On Fri, 7 Oct 2011, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Yikes, this corporate personhood thing is ludicrous too. I may scream.
To be fair, the corporate personhood thing, unlike the Fed thing, has a reasonable core that just got extended too far. It's perfectly fair to argue that corporate persons shouldn't have all the rights of natural persons -- that they don't deserve the same protection for their speech, for example. That's where most of the recent upsurge comes from I think -- as a spin-off of the Citizen's Union verdict.
And not having thought it through, they say Abolish Corporate Personhood because it seems like the simple solution and a snappy slogan and people have been saying it in prairie populist circles for decades. What they would mean if they thought it through is "Make a legal distinction between fictional and natural persons, such that the bill of rights can be limited for the former by statute and regulatoin whenever it serves the public interest." I.e., that their rights are not absolute, as they are for natural persons. But that's soporific.
Michael