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If Corporations Are People, Then...
Pondering corporate personhood can make your head swim. Based on the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, corporations now have unlimited free speech rights, the same as human beings do. What has been bothering me is that in certain areas, humans have a few more rules to follow than corporations. If you are a man, you have more rules still. Take the Selective Service, for example. If you are a guy, you have to register by age 18 or you are not eligible to receive government training, a government job or eligibility for a student loan. Perhaps all male corporations should sign up with the Selective Service to be eligible for government contracts, research grants or guaranteed loans.
(IndyMedia.org | Portland)
This brings me to the gender issue.
If corporations are the same gender and they want to merge, would that be prohibited in states that don't recognize civil unions? Recently, one presidential candidate even seems to be worried about three or more corporations merging. Would mergers between a male and female corporation be considered marriage? If you sue a corporation into bankruptcy, should that now be considered murder? If you sign paperwork to form your corporation and the financing falls through, is that a miscarriage? When humans get sick, they see a doctor or go to the hospital. When corporations get sick, they see a lawyer or go off shore. Whereas cloning humans is illegal, cloning corporations can just be considered franchising. Corporations can also split like amoebas or merge like pieces of clay, which are abilities that humans do not possess.
The tax code gets confusing also. If corporations are "people," then why don't they use our human tax tables? Unless they are married (merged) or head of household, I'd think that they should pay at the single rate. There should be no "corporate" tax rate, since they are just like the rest of us. I don't dare to think of the tax write-offs, but perhaps the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) rule that some have to follow would be appropriate. When corporations can't exempt themselves from the AMT, they pay at a rate lower than many humans do, and that is after they file for the foreign tax credit, if they can. It does seem a bit unpatriotic to be willing to pay other countries' taxes and then complain about ones in the country that you call home. We human beings are paying for the roads that the company trucks are driving on, among other perks that some corporations get for free.
Another great thing about being a corporate person is that, in some cases, you don't even have to be "born" here to be considered a domestic corporation. As long as you set up shop in Delaware or Nevada, you can be recognized as domestic versus being considered foreign in any other state. It begs the question: If undocumented immigrants got together and incorporated themselves, would they be allowed to stay? If they were corporate people, it seems like the answer would be yes.
What makes me a bit nervous is that the corporate people may now start demanding unlimited Second Amendment rights. Some of those people can easily afford their own fighter jets, tanks, ships, cruise missiles and a well-armed militia to protect themselves with. I suppose the increased firepower would provide great incentive for paying our bills on time. One of their unmanned drones could even follow you to the bank perhaps.
We'll have to wait and see what the future brings. As long as Amendments 15, 19 and 26 are still in effect, there still may be hope for our democracy. Maybe someday, a corporation will even be elected president; as long as "it" can show a valid birth certificate and that it is at least 35 years old. The presidential seal could even be customized with the "person's" logo.
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69 Comments so far
Show AllOnly answer is:
Constitutional amendment stating that Corporations are not people, never have been, never will be.
That is not the "only answer." They can be abolished completely as well.
Interestingly, the Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad decision did not say or imply that corporations are people (and of course unions are in nearly every instance corporations). It was misrepresented in the head notes of that decision (written by a clerk, after the death of the presiding judge) that all persons, including artificial persons such as corporations, had the rights guaranteed to persons in the Constitution. Head notes are brief summaries of decisions that, in themselves, have no legal standing.
Nowhere in the Constitution is there a distinction between "natural" persons (living people as in the every-day use of the word person) and "artificial" persons (usually a corporation, but more generally some entity that can own property). But in the language used in law, at least by 1886, these two distinct uses of "person" had become commonplace. So from the standpoint of a lawyer in 1886, if someone writing a legal document wrote only the word "person" without qualifying it then they meant to include artificial persons as well as natural persons. However, the law does not pretend that corporations are the same as natural people - only (in some decisions) that they have the same rights as (natural) people under the constitution.
Perhaps someone can comment on whether corporations were regarded as artificial persons in 1776 - if so it was a serious oversight to leave out the word natural when referring to persons; maybe the founders needed better legal staff to go over the document before it was adopted. But corporations in 1776 were rare in America and they were much different from today's corporations; even if corporations were then considered (artificial) persons, the founders probably didn't give them much thought.
And of course since this all hangs on tiny details of language, perhaps someone needs to look carefully at the distinction between "person" and "people". I'm not sure the law has a notion of artificial people (as opposed to artificial persons).
...
Santorum's logic on the efficiency of private schools and corporate efficiency vrs public sector waste in recent town hall meeting: New York Times journalist Mr Blow then questioned his logic to which I posted this comment on their readers blog:
I concur that life long and accelerated learning are the mainstays of individual success whether that be self concept or $ to support the financial Corporate/Political structure that President Obama also supports along with massive military budgets. Just the cost of one F-35 could build one thousand vocational schools at one million a piece! In Canada the Harper government has also committed to 35 of these easy to knock out say by an old fashioned MIG boondoogles. That would buy every Canadain 12years - 25yrs 12 years of advanced Education. Invest in People no?
Wow, what a can of worms. I think this is the real Pandora's box. When you take this, plus the NDAA, plus the total Wall St control of our government...where the hell do we turn?
THE STREETS .... THE CAPITOLS ....THE COURTS
Non-violent non-violent non-violent
Time to squash some cans.
If corporations are considered persons, then why aren't the scumbags who have committed criminal acts doing perp walks? The CEO's of AIG, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America have all contributed to the collapse of the economy, as well as many others. So why in the name of personhood hasn't the Justice Department prosecuted these individual CEO's, CFo's, etc etc?
This is actually the best response to the mentally-bankrupt topic of corporate "personhood" that I've ever seen.
It's not corporations having the rights of citizenship that creates a problem for liberal democracy. It's that they have no obligations of citizenship. Good citizens recognize their obligations to the public interest even when no law requires them to.
Corporations do not recognize these obligations. The reason for this has to do with the way they are designed by the corporate law. See www.change.org and put code for corporate citizenship in the search engine.
Right-wing courts have openly ruled that corporations have all the rights of citizens, plus whatever they can get way with, which is plenty.
But right-wing courts have also tacitly ruled that actual people are NOT people, and have no rights at all, and are entitled only to imprisonment, torture, and assassination on the whim of the 1%, plus whatever the 1% feels like doing to them, which is also plenty.
The Occupy movement should subtitle itself the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Humans. Animals have more rights.
Civilization is in grave danger.
If corporations are people...then they can serve time in jail.
The Constitution guarantees us free speech and the Supreme Court has declared that money is speech.
Does this mean that we guaranteed free money? I kind of like that idea, but I think actually the Court declared that for corporations money is speech. Perhaps that is why the government is always giving free money to corporations.
I lived in Rye NH for a few months. I'm surprised that this letter prompted only one comment in Seacoast Online. I would have thought that it would have prompted an avalanche of outrage from the ultra-conservative, ultra-libertarians.
When one uses the word “corporation”, it is very important to clarify that you refer to a tiny, not-necessarily-US-national, minority of demographically identical 'PEOPLE-with-pulses' who populate the inter-locking boardrooms and corner offices operating behind the fascade of "corporation".
(That's the nice way to say it...insert 'sociopaths' and "Anti-Christ" in the appropriate spaces, for the juicy version.)
Seriously, each time we fail to make that distinction, we re-enforce the fiction of corporate personhood. 'We' are up against a flesh-and-blood global oligarchy using the "corporation" as a front to concentrate wealth and power in ways that will result in the destruction, of not only society and all that's been accomplished, but also, the ecosystem itself.
[We] are in a struggle for survival.
My wife has said from the beginning that if corporations are people, they should have a life expectancy and eventually die. The executives, board of directors, and all officers of the corporation disbanded and the assets distributed.
Corporations were created as a means to limit liability. Previous to the invention of corporations, people who gathered together to do something also faced the problem of unlimited liability. Through incorporation, they could pass this liability on to the corporation itself. So if the worse came to the worst, all they would lose is the value of their investment in the corporation. This is also why corporate officers can make decisions that result in the unintended death of people, but escape liablity (in most cases) for their decisions. A good example of this was Ford and the liability of Pinto gasoline tanks to catch fire in a rear end crash. A corporate officer had made a decision that in order to save a few dollars per car, the location of the exhaust and the structural design of the car was that the car was more likely to catch on fire in the event of a rear end crash. Ford did end up paying out judgements against the company because of it, but the corporate officer who had made these judgements never faced legal action. This is what incorporation does, although under certain circumstances a corporate officer can be held liable for actions such as fraud and such. But most of the time a corporate officer can escape legal liabilities for decisions he or she made. And of course stockholders have no legal liabilities at all, although a judgement against the corporation could reduce the value of their stock holdings...
If corporations are people then they should be prosecuted for their crimes against people or property.
Further, Corporations should be held accountable for any crime to which humans are held.
Seems they want it both ways.
Corporations are legal fictions and only exist at the whim of folks who write the regulations that allow them to be formed. They have no inherent right to exist and, for the good of all, should be legislated out of existence.