>
> 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.
So does that mean Amnesty International, another fictional person, should have its Bill of Rights protections limited too? Or a legally registered food co-op? Does that mean David Koch, a natural person, should be free to buy elections, just as long as he doesn't do it through Koch Industries Inc.?
It's not a good idea that's been miscast. It's just a bad idea, that starts from the wrong premise. If the aim is to get money out of politics, then why not just make the slogan Money Isn't Speech?
SA