FL and WA moms cheer each other up Here is an example showing corporations do not buy elections, but legislation. The bankruptcy bill was written by the financial institutions. The repubs ramrodded it through with their majority which held together through every amendment. It just lined the pockets of the bankers.
Fund raisers are covered with corporation representatives. They have the money to go to 1000 dollar parties . They buy access to the pols through attendance and donations.
I’ve been thinking about this and I agree that your way is better and something we should consider. Political contributions should come from individuals within limits, period. No political action committee should be allowed to donate. No grpup whatsoever.
The next issue is freedom of speech. Should any group be able to make and air political ads to promote or bash political candidates. Should any group be able to air any distortion of the facts they feel like it. I guess so. I do think it should also mean that cooperate owned media should be required to air the ads proposed or some provisions so they don’t favor one political group over another.
Corporations can form political action committees( P.A.Cs), the executive can lobby because of personal access, they can employ lobbyists to present their case and they can have advocacy advertising like the Drug Companies and health care companies are running now . There are a lot of ways they get their viewpoint across. They simply have the financial advantage .
They also impact the news and talk stations who rely on them for advertising dollars. The stations know the financial dangers of presenting positions that could piss off the big advertisers.
The banking institutions got regulation removed by pressuring politicians to continue presenting bills gutting oversight.
It adds up to having great political power.
I have no problem with corporations communicating with legislators to present their arguments concerning proposed legislation. It’s the promise of financial support that I see corrupting the system. I have no problem with unions deciding they want to officially support a certain candidate on paper. They can recommend to their members that they endorse a certain candidate and why. The FOP met with both Obama and McCain and wound up recommending McCain. What shouldn’t happen are political donations from the Union. The members can still decide for themselves who gets their donation.
How about if that private individual owns a corporation and wants someone in the corporation to speak out on his behalf, in support of the corporation’s (and thus his own) best interest?
This is ultimately what corporations are anyway, collections of owners, who are choosing to have people (Board Members and Executives) manage their assets in a way that is in their best interest. If you refuse to allow the corporation (via the executives or whomever) to speak, you take away the right of these owners to have someone knowledgeable in the business world speak on their behalf.
What’s to stop him from paying that person out of his own pocket? If she’s the sole owner, she can just pay herself a bigger dividend to cover it.
Situations like this at the margin are both meaningless and easily dealt with.
Again, the owners can pool their money and hire the knowledgeable people out of their own pockets.
But if the owners know what needs to be said, why can’t they speak for themselves? If they’re stockholders in a corporation that isn’t closely held, then anything they’d want to say as ‘owners’ of the corporation is public knowledge, and they can say it themselves.
And if the corporate executive sees a need to say something, then she can say it for herself. I don’t see who doesn’t have the right to say what they want here.
You mean besides the fact that she is already paying him a full salary? Why should she pay him extra?
Of course, then they would need to manage the money they’ve pooled, should hire someone to do that. Then they need to hire a staff of knowledgeable people, and pay them. They should probably set up a legal entity to deal with this for them, what if one of these staff members trips and falls, he could sue and take their personal assets.
If only there was a legal construct that would allow them to pool their resources, while protecting their personal assets.
Let’s also be honest, the owners often don’t know what needs to be said, this is why they hire people to do the actual work. The people we hire know what is good or not good for the company we own, know what is and isn’t happening in government, because they have the time and resources to do the research. Individual owners don’t. Especially nowadays when individual owners can mean someone with a mutual fund that has a 100 stocks in it.
We’re also not really talking about “saying something” we’re talking about spending money to say something. Having 10,000 people spending $10 each to say something is no where near as effective as pooling that money for a $100,000 campaign.
The freedom of speech argument for corps denies the fact that they have far greater access to the press than a citizen does. They can run ads (like the health care companies are now) ,they can push their agenda through friendly TV and radio stations and they can throw tons of money at the pols to get legislation they want. Their power is far greater than that of any individuals speech and it should be greatly moderated, if not eliminated. Because a corporation is not a person. It is a huge and powerful organization.
Because of the fundamental inequity involved in treating corporations as having first-amendment rights. If you think there’s no inequity there, then argue your case. If you agree with me on the nature of the inequity, then this is pretty trivial horseshit. She can organize her business as a sole proprietorship, if she wants. Or she can, as sole owner of the corporation, hire the guy 3/4 time through the corporation, and 1/4 time out of her personal pocket. Or who knows what else.
IOW, this is nitpicking, rather than a serious argument against depriving for-profit corporations of First Amendment rights.
Again, this is nitpicky stuff. But they could hire a knowledgeable person on an ad hoc basis as the need arises. Since if we’re not talking about a closely held corporation, many if not most shareholders would have little interest in being represented on a regular basis in this manner. It would be an unreasonable imposition on the people who were simply buying shares as part of an index fund, or something similar, to make them subsidize the speech of the shareholders who felt that their personal interests aligned fully with those of the corporation. So yeah, shareholders who want to speak out on issues related to the corporation should do so on their own time and their own dime.
Exactly - what the corporation would say is NOT what the shareholders would say. You’re assuming that if the shareholders’ interests would fully align with those of the corporation, despite their lack of knowledge. You know what they say about assuming.
I agree, but am not sure what your point is.
We have had the personhood of corporations foisted on us for so long, that we forget how much it was fought against by many of the founders, Jefferson wanted an article in the bill of rights preventing it from happening. He described corporations as :
full blown monsters ,crushing competition of smaller businesses , bleeders of farmers charging excess shipping costs, guilty of buying politicians at every level of government.
Lincoln weighed in with (30 years before personhood actually won)
Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption will follow in high places and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until all the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed.
It has been suggested that Chief Justice Waite conspired with the court reporter ,J.C. Bancroft Davis to slip it into a case decision. He made a statement that the case was not about the personhood argument and they would not be deciding that in the case. Although he felt corporations were deserving of person rights. The reporter included that statement as part of the decision . Several justices were not happy about it ,but they got away with it.
My argument is that you can’t take away something that doesn’t exist in the first place. Corporations are legal fictions, concepts on a piece of paper that offer legal protection to people who want to pool some of their money, keep the rest of their money secure from that pool, and hire people to act on their behalf in managing the pooled money. Legal fictions don’t have brains, they don’t have thoughts, they don’t have lips to speak with or fingers to write with, all of those things belong to good old flesh and blood human beings.
When you say that you want to take away 1st Amendment rights from corporations, I believe you’re really taking away those rights from the owners, and the people they hire to make decisions on their behalf. Then you give them back those rights by saying they could simply re-create the investment pool they already created, under a different legal fiction, and it’s totally cool. You want to talk nitpicking, how about “You can’t pool your resources and speak under THIS legal construct, but you can under THAT legal construct.”
What differences in Corporations vs. Sole Proprietorships make it so that in one case political speech should be restricted and in the other it should be unrestricted?
That’s a false quote. There’s no evidence Lincoln actually said it, and it first appears in print 20 years after Lincoln died.
I’d also like to see a source for your Jefferson quote. Jefferson wasn’t a fan of corporations (or banks, or commerce in general), but I can’t find him making that quote.
Simply asserting that it’s so, while ignoring my arguments to the contrary, is bunk.
I don’t care what you believe.
The point is, this re-creation would be voluntary in terms of the choice to support the speech in question, as distinct from the choice to simply own a share of XYZ Corp.
You are the one who’s arguing in favor of shareholders being dragooned into supporting speech that they don’t necessarily agree with. You are the one who’s arguing for trampling on the First Amendment rights of the shareholders in question.
If you ask a nitpicky question, the only good choices regarding an answer are (a) to get down into the same nitpicky weeds, or (b) dismiss the question altogether.
You seem upset that I chose (a). My deepest and most sarcastic apologies.
Because one is a separate legal entity, and the other isn’t.
There’s the question of whether there should be a line at all, and there’s the question of where the line should be. Let’s not conflate them. If there should be a line, where would you put it? A closely-held corporation, even one that has a single owner, can potentially grow into a much larger corporation, without crossing any particular legal lines. But there’s a distinct legal difference between a sole proprietorship, which is a business that the owner runs out of his/her own personal funds, and a corporation set up and run by that person, which is a distinct legal entity.
Because they can function very similarly, it’s easy for the sole owner of a corporation to work around the limitations I propose - which is as it should be. It should be a bit harder for ExxonMobil Corp. to do so.
I didn’t notice your arguments that corporations have brains outside of the human beings that work there. Anti-corporate folks set up their arguments as though corporations are real beings with life of their own, making decisions and taking actions that are somehow separate from the human beings that run the place. It’s anthropomorphism at its worst, we’re no longer pretending they’re separate entities for legal purposes, we’re actually treating them like they are beings in their own right.
I am definitely not in favor of making any distinction between a closely and widely held corporation. What works for one should work for both, either they both get to use their assets for political speech, or neither do.
If you set up a legal entity with your own personal assets, you lose the right to use those assets to promote your political ideas. Unless you jump through a bunch of hoops, divesting those assets from the corporation and setting up a non-corporation with the same assets that will now be allowed to promote your ideas.
If you want to say that you should not be able to use protected assets for political speech, that’s fine, but don’t treat corporations like they’re actual beings with thoughts and feelings and political agendas.
I’ve made my arguments here in paragraphs 2-4 of post 17, paragraph 2 of post 44, and paragraph 2 of post 57 of this thread. Your rebuttal is awaited.
Again, your rebuttal is awaited.
At least we can agree on that.
Why? Just because you don’t like it when I do?
That would be IMHO, three forums down from here.
No, because corporations aren’t actually beings with their own thoughts. No matter how much you want to think that corporations somehow form their own magical consciousness that is entirely separate from the people who own it and work there, they don’t.
It is so because it is so.
Impossible to argue with that.
http://www.ratical.org/corporations/Lincoln.html Have at it.
The Elkins letter is a fraud, though. I know it’s in Hertz’s book, and “A Lincoln Encyclopedia”, but the quote doesn’t first show up until 1896, when it came out, John Nicolay said it was fake, and it doesn’t even sound like Lincoln or something he’d say. See this (in PDF)
and the Snopes site here:
The Supreme Court will soon be weighing in on this issue.
An editorial against corporate free speech rights: