[lbo-talk] corporate personhood

[Fernando Cassia]

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 4:36 AM, J Cullen <jcullen at austin.rr.com> wrote:
> If corporations were denied recognition as persons, they would be governed
> by statutes, as they were from the founding of the United States through
> this past year.  Government still would not have the ability to abridge the
> freedom of speech, or of the press -- and one could argue that corporations,
> including non-profits, still would have the right to run programming such as
> the Hillary attack movie, since the First Amendment doesn't limit the
> freedom to persons.
>
> But corporations claimed they should be protected from discrimination under
> the 14th Amendment, which was drawn up in 1866 and ratified in 1868 to
> provide equal protection for freed slaves, as "persons born or naturalized
> in the United States." The first case apparently giving corporations
> protection under the 14th Amendment was the 1886 case of Santa Clara County
> v. Southern Pacific Railroad, where the presumption of civil rights for
> corporations was the result of an overzealous Supreme Court reporter who
> also was a former New York railroad president, and who wrote in the
> headnotes to the case, "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," when the court
> apparently made no such determination.  But in later years Supreme Courts
> seemed to accept the theory of corporate personhood and showed increasing
> deference to the rights of corporations as they seek to escape taxes and
> regulation from the state.

Exactly. Or, there´s the audiovisual version, by Mark Achbar:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-684415688278839051#

FC