by Deb Cupples | The corporate-personhood debate is raging, and it's silly. Like most third-year law students, all U.S. Supreme Court Justices know better. Apparently, they cannot resist grabbing some spotlight while engaging in bizarre verbal gymnastics.
Corporations don't even exist on the physical plane, which is why law professors call corporations a "legal fiction." Corporations can't even physically do anything, like drive a car or eat a sandwich. The only thing a corporation can do is what human beings do in a corporation's name.
Corporations exist only because some legal documents say that they do -- kind of like Santa Clause's existing because parents say that he does.
Robots are closer to human beings than corporations are. Should robots have all the same constitutional rights that human beings have?
Fact: the people who own, run or work for corporations already have their (personal) Constitutional rights, precisely because they are people. Giving extra rights to corporations would be grossly unfair, as it would give the people who own, run, and work for corporations access to more rights than the rest of us have.
For example, most adult American people have a constitutional right to vote. If corporations are given the right to vote, then some of the people who own, run, or work for corporations (i.e., the ones who would cast a corporations' ballots) would get to vote more than once.
A New York Times editorial states:
"The question at the heart of one of the biggest Supreme Court cases this year is simple: What constitutional rights should corporations have? To us, as well as many legal scholars, former justices and, indeed, drafters of the Constitution, the answer is that their rights should be quite limited — far less than those of people.
"This Supreme Court, the John Roberts court, seems to be having trouble with that. It has been on a campaign to increase corporations’ legal rights — based on the conviction of some conservative justices that businesses are, at least legally, not much different than people."
Conviction? That almost sounds like an ideal or principle. Actually, it's more like a political agenda.
Yes, the Roberts court (like the Bush Administration) has been on a multi-year campaign to push the interests of elite folks who run big corporations -- at the expense of us ordinary Americans. At least the so-called "conservative" justices have pushed that agenda (i.e., Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito).
And it's hypocritical as Hades....
Those same so-called "conservative" justices staunchly scream their (purported) opposition to "activist judges" at the very same time that said "conservative" justices actively campaign to push a pro-corporate-executive agenda.
Hypocrisy is a huge clue that what someone is trying to market as a "principle" or "ideal" is anything but.
The Times also points out:
"In an exchange this month with Chief Justice Roberts, the solicitor general, Elena Kagan, argued against expanding that narrowly defined personhood. 'Few of us are only our economic interests,' she said. 'We have beliefs. We have convictions.' Corporations, 'engage the political process in an entirely different way, and this is what makes them so much more damaging,' she said....
"Justice Antonin Scalia said most corporations are 'indistinguishable from the individual who owns them.'”
There's an example of Justice Scalia forgetting his own so-called "principles" to support his agenda. He knows full well that corporations are highly distinguishable from the individuals who own them -- and in fundamental ways.
First, corporations don't have organic, physical bodies: they can't bleed or break bones or feel pain; they can't be put in jail when they break the law. Actually, corporations cannot even commit an act that would break the law: the people who run or work for corporations are the only ones who commit the acts.
Conversely, the people who own corporations have bodies and can be jailed.
Second, corporations have potential immortality. Seriously. A corporation can survive hundreds -- theoretically even thousands -- of years.
Conversely, the people who own corporations, being human, are strictly mortal.
Basically, a corporation is an invisible, non-physical shield against an owner's legal liability.
For example, if a corporate employee dumps toxins into your ground water and your family members start coming down with cancer, the corporation might become liable for damages (i.e., might have to pay your medical bills, etc).
BUT the corporation's owners won't become liable (unless your lawyers pierce the corporate veil, which is a different story altogether).
Corporations already have many rights: e.g., they can advertise, make money, own property, sue, be sued, enter contracts....
If corporations get the right to influence our elections, the result would essentially be that the relative few people who own or run corporations would have more than a once-person-one-vote type of influence on our elections.
I'm NOT saying that we shouldn't have corporations or that they shouldn't have some rights. The invisible liability shield that we call a "corporation" has played a vital part in our nation's progress in terms of commerce and technology.If individual investors could be held personally liable for misdeeds of the people working for the companies that investors had invested in, then no one would feel safe investing in commerce or technology.
If investors hadn't felt safe over the last few decades, we might not today have laptops, hybrid cars, or I-tunes.
To be sure, the legal fiction we know as the corporation has served our society well in some respects. And lawmakers and courts have already given corporations many rights.
It just doesn't make sense to start regarding and treating an invisible legal fiction as a human being -- especially when doing so would come at the expense millions of us real human beings.
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