Corporation Coups d' etah.

[Windship]

We have been made "persona non grata. Corporations have had their coups d'etat in slow motion. They own our politicians AND our courts. How else can a corporation be deemed a person...or money be free speech! Jesus man!

The corporations are in control and the population has been rendered impetant. We no longer matter and they're not afraid of us anymore. How else can they pass law and policy with 60, 70 and 80% opposed by the public and still pass them? Elections are a sad joke. The only thing that will make them afraid of us again is protest and civil disobedience. Democracy and true liberalism is dead and gone.
Everyone knows about this phenomenon but when shown facts? ...will deny it rabidly.

 

[aaronleland]

We are our own worst enemies. The politicians have convinced us that it's us vs. them. Republican vs. Democrat. Conservative vs. liberal. We throw around the "lesser of two evils" argument every election cycle as if this is an acceptable way of being governed. How do we fight the status quo when we're too busy fighting each other?

 

[Windship]

Exactly but 95% of the ppl dont see it and we get corporate running our lives. To bad no one here was presant during the industrial revolution so the could see what corporate wants again. It IS what they want and they are getting it while we bikker over hot button footballs at election time. Suckers. Hows it feel to be a sucker? I may be suffering with everyone else but at least I aint no sucker.

 

[eflatminor]

How else can a corporation be deemed a person?

Reference please.

 

[Windship]

When Did Companies Become People? Excavating The Legal Evolution
8:50

• 
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  Volunteers at the Lincoln Memorial help roll up a giant banner printed with the Preamble to the Constitution during an October 2010 demonstration against the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling.
  
  Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
  
  POLITICS
  'Citizens United' Critics Fight Money With Money
  Are corporations people? The U.S. Supreme Court says they are, at least for some purposes. And in the past four years, the high court has dramatically expanded corporate rights.
  
  It ruled that corporations have the right to spend money in candidate elections, and that some for-profit corporations may, on religious grounds, refuse to comply with a federal mandate to cover birth control in their employee health plans.
  
  These are personal rights accorded to corporations. To many, the concept of corporations as people seems odd, to say the least. But it is not new.
  
  The dictionary defines "corporation" as "a number of persons united in one body for a purpose." Corporate entities date back to medieval times, observes Columbia law professor John Coffee, an authority on corporate law. "You could think of the Catholic Church as probably the first entity that could buy and sell property in its own name," he says.
  
  Indeed, having an artificial legal persona was especially important to churches, says Elizabeth Pollman, an associate professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
  
  "Having a corporation would allow people to put property into a collective ownership that could be held with perpetual existence," she says. "So it wouldn't be tied to any one person's lifespan, or subject necessarily to laws regarding inheriting property."
  
  Later on, in the United States and elsewhere, the advantages of incorporation were essential to efficient and secure economic development. Unlike partnerships, the corporation continued to exist even if a partner died; there was no unanimity required to do something; shareholders could not be sued individually, only the corporation as a whole, so investors only risked as much as they put into buying shares.
  
  By the 1800s, the process of incorporating became relatively simple. But corporations aren't mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, leaving the courts to determine what rights corporations have — and which corporations have them. After all, Coca-Cola is a corporation, but so are the NAACP and the National Rifle Association, and so are small churches and local nonprofits.
  
  "All these truly different types of organizations might come under the label 'corporation,' " Pollman observes. "And so the real difficulty is figuring out how to treat these different things under the Constitution."
  
  In the early years of the republic, the only right given to corporations was the right to have their contracts respected by the government, according to legal historian Eben Moglen.
  
  The great industrialization of the United States in the 1800s, however, intensified companies' need to raise money.
  
  "With the invention of the railroad, you needed a great deal of capital to exploit its purpose, " Columbia professor Coffee says, "and only the corporate form offered limited liability, easy transferability of shares, and continued, perpetual existence."
  
  In addition, the end of the Civil War and the adoption of the 14th Amendment provided an opportunity for corporations to seek further legal protection, says Moglen, also a Columbia University professor.
  
  "From the moment the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868, lawyers for corporations — particularly railroad companies — wanted to use that 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection to make sure that the states didn't unequally treat corporations," Moglen says.
  
  Nobody was talking about extending to corporations the right of free speech back then. What the railroads sought was equal treatment under state tax laws and things like that.
  
  The Supreme Court extended that protection to corporations, and over time also extended some — but not all — of the rights guaranteed to individuals in the Bill of Rights. The court ruled that corporations don't have a right against self-incrimination, for instance, but are protected by the ban on warrantless search and seizure.
  
  Otherwise, as the Cato Institute's Ilya Shapiro puts it, "the police could storm down the doors of some company and take all their computers and their files."
  
  But for 100 years, corporations were not given any constitutional right of political speech; in fact, quite the contrary. In 1907, following a corporate corruption scandal involving prior presidential campaigns, Congress passed a law banning corporate involvement in federal election campaigns. That wall held firm for 70 years.
  
  The first crack came in a case that involved neither candidate elections nor federal law. In 1978 a sharply divided Supreme Court ruled for the first time that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend money on state ballot initiatives.
  
  Still, for decades, candidate elections remained free of direct corporate influence under federal law. Only money from individuals and groups of individuals — political action committees — were permitted in federal elections.
  
  Then came Citizens United, the Supreme Court's 5-4 First Amendment decision in 2010 that extended to corporations for the first time full rights to spend money as they wish in candidate elections — federal, state and local. The decision reversed a century of legal understanding, unleashed a flood of campaign cash and created a crescendo of controversy that continues to build today.
  
  It thrilled many in the business community, horrified campaign reformers, and provoked considerable mockery in the comedian classes.
  
  The Daily Show
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  "If only there were some way to prove that corporations were not people," lamented the Daily Show's Jon Stewart. Maybe, he mused, we could show "their inability to love."
  
  The Colbert Report
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  Fellow Comedy Central comedian Stephen Colbert tried unsuccessfully to get the question of corporate personhood on the South Carolina ballot, and also formed a superPAC, which asked whether voters would be comfortable letting Mitt Romneydate their daughters' corporations.
  
  But there are serious people on both sides of this issue.
  
  Cato's Shapiro sees all corporations, when they spend on political campaigns, as merely associations of like-minded people.
  
  "Nobody is saying that corporations are living, breathing entities, or that they have souls or anything like that," he says. "This is about protecting the rights of the individuals that associate in this way."
  
  Countering that argument are those who note that individuals are perfectly free to give money to candidates with whom they agree, and to spend unlimited amounts independently supporting those candidates. They shouldn't need a corporation to express themselves, the argument goes.
  
  Some critics, like Pollman, see a difference between for-profit and nonprofit corporations. A nonprofit corporation formed to advance particular political views is one thing, she says. A large for-profit corporation is something else entirely.
  
  "There's no reason to believe that the people involved — shareholders, employees, even the directors or managers — have come together for an expressive purpose related to anything other than really what the business is doing," she argues.
  
  And shareholders and employees, Pollman observes, have no real recourse if they disagree with how corporate money is spent in campaigns.
  
  And then there is the money-is-not-speech argument. The problem for First Amendment believers, Moglen says, arises not because they think corporations shouldn't have rights so much as they think money isn't equal to speech.
  
  "And we are now winding up using constitutional rules to concentrate corporate power in a way that's dangerous to democracy," he says.
  
  That, of course, is not how the Supreme Court majority sees its decision. The court has said that because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy, the First Amendment forbids discrimination against any class of speaker.
  
  It matters not, the court said just this year, that some speakers, because of the money they spend on elections, may have undue influence on public policy; what is important is that the First Amendment protects both speech and speaker, and the ideas that flow from each.
  

 

[Windship]

The U.S. Supreme Court's Cultivation of Corporate Personhood
The liberal justices expanded the rights of corporations, without considering the limits of that doctrine.



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• KENT GREENFIELD AND ADAM WINKLER
  
• JUN 24, 2015
  
• POLITICS

Politics & Policy Daily, a roundup of ideas and events in American politics.



Over the next week, the Supreme Court will decide cases on same-sex marriage, Obamacare, and lethal injection. So Monday’s rulings about raisins and hotels were not the focus of much interest. But they should be. Taken together, they represent an important victory for corporate personhood. And they suggest both the utility of that legal fiction, and its limits.

No legal question has sparked more recent controversy than whether corporations are people. Obviously, corporations are not human. Yet the Court has held that they, like people, are entitled to certain fundamental rights, including the freedom to make political expenditures (Citizens United) and the religious freedom to object to birth-control coverage in their employees’ health insurance (Hobby Lobby).

Many Americans, including the Court’s most liberal justices, object to the recent expansion of corporate rights. Yet, in Monday’s cases, corporations gained valuable new constitutional protections—and the liberals were on board.

If Corporations Are People, They Should Act Like It


In Horne v. Department of Agriculture, the Court ruled that a federal program requiring raisin growers to set aside a percentage of their crops for government redistribution was an unconstitutional “taking” under the Fifth Amendment. In Los Angeles v. Patel, the Court extended the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment guarantee of privacy to hoteliers, invalidating a city ordinance (similar to laws around the country) allowing police to search guest registries without a warrant.

In both cases, the constitutional claimants included individuals as well as a mix of business associations. In neither case did the justices explicitly address whether corporate businesses should have the same constitutional protections as individuals. Yet there is no question that the biggest beneficiaries of these decisions will be corporations. Del Monte Corporation will not have to give up a portion of its raisin crop; Marriott and Hilton hotels can refuse to show their guest books to police.


Although corporations won big, the justices focused on the nature of the rights in question, not the identity or status of those who claim their protection. The raisin growers had to be compensated because, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for a majority that included Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan, the ban on government taking of private property is as old as the Magna Carta. In the hotel case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for a majority that included the Court’s liberal wing and Justice Anthony Kennedy, declared that searches conducted without judicial process are “per se unreasonable.”

Opponents of corporate rights too simplistically champion the notion that “corporations are not people.” Corporations deserve some Constitutional protections, both in order to keep government in check and because the ultimate beneficiaries are citizens. A corporate right to be free from government takings, for example, makes sense both as a matter of constitutional law and of economics. Government overreach is problematic whether the raisin grower is a family farm or a business corporation. And corporations left exposed to government expropriation would find investors reluctant to take that risk, undermining the basic social purpose of the corporation, to make money. (So Roberts in the raisin case got the takings question correct for corporations, even though he never explicitly considered it.)

Some rights, though, are more appropriate for people than for corporations, particularly when the nature of the right does not “fit” with the corporate form, or the corporate form magnifies the nature of the right beyond what humans would have. Religious rights, for example, should be different for corporations because only humans have consciences. Rights to spend money in elections should be different for corporations because the benefits they receive from the government give them an improper advantage in influencing government policy.

Do corporations warrant privacy rights? Corporations should be able to expect that government agents will not seize their property or search their premises without good reason. But the privacy interests of humans are likely to be stronger than those of corporations, and the Court has understood that in the past. In 2011, the Court unanimously rejected AT&T’s claim that its finances be excluded from Freedom of Information Act requests under that statute’s exception for “personal privacy.” Roberts wrote that such right “does not extend to corporations. We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.”

In Monday’s hotel case, the Court could have analyzed whether the distinction between corporate hotel chains and human innkeepers should make a difference.Sotomayor has been attuned to problem of corporate rights in the past—in the oral argument in Citizens United six years ago, Sotomayor pointedly asked whether corporations should be considered “persons” for purposes of constitutional law. But in Patel, she did not even raise the issue.

Today, corporations have nearly all the same constitutional rights as individuals. Yet too often the Court has expanded the rights of corporations as it did on Monday, without ever asking whether such entities ought to be entitled to the same rights as people. And the liberals have been as guilty as the conservatives.

Corporations may be constitutional people, at least some of the time. But it would be helpful if the Court explained when and why.

 

[Windship]

If you didnt know this then you are...I dunno, lol...lost?

 

[Windship]

Im embarrassed for you.

 

[eflatminor]

Corporations are not living, breathing human beings, and their ’personhood’ for legal purposes is just that: a convenient legal fiction.

When individuals pool their resources and speak under the legal fiction of a corporation, they do not lose their rights.

It cannot be any other way; in a world where corporations are not entitled to constitutional protections, the police would be free to storm office buildings and seize computers or documents. The mayor of New York City could exercise eminent domain over Rockefeller Center by fiat and without compensation if he decides he’d like to move his office there. Moreover, the government would be able to censor all corporate speech, including that of so-called media corporations. In short, rights-bearing individuals do not forfeit those rights when they associate in groups.

Unions aren't persons either, and I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want the individuals in a union to forgo their rights just because they unionized. Same goes for a corporation.

 

[Windship]

Unions are no comparison.
Unions did good for the population of our country, built the middle class and built a strong economy. Capitalism does not do that. Capitalism allows that to happen if regulated properly. Without regulations, capitalism ruins country's. Unions dont do that so, I havent a prob with union contributions which are a small fraction of what corporate gives to campaigns. Unions help the multitudes...capitalists help themselves without a care for anything or anyone.

 

[Tehon]

Corporations are not living, breathing human beings, and their ’personhood’ for legal purposes is just that: a convenient legal fiction.

When individuals pool their resources and speak under the legal fiction of a corporation, they do not lose their rights.

It cannot be any other way; in a world where corporations are not entitled to constitutional protections, the police would be free to storm office buildings and seize computers or documents. The mayor of New York City could exercise eminent domain over Rockefeller Center by fiat and without compensation if he decides he’d like to move his office there. Moreover, the government would be able to censor all corporate speech, including that of so-called media corporations. In short, rights-bearing individuals do not forfeit those rights when they associate in groups.

Unions aren't persons either, and I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want the individuals in a union to forgo their rights just because they unionized. Same goes for a corporation.

An individual does not lose their right to speech when they are denied the right to it collectively.

 

[Windship]

no but they lose the right to bargain collectively. and thats everything and you know that so dont be silly.

 

[Windship]

And when nothing you say matters to anyone and the public no longer matters, you get what we have now. Neocons and neolib's. An oligarchic inverted totalitarian government bought and payed for.

 

[Tehon]

no but they lose the right to bargain collectively. and thats everything and you know that so dont be silly.

no but they lose the right to bargain collectively.

Why do you think that?