I don’t care about the law, what it says, or its meaning. I wrote an entire thread one time about how I don’t care about the law, and lots of people agreed with me. Laws influence my actions and beliefs to a negligible degree.
All I’m saying is that whatever else it is, a corporation is a group of people. A “legal entity” doesn’t have a mouth, people do. “Legal entities” don’t write; that’s people too. Any laws you may write governing corporations and their ‘speech’ is going to restrict people and their actions. People are the only entities that can read and write; laws are written by people and for people, and any action that is prohibited is a human action.
If every last person involved with the company has the freedom of speech, who exactly are you trying to silence? The walls and the factory robots?
A marriage is another “legal entity”. Married couples can buy houses, open bank accounts and do all sorts of other things jointly as if the couple itself was a single quasi-person.
Do married couples have rights? Do they have the freedom of speech?
You may or may not agree whether technically the “couple”, or “partnership” has any rights; but when someone starts demanding that free speech be denied to marriage partnerships, who else are they targeting except for you and your wife? The wedding ring? The marriage license? Of course not, they want to shut you up.
Of course, the marriage unit does not open a bank account - the constituent parties of the marriage are free to both take up ownership of property as they see fit - but don’t let reality get in the way of a craptastic analogy.
Marriage is not a “legal entity” in this way - “The Marriage of Dick and Jane” does not buy a house. Dick and Jane, who happen to be married, buy the house.
The question remains: Whose freedom of speech are we talking about curtailing, if not a person’s? Who else speaks but people? Don’t tell me corporations speak. The words are coming out of some person’s mouth.
Even if we are talking about other forms of speech and not just vocal, the original source was a person, and the original motivation was a person’s. You are talking about silencing people.
I think this issue could easily be addressed by making any restriction not apply to corporations that have non-profit status. I don’t think the concern is that the United Way, for example, is corrupting our political process.
I guess I can ignore anything else you have to say about this. Because while we human beings exist independently of the law, corporations are entirely creatures of the law; without the law, they would not exist. At most, we would have informal partnerships, which have vastly different properties.
That’s because you’re a flesh-and-blood human being, whose existence isn’t dependent on enabling legislation.
No, it’s not. I’ve gone into detail about that.
And they’re doing so as employees and paid agents of the corporation. So who is really speaking through these people’s words and writings: the people themselves, or the corporation?
It would restrict what they could say and write as paid agents of the corporation, not what they could say and do as independent individuals.
I’m trying to silence what they could say and write as paid agents of the corporation, not what they could say and do as independent individuals. You really haven’t been reading my posts, have you?
If the things they’re saying for the corporation are things they want to say anyway, then they’d be free to say them on their own time and dime. If you believe that corporations are really groups of individuals, they would do so, and such a change wouldn’t impact their behavior in the least, right?
So if I put my corporate hat on, I won’t be able to say what I want, but if I take it off, I can say whatever I please?
So you admit you want to take the freedom of speech away from people in certain situations, specifically, the situation in which they are wearing the corporate hat? This ties in directly with what I said above:
No, because if you’re doing anything to the actual person, you’re taking away someone’s right to be someone else’s agent. That isn’t a constitutionally-protected right, last time I checked.
I’m saying that you definitely should have that right. And that a private individual should be able to pay you for speaking on their behalf. But a for-profit corporation shouldn’t be able to do so.
Yes, we’re talking about curtailing people’s freedom of speech. People who would use the corporate coffers to speak louder than others. People whose speech is meant to corrupt the political process, to make it shallow and divert it from caring about the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
What’s wrong with curtailing people’s freedom of speech?
But of course, better than trying to shut people up is to make their words irrelevant, which is what I was arguing must be done.
I guess I can see how putting anti-lobying laws into place could significantly curtail corporate influence. Yet, the political process will remain shallow, based on tv ads, based on groups of people aggregating power and competiting with it. And the rich will still have disproportionate influence. In total, you won’t see dramatic change.
Btw, probably the worst way that corporations influenced America in recent memory: the war that they started in order to raise the price of oil and increase demand for the products of the military-industrial complex did not hinge on the influence of lobyists or the power of corporate funds. It hinged on powerful, rich people electing themselves into office. The media supported them not because it is owned by corporations (which are typically unrelated to the oil/war ones), but through careful manipulation of the concept of political correctness, controlled access to press conferences, and the general tradition of ass-wipe pussy journalism that is mainstream. This dark chapter in our history won’t be reexamined or revised by Obama not because he’s been bought out, but because he’s a bastard concerned about maintaining faith and confidence in our crooked government.
I think a lot of smaller things are directly decided by corporate lobying and corporate money. But not the biggest ones. Those are a lot more complex, even if they involve corporations and people made rich by corporations.
The health care corporations have 5000 lobbyists threatening ,cajoling and bribing our politicians at this time.They are apparently very successful at getting their way on legislation. They wrote legislation during Bush’s term like the Bankruptcy Bill. They are insidious and should be cleaned up.
Tell you what: If you want to clean up influence in government, how about we start with the massive influence unions have? Start by making it illegal to use union dues for any sort of partisan activity, since union employees have no choice but to pay dues.
The floor of the Republican convention wasn’t filled with representatives of Pfizer and Halliburton, but the floor of the Democratic convention was filled with people from the teacher’s unions, the service employee’s unions, the teamsters, and other big union officials.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0101-07.htm Here is a nice history of how corporations and the powerful have slowly changed the entire system to their benefit. The original framers had no trust of corporations and wanted to limit their influence. They have won and they are above the law. When they are not they just change it.
What evidence do you have that unions have ‘massive’ influence - compared to that of corporations, since that’s the present topic of discussion?
What evidence can you give that union influence is a problem? Don’t unions basically represent their members - flesh-and-blood people - just like other nonprofit activist groups from the NRA to the AARP do?
As a small-d democrat, I start with the assumption that the involvement of actual human beings in the political process is a positive good. Even when they heatedly disagree with me, I believe their participation in the game is important. I may ridicule the wingnuts who are screaming about death panels and Obama’s birth certificate, but they’re people; they have the right to make their voices heard, and I will always defend that right. So I find nothing inherently troublesome about unions making their political presence felt.
YMMV, of course, but I’d like to understand why, other than that you object to the things they favor, or that they have support that’s somewhat disproportionate to their membership - because someone’s always going to swing more weight than appropriate for their numbers.