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[Piecake]

What links these two news items? In both cases, corporations, or agents of corporations, are displaying good citizenship. Americans' fight—against bigotry, neo-Nazi sympathies, and Big Brother-style surveillance—is, in these two cases, their fight.

Nor is this anomalous. During many recent legal and social battles—for the survival of affirmative action, for example, or for marriage equality, or for protection of transgender people against punitive ”bathroom bills," to name a few—large consumer companies and professional sports corporations have weighed in on the side of marginalized and endangered groups. Tech companies often speak up when they see threats to online privacy or danger of discrimination against their employees. Pharmaceutical companies have firmly disassociated themselves from the death penalty. And health insurance and hospital corporations were an important force in defeating the administration's plan to gut the Affordable Care Act. In a society where civil society groups—churches, universities, civic groups, and unions—sometimes seem enfeebled, corporate voices have made a difference.

Those facts provide a moment to rethink quietly one of the key ideas that floats around among the progressive community—that corporations are anti-democratic, and that they should be stripped of their constitutional rights

This demand is at the core of much of the organizing taking place against campaign-finance decisions, such as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that have made possible the domination of our politics by wealthy special interests. Many progressives believe devoutly that Citizens United held that ”corporations are people" and ”money is speech." The answer, they argue, is simply to take constitutional personhood, and constitutional protection, away from these sinister entities.

Consider the ”People's Rights Amendment" offered by Free Speech for People, one of the major groups seeking an amendment to roll back Citizens United: ”The words people, person, or citizen as used in this Constitution do not include corporations, limited liability companies or other corporate entities..." Move to Amend, another progressive group, proposes inserting this constitutional language: ”Artificial entities established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law."

It sounds good. But there's a problem: If the protections of the First Amendment didn't apply to corporations, the CEOs of the dissenting companies above would be opening their companies to legal, open retaliation by the government—cancellation of contracts, exclusion from government programs, and other measures a spiteful administration could take to punish them. The First Amendment prevents this sort of retaliation against the leaders as persons—but it would offer no shelter to their corporations, which Trump could punish at whim; the corporation itself wouldn't even be entitled to Fifth Amendment due process. No CEO faithful to his or her charge would dare open their corporation to such danger.

And if the Fourth Amendment's protection against ”unreasonable searches and seizures" didn't apply to corporations, DreamHost would have been forced to hand over the required information by now. No court could even hear the company's challenge.

The campaign finance problem, in fact, has little to do with corporations, and everything to do with the increasing share of America's wealth held by a few greedy individuals. It is wealthy individuals, far more than giant corporations, who are poisoning our politics. Stripping corporations of rights would do nothing to reduce the power of the Koch brothers, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, or hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer.

As for corporations, Kent Greenfield, a law professor at Boston College, recently wrote that ”corporations may provide a brake on the political pendulum's rightward swing ... To survive, corporations must be inclusive and multicultural in ways that homogeneous, economically distressed, insular tribes are not."

https://www.theatlantic.com/politic...corporations-display-good-citizenship/537231/

 

[Kin5290]

Corporations played a vital role in killing the anti-transgender bathroom bill here in Texas. Again.

They basicallly forced the pro-business GOP to break from the religious/cultural conservative GOP.

 

[Piecake]

Corporations played a vital role in killing the anti-transgender bathroom bill here in Texas. Again.

They basicallly forced the pro-business GOP to break from the religious/cultural conservative GOP.

What I find interesting is that without corporate personhood these corporations would not have freedom of speech and would not be able to protest against these sorts of things without facing reprisals. I am rather embarrassed to admit that I never really made that connection before.

This also makes sense:

As for corporations, Kent Greenfield, a law professor at Boston College, recently wrote that “corporations may provide a brake on the political pendulum’s rightward swing … To survive, corporations must be inclusive and multicultural in ways that homogeneous, economically distressed, insular tribes are not.”

Because corporations are the only players who care about multiculturalism and inclusiveness that the GOP and conservatives actually give a shit about.