Corporate personhood, where else?

You might think so, but no.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

It's not an unwarranted assumption.
I am not jumping on anyone's bandwagon.
You do not have a law degree - the subject did happen come up in a discussion in the past.

Tell me I'm wrong, and you do have one - or that you have gotten one in the past couple of years, and I will apologize.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Even if the corporation isn't a person, it is still making statements on behalf of people. Shareholders might want the company to lie, and the officers must have wanted the statement made. If the business is not a person in its own right, then it is a sock puppet for a group of people, each of whom has a right to free speech, even free anonymous speech—and speaking through a corporation isn't entirely anonymous in most situations.

One could argue that making the corporation a "juridical person" might make it easier to limit their speech rights, than treating them as a pass-through entity. If you limit the speech of a corporation and that corporation is a legal non-entity, then you are *really* limiting the speech of the individuals who own it. If you limit the speech rights of a juridical person, then you are only limiting the rights of a person which isn't endowed with "unalienable rights" in the first place.

There are sound reasons to want to limit the ability of corporations to lie (and other business organizations, not all of which are "persons" under the law), but I don't see that turns too much on the personhood of business in question.

 

Interesting...

Again, you're a hypocrite - and an arrogant one at that...
And, obviously, a less than forthright one.
Look at that - my three least favorite qualities rolled up into one convenient package.

No, YOU call other people's personal lives and qualifications into question (just as you did in the case with Willy), but then backpedal when the table is turned (just as you did in the case with Willy).

You were the one who brought up the law degree in response to Mr. G's responses, when your were posting with at least as much confidence as he was (again, with no references to your claims).
What's good for the goose, is appraently not good for the gander - is it?

As I said, tell me I am wrong, and I will apologize.
Which, of course, you haven't done, have you?
Curious.


And, of course, it's fine if you say I am a liar, isn't it?

...

Oooo, and sanctimonious as the cherry on top of it all.

I owe you nothing of the sort.
I am simply calling you on your bullshit.

 

As has already been pointed out, it is well-established in the United States that commercial speech can be restricted in many ways that an individual’s ordinary speech can’t.

 

I would be very interested to hear some explanation from the anti-corporate personhood crowd here about why, specifically, you don’t think corporation should have some of the same rights as people. Pick any right that an individual enjoys and explain why you don’t think that right should apply to a group of people. If an individual has a right to due process before the government confiscates their assets, why shouldn’t that right also apply to assets that are owned collectively? If an individual has a right to sue someone who wrongs them, why shouldn’t a group of people be able to sue collectively if they have been collectively wronged? If an individual can open a checking account, why shouldn’t a group of people who are pooling their money be able to open a collective checking account?

Let’s hear some specific examples of rights that both individuals and corporations enjoy that you feel should only be available to individuals.

 

Corporations are not groups of people. For instance you could never make a CEO pay personally to clean up a hazardous waste site. Corporate charters ensure that the corporation is serving the interests of the community and can be revoked anytime, although in practice this is rarely done. The people that run a corporation do not "own the property [of that corporation] collectively". We may provisionally grant some rights to corporations, but ultimately, and unlike individuals, they are answerable for their contributions and actions in terms of what is good for the people.

Corporations should not have the right of free speech (so that the public's interest of "truth in advertising" can be upheld), and they should not be able to contribute to political campaigns. They should not have the right to remain silent, they should not have a right to privacy.

 

The "group of people" that I was referring to is the owners/shareholders for the corporation. You certainly can make a company clean up a hazardous waste site, in which case you are really making the shareholders clean up the site, because they're the ones who are paying for it.

Suppose 5000 people all want to pool their money and engage in some business venture. During the course of that venture, they screw something up and create a problem that needs to be fixed. One option would be for the government to bill each of the 5000 people individually. Another option is to "pretend" that their collectively-owned business is a single entity and simply send one bill for the entire amount to it. I'm not sure why you think that the first option is better than the second. Sending one bill seems a lot easier to me.

Again, I was talking about the owners of the corporation, not the corporation's employees. The people who own the corporation certainly do own all of the corporation's property collectively.

As has already been pointed out, commercial speech is subject to many restrictions that other types of speech are not...so I'm not sure what you're complaining about here.

So it's okay for 5000 individual people to each donate $1000 to a campaign that promotes their personal interests, but it's not okay for those 5000 people to pool their money and collectively donate $5 million if they all share the same interest?

 

You aren't making the shareholders personally responsible for anything, they do not pay for it out of their own accounts, the corporation pays for it from separate accounts, which each shareholder does not have access to. There will not be any personal liability. If the corporation declares bankruptcy, the shareholders don't lose their personal fortunes, and will never have to pay for the damaging consequences of a corporation's actions.

I'm not debating the effectiveness of corporations as a useful tool of business, but the shareholders can change from day to day and hour to hour, so corporations are not simply a way to streamline collective ownership, it's something different.

I acknowledge that commercial speech is currently subject to special restrictions, but it is these restrictions that corporations are trying to circumvent through the principle of corporate personhood.

 

We're all idiots?
I thought personal attacks were against the rules here.

Of course you do.
I doubt anyone expected any less.
I certainly didn't.

You have already answered all my questions.
Thank you.

You've already done it for me.
Over and over again on this forum.

No.
I accuse you of being less than forthright.
For someone as bright as you, you should know the difference.

The only personal issue I have ever had with you I addressed you directly and privately in PM and I addressed with your superior and it is over.
This has nothing to do with that, and I am not weasling into anything.
This is an open discussion, is it not?
Do I have to be formally invited into it?
Have the rules changed?
You spoke as if you were an authority on the subject (yet without offering anything to back up your claims) and I called you on it - it has EVERYTHING to do with this discussion.

As for being unfounded - try again.

For years I have thought you were arrogant - and, believe me, I'm NOT alone.
However, it didn't directly affect me in any way, and at least you were honest and quite knowledgable about Physics.
You were arrogant, but you did not personally attack members - you did offer solid scientific advice and knowledge and you were largely unaffected.
You were an arrogant robot. Unoffensive.

Lately, however, something has changed, and you are becoming a real prick.
You sneak in personal attacks on people (whether you feel they are justified or not) but you do it in a sly, indirect way to keep your hands clean - so you can give infractions to other members who do the same thing.
You insinuated that Willy was gay, and asked him if he was, but backpedaled and told him it was none of his business when he asked if you were.

You speak about this topic as if you are an authority on the subject, yet did not offer one source - not even a specific verifyable claim.

You went from arrogant and unaffected to arrogant and rude with sleazy tactics.
You speak like a politician, carefully measuring his words, while looking for ways to fuck someone over.
You should be held to a higher standard as official representation of this site, but you no longer serve as an example as what the membership of this forum should be - not in my opinion.

Case in point.

 

Likewise...

Only I have come to not expect better from you anymore.

 

Of course not.

You need to be intellectually comfy more than you need to be intellectually competitive.

We're here for you, dude.

 

Nace on Santa Clara

Re: Topic Post

The most unfortunate outcome of the Santa Clara case is not that corporations were declared to be persons. Given the steady ascendancy of the stridently procorporate Field faction on the Court, that result would have come inevitably within the following decade--certainly no later than 1895. But interestingly enough, Field's doctrine of personhood, as articulated in his circuit court opinions in the San Mateo and Santa Clara cases, was actually a good deal more circumscribed than the blanket "corporations are persons" doctrine that came to be ascribed to Santa Clara .... Field based his doctrine of corporate rights on the notion that an unfair tax on corporate property amounted to a violation of stockholder rights. If this rationale had been articulated clearly by the Court in Santa Clara, the precedent would have been a much narrower one than it turned out to be, and it would have been much easier to reverse.

Instead, the muddled and confusing circumstances behind the Santa Clara decision, combined with the lack of any stated rationale for it, served the interests of those seeking the broadest possible interpretation of the decision as a basis for corporate empowerment. That confusion was no accident--it was deliberately produced through the artful deception of one well-placed, highly skilled, unscrupulous man, former U.S. senator Roscoe Conkling .... (Nace, 109)​

Interestingly, as author Ted Nace explains, this travesty in the courts came about for reasons that are easy enough to explain, but hard to fathom:

If you go to a law library and read the Santa Clara decision in Supreme Court Reporter, Vol. 6 (1886), you will not find anything about corporate personhood. The decision, written by Justice Harlan and announced on May 10, 1886, includes a lengthy discussion of fences and mortgages, and a final conclusion that those technical factors fall in favor of the railroad. That's about it.

So where does the idea come about that the Santa Clara decision established corporate constitutional personhood? If you go back to the library and ask for a different compilation of Supreme Court decisions, United States Reports, Vol. 118, J. C. Bancroft Davis, Reporter (1886), you'll find in that version the following paragraph inserted in a section prefacing Justice Harlan's decision entitled "Statement of Facts":

One of the points made and discussed at length in the brief of counsel for defendants in error was that "Corporations are persons with in the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States." Before argument, Mr. Chief Justice Waite said: The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.​

Another reference to personhood appears in the "Syllabus" or "Headnotes" to the case--that is, the annotations prepared by the court reporter to summarize the opinion. The first sentence of these headnotes is as follows:

The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section I of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.​

In other words, even though the written decision made no mention of the notion that corporations deserve Fourteenth Amendment equal protection rights, Chief Justice Morrison Waite made a comment from the bench that seemed to endorse the view that corporations are persons for purposes of the amendment. The court reporter, J. C. Bancroft Davis, incorporated thosse verbal comments into the statement of facts. And in the syllabus (the court reporter's summary of the case), he highlighted Waite's verbal "personhoood" comment as the main point of the case.

The unusual way in which the verbal statement of Chief Justice Waite made it into the record and subsequently became the basis for an entirely new doctrine of corporate rights leads to a number of questions .... (102-103)​

Nace's book, Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005) includes, amid its examination of the rise of the corporate concept in the U.S., this tale of how a court reporter turned a nonviable comment by a judge into the foundation for a cruel and antithetical exploitation of the constitution that would last some fifty years before being put to rest, hauled out, dressed anew, and brought back before the world.

Corporate personhood is not the result of pure constitutional consideration, but, rather like the corporations themselves, descends from greed and corruption. Regardless of what point we've come back to in the century-plus since Santa Clara and other bizarre court decisions, it is a compelling issue indeed to consider that corporations have been and often still are considered to be human, save for the responsibilities.

Think of it this way: corporations are generally treated like people when doing so will increase profits; they are not regarded as people when doing so will actually help the status and security of real people.

The Santa Clara decision is but one chapter in that most bizarre saga. As history shows, however, it was hardly the last word.

 

tiassa, have you ever wrote a book? I would like to read a book written by you.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

No, seriously!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Still workin' on it, TS. Soon enough, I'll be announcing the launch of a blog, and from there, it is expected that I will finally be able to commit myself to writing as an enterprise instead of a hobby.

Part of it is the debate about fiction. I've lost such faith in the audience over the years that I must consider by which method to alter people's perceptions. Covert mass-drugging, however, is off the table. (Damn!)

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

I used to think that fiction is primitive and non-fiction was the way to go. But I don't think so anymore. I think a well written fiction book can be used to express a vision and ponder about the universe (and, of course, alter people's perception- isn't that always the goal?).

I have envisioned a book of fiction with hidden lessons in it, full of sarcasm, irony and wittiness; and that would still be friendly to children. Unfortunately, I'm not the best writer. Sadly, I simply don't have the patience or the time for it.

I don't know... maybe someday I will...

I'm looking forward to your book and blog. Would you PM me your blog when it's done?

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Cheers

 

It'll be without revenue at first; I'll promote it shamelessly before I attempt any revenue schemes.