I said that we should end corporate personhood, not corporations. They existed just fine for hundreds of years before their money was considered “speech” that must be protected.
Or were you being serious?
First, re: the influence on corporate money on politics, I’m willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of protestors would be down with public financing and the banning of all private donations to political parties entirely, from both the left and the right – along with some strict regulation of lobby activity. Or is that too complex/too simple/too vague/too specific/too unreasonable for you all?
Jimmy Chitwood:
+1
Or, as Glenn Greenwald put it, in a very worthwhile post on his blog:
Secondly:
John Mace:
You’ve said this twice now. Could you flesh out your objections a bit more for me? In what way do corporations require the status of “personhood,” and how would it damage our economy to deny them that status?
Thirdly:
Hola Red! Que pasa? Nice to see you again, hope all is well with you and yours.
This is some deeply Gnostic shit going on, here. A non-corporeal being that only exists in a state of contemplation. Whoa. Was he one of those hemp-growng Founders? Because, I mean,… damn! Far out!
OK, that’s too many for me. I fold.
Nah, it would just need five votes on the Supreme Court.
Of course, we’d need five libruls on the court who were as willing to dispense with precedent as the current conservative majority is, but that’s not gonna happen anytime soon. So you’re right, a constitutional amendment is needed.
We might as well start pushing for it now.
Not really. It’s had too little discussion among the public at large to be identified with any particular point on the spectrum, other than to say it’s a center-left idea because the conservative end of the spectrum will stick up for the rights of corporations almost automatically.
I think that if this idea gets into play, a lot of people who don’t consider themselves liberal in the least will accept it as a common-sense idea.
How so? We aren’t talking about ending corporations as a legal entity distinct from their shareholders; the proposal is that corporations shouldn’t have the rights accorded to flesh-and-blood persons except as conferred by statutes specific to corporations.
So a lot of statutes would get passed in short order?
Translation from Justice Marshall to modern layperson English: Corporations are entities which were created by law and not by nature; therefore the rights and privileges they enjoy aren’t inalienable, but are inherent to their legal charter and legitimate operation.
In other other words, Marshall thought those corporate rights and privileges could be properly controlled by statute and are not constitutionally protected.
This opinion came well before Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, in which the Court under Chief Justice Waite determined that corporations enjoy the “equal protection” afforded to “persons” by the 14th Amendment at least as that protection applies to the assessment of state taxes.
The Santa Clara decision avoided the question of whether corporations are full “persons” under the 14th, but the precedent advanced the concept of corporate personhood well beyond what was previously understood by the term. And this is where we begin to get into the aspects of the ‘legal fiction’ that are disdained by most of us lefty hippy radicals.
What do mean by a Star of David embossed urn? Speak plainly: what do you mean to say here?
Yeah, you’d have to have a period of a few years after ratification before the amendment took effect, to pass the appropriate statutes. If the amendment ever actually got through Congress and started working its way through the state legislatures, I’m sure there’d be plenty of discussion in both legal and non-technical circles of what was needed.
There’s the obvious quick fix, which is for state legislatures to pass laws saying that the statutory rights applying to persons in their states also apply to corporations. But hopefully a lot of states would use this as an opportunity to pass genuinely corporation-specific laws.
I think it’s pretty clear he was accusing you of being a Nazi; personally, I wouldn’t give him the benefit of the doubt.
I’d go with that assumption too, unless Merijeek comes back sharpish with a Damn Good Explanation.
Back on topic, I came across a quote recently that seems relevant in this thread:
Well, perhaps more accurately a bureaucratic Nazi-enabler, i.e. the official who would casually sign off on atrocities as long as a written procedure exists and was followed.
How is that better? Someone who would condone the plan to murder six million Jews, not to mention Roma, Catholics, the handicapped, and homosexuals, as long as there was a clipboard with procdure on it?
I know this is the Pit, but that seems a bit extreme and uncalled-for.
How many resources could they have when the wealthiest 400 families have more wealth than the bottom 50% of American families combined.
Corporations are a legal construct. A mechanism to divorce shareholders from unlimited liability to promote capital creation. Sure we protect their property rights (we are actually protecting the property rights of the shareholders) and respect the enforcability of their contracts, but why do corporations need to be able to participate in the political process at all?
Those wealthy families still only have so many votes–at some point, public perception of them WILL come in to play if they start out-donating and out-funding unions and PACs by too much of a margin.
I didn’t say it was better, I speculated it was a more accurate description of the original image of an approving person with an urn in one hand and a clipboard in the other.
Anyway, your issue isn’t with me but with the author of said image, i.e. Merijeek.
If you’re using your money to tell other people what to think, you don’t have to worry much about public perception.
What a concept. Judge corporations by the public good they do. Then revoke the charter of the ones who don’t. There would not be very many left.
It is possible to do good by the environment and the people while making money, but you won’t make as much. As long as money is the only barometer of a corporations success, they will be very bad citizens. The methods of determining a successful company should be changed.
You say that until you become liable for the damages a company causes just because you happen to be “part owner” with a couple hundred shares of their stock in your 401k.
Enron? Lehman Brothers? Bear Stearns? Arthur Andersen?
I’m curious how you fight unemployment by attacking the very institutions that create jobs for people?
And if corporations aren’t “people”, why do you insist on “punishing” them as if you were going to (or could) teach them a lesson?
Let’s look at a sampling of the source of wealth for some of these Forbes 400 families:
Mircosoft
Berkshire Hathaway
Oracle
Wal-Mart
Bloomberg
Facebook
Google
Ebay
Ralph Lauren
Most of these companies are being run by their founders. And most of them have been founded in my lifetime. How much wealth do these companies generate for their employees and shareholders? How much value do their products create for the economy?
I can’t take you people seriously (not that I need to) because you can’t seem to make a distinction between investment bankers destroying the economy thought leverageing huge amounts of debt for reckless speculation and entrepreneurs creating billions of dollars of wealth through their own ingenuity. It just sounds like a mindless drone of “big business is evil! Rich people are bad!”