On Oct 29, 2011, at 5:10 PM, SA wrote:
> On 10/29/2011 2:03 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
>
>> The idea that the issue of "corporate personhood" has anything to
>> do with "scale and organization" betrays a lack of having
>> understood what the issue is all about. It has *nothing* to do
>> with the status of corporations, creatures of the states, as
>> *legal* "persons" able to act economically, to sue and be sued over
>> contractual issues, to provide limited liability to their owners.
>> It has to do with *constitutional* personality--the court-invented
>> gift of constitutional rights, rights that the text of the
>> constitution grants only to *natural* persons. Constitutional
>> corporate personhood is the means for capitalists to use the courts
>> to guarantee their property from expropriation, on the grossest
>> scale to evade taxes and legal controls, and to make ironclad their
>> financial control over the two-party system of "democratic"
>> electoral fraud, and, consequently, over the entire judicial system.
>>
>> The call to abolish corporate personhood consists simply of this
>> proposition:
>>
>> "All rights as specified in the US Constitution or as retained by
>> the people under the Ninth Amendment apply to all natural persons
>> and only to natural persons."
>
> In other words, you think the government should have the right to
> shut down the NAACP, ACLU, Amnesty International, etc. According to
> you, they should have no constitutional rights because they aren't
> natural persons.
No way. NAACP, ACLU, Amnesty International, etc. are *membership* associations, collectively exercising the personal constitutional rights of their members. In the (paraphrased?) citation from NAACP v. Button this is emphasized: "but a corporation may also assert free speech and free assembly rights on behalf of its members." A for- profit corporation has no members, only stockholders. That an association has *legal* personhood alters in no way the principle that its constitutional rights are those of its members.
Shane Mage
> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos
>
> See the 1961 Supreme Court case NAACP vs. Button:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAACP_v._Button
>
>> On September 29, 1956, the Virginia General Assembly enacted five
>> statutes regulating the practices of barratry, champerty, and
>> maintenance.....The bills were specifically aimed at curbing the
>> National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
>> in Virginia, which many racial segregationists believed was
>> responsible for "stirring up" integrationist lawsuits against the
>> state.[3] The bills also collectively required any group which
>> promotes or opposes state legislation aimed at (1) any race, (2)
>> any organization attempting to influence public opinion on behalf
>> of any race, or (3) any group raising funds to employ legal counsel
>> in connection with racial litigation to file a financial report and
>> membership list annually with state..[3] The Virginia NAACP filed
>> suit in federal court in 1956...
>>
>> Having asserted the Supreme Court's jurisdiction over the matter,
>> Brennan [for the majority] now turned to the constitutional issues
>> raised by the appellant. The state of Virginia argued that it was
>> not regulating the free speech of individual lawyers and citizens,
>> but rather that of a corporation (the National Association for the
>> Advancement of Colored People), and that the U.S. Constitution did
>> not protect the free speech rights of corporations as strongly as
>> it did that of people. Brennan disagreed: Corporations, he said,
>> not only have rights equal to that of individuals but a corporation
>> may also assert free speech and free assembly rights on behalf of
>> its members.[7]... The judgment of the Virginia Supreme Court of
>> Appeals [upholding the laws] was reversed.
>
> SA
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