-public option side to be associated with a bunch of mindless dittoheads who think the UK is a third world country.
A corporation is legally a person for some purposes but not for others. E.g., a corporation has no vote in general elections. OTOH, it can own property and – more to the point WRT the OP – exercise freedom of speech/press. The question is whether money is a form of speech, in the sense that giving money to election campaigns is constitutionally protected activity. The Supreme Court, last time it ruled on the question, said yes, but maybe it will rule differently in the future; there are persuasive contrary arguments (see here).
Your logic is flawed. My employment with a corporation does not mean my vote has to reflect the interests of my employer.
True. It can be simply an entity that exists just on paper. However, they often do have natural persons as employees, owners and managers. And those people are subject to the law, part of a corporation or not.
It’s simplistic to say “Corporations are treated like people! That’s evil!” It’s also simplistic to criticize lobiests on principle. People have a right to assemble, to pool their resources and petition the government.
Any time people come together and organize, they gain power greater than the sum of their parts. Whether they’re corporations, unions, etc. And like everything else, that is ok only in a certain dosage. The constitution way have been wrong with the blanket “people may assemble and petition the Government,” at least under some circumstances. It’s turned out that government’s dissolved into special interests haggling it, and it’s not effective.
But rather than trying to ban lobbying, etc. (although some good may come of it), the problem must be attacked from the other end. Our elections and issues are decided by tv ads. WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT. When you have a retarded system like that (based on money and based on ignorant decision making), you’re bound to have everything else go wrong too. No shit, sherlock.
Does everything you say reflect the interests of your employer? Of course not. You have the freedom of speech. Your company has the freedom of speech only to the extent that people employed by the company agree with it. Similar with the vote. If your company had an “official” voting policy, you would be free to disagree and vote for someone else and those who agreed with the policy would be free to vote the company line.
So you see, your company has a vote to the exact same extent as they have free speech. The only difference is that they can’t put their name on a vote and make it look more official and weighty than everyone else’s vote.
I’m not passing judgement on how you guys do things, just passing on some information you might find interesting. Our laws take the opposite view from you guys about corporate donations. If you want my opinion, I think our way is better, but then again I am Canadian!
PS Oops, I guess that means I did pass judgement. Oh well. Chacun à son goût
Then I don’t understand your point then that “Corporations do vote”. I thought we were talking about corporate influence.
Actually, if you want to know how corporations wield influence, the management consulting firm I used to work for had a “strategic communications” division that essentially was a kind of lobby / PR firm. What they will typically do is figure out what “levers” they can pull to apply public opinion pressure to candidates. I never actually worked with that group, but they way they described it, it’s a bit more nuanced than simply sending some guy with a trenchcoat to deliver a suitcase full of cash.
You may be talking about corporate influence, but I’m trying to make the point that restricting corporations is the same as restricting people, and corporate action is simply human action. Taking away a corporation’s rights is taking away a person’s rights.
You may argue that it is a good thing to take away people’s rights in certain situations, but let’s call a spade a spade.
A corporation is a legal entity distinct from its shareholders, executives, employees, etc. I thought we’d pretty well gone over this.
A corporation’s motives are not simply some weighted average of the motives of the above-mentioned people. The corporation is in business to maximize its profits more or less within the confines of the law. The motivations of just about any person you meet are much more complex than that.
How so? The fact that a corporation doesn’t have a vote of its own doesn’t deprive the stockholders, employees, etc. of the corporation of their votes - and many of them will be voting in ways that are at cross purposes to the interests of the corporation.
Similarly, depriving the corporation itself of the right to free speech would not prevent those associated with the corporation in various capacities from exercising their free speech rights on behalf of the corporation.
I think what people are saying is that if you simply took away corporation-as-separate-entity’s rights, you won’t get far. Its interests may be distinct from that of most of its employees, but they’re pretty much the same as that of its CEO or other top officers. If these people can’t use corporate money, they’ll just write themselves bigger checks and use personal funds. Again, maybe there’ll still be some net benefit. But nothing huge.
In the end, the fucking problem is that our elections are decided by TV ads. The electorate is ignorant, and swayed by rumors/emotion. (Like how msmith pointed out: you don’t need to pay politicians, you can pay people to attack politicians.) Even when everyone gets all “serious” and starts examining the “issues” on TV or in print, it’s all completely shallow, retarded discourse. That’s your problem. Everything else are symptoms.
That’s where we disagree. Even most corporate CEOs have other things in their lives besides the state of being a CEO.
And again, if it’s apparent that this is happening, it would be illegal. And unlike with most bad things a corporation does, the CEO would be personally liable here. A corporation and its execs would have to do this in a way that there was no clear pattern between raises/bonuses and what the execs spent on lobbying. It’s doable, but the corporation would have to accept a high level of inefficiency in the use of its money. Hence there would be a huge net benefit.
Hell, I’ve noticed this myself. It’s the other side of the same coin - the money in the coffers is the carrot; the ads trashing the politician’s character are the stick.
And who owns the TV networks and most of the newspapers? Oh, yeah.
