“Corporations are people, my friend,” Mitt Romney famously said in 2011 while running for president. The Supreme Court decided the previous year that corporations could give money to political campaigns, just like people, and in 2014, the high court gave corporations religious freedom to deny contraceptives to employees, thereby letting them behave just as badly as people. If you prick corporations, do they not bleed?
Actually no, they don’t. But as of now, they can get presidential pardons.
The notion that corporations are people did not originate with the Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision in 2010. Way back in 1886, the high court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Union Pacific Railroad that corporations were covered by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. To be more precise, this question was addressed not in the decision (which resolved a local taxation dispute) but rather in a headnote that said the court “does not wish to hear argument on the question” of whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to corporations because “we are all of the opinion that it does.“ Somehow this non sequitur became legal precedent. “Later cases,” wrote Stetson University law professor Clara Torres-Spelliscy in a 2014 analysis for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, “uncritically cited the headnote as if it had been part of the case.”
You know what isn’t declining? Pardons for corporations. Trump has granted nine. These were never a thing before Trump—not in the modern era, and possibly never. According to Bloomberg’s Ava Benny-Morrison, the nine pardons wiped out $200 million in financial penalties, “some of which were destined for victims of wrongdoing.” Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri, told Bloomberg: “In any previous era no president would touch this with a barge pole. Maybe individual cases with some compelling reason, but the systemic elimination of criminal liability of major financial crime would never have happened before, and it didn’t.”
Half of the $200 million in wiped-out fines can be attributed to a single crypto company, BitMEX. The three co-founders of the company, a pioneer in crypto derivatives, all pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires maintaining certain safeguards against money laundering. Each paid $10 million in fines. Then, in July 2024, BitMEX itself pleaded guilty to the same crime, and this past January the company was fined $100 million.
This notion of corporate personhood is purely for our own convenience, so corporations can enter into contracts, have bank accounts, and so on. In no universe did the folks who wrote that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" mean to include corporations on that. After all, corporations were not created by the same Creator as people, were they*?
I would be 100% in favor of an amendment that clearly spells out that the rights enumerated in the Constitution are limited to actual humans, and any corporation or other group of people are not entitled to any more inherent rights than the humans who make up the corporation are entitled to collectively. You don't get more rights simply by paying a filing fee to Delaware!
This does not remove all of the privileges that we have granted corporations to make it easier to organize, but does mean that corporations have no inherent "right" to anything. Humans have those!
Edited to add: someone has proposed it already! https://www.movetoamend.org/amendment
* = Yes, this is Lemmy, so some snarky person will come along and say "of course they are! We made up both corporations and God!". But, the founders were deists and believed in a Creator, so let's try to look at it from their point of view, because that's what our backwards Supreme Court does....
Perhaps not in the ways people wildly imagine, and perhaps that's the intent.
No but by the same sorts of people who had the Tower of Babel built, intending to lord it over the common people.
We need to stop worshipping a piece of paper that's become so bulky and cumbersome, and which was disingenuous, from the beginning. Portugal did that, and so can any other state.
You might imagine a streamlined better outcome.
Practically speaking, almost certainly that path gets worse
I most certainly do not, but unless people stop with the Gell-Mann amnesia 🐂 💩 and start educating themselves on something besides liberal slop, it's definitely getting worse, regardless.
My brother in Baphomet. That don't make no sense. "People" (in general, excluding their direct descendents)... were not created by "same sorts" that created ziggurats... I get what you're trying to do there, I really do, but that particular aside doesn't make sense there semantically.
Yes, but also:
After all, corporations were not created by the same Creator as people, were they*?
The subject was corporations.
We need to stop worshipping a piece of paper that’s become so bulky and cumbersome, and which was disingenuous, from the beginning. Portugal did that, and so can any other state.
The verb was worshipping. Portugal didn't rewrite their Constitution in a vacuum. We're nowhere near ready for that.
I live in one of those states. So I'm feeling that, 💯. At the same time, nothing is gained without sacrifice. So I advocate education, preparation. And we're already in the hypercapitalism stage of collapse, and it's coming at us like an ICBM with a nuclear warhead. I'd just started making enough to tread water and suffered a work injury which significantly reduced my income. And we've still got more "~~FU, I got MINE~~" dubiously "well-meaning" liberals slapping the hands that would offer a long-term course of medicine that would cure this syphilitic paper-worship, both profit that casts our own, alive, onto the altar of Molech, as a burnt offering as we live-stream genocide and DARVO victims to maintain dollar hegemony for the priests of a Caanite storm and war G-d, bombing schools of little girls, who incidentally, were blessed by this same G-d, according to their own scripture, as well as a bald-faced lie of a Constitution.
And yet, to save the many and hopefully manifest a destiny that doesn't genocide and colonize and enslave and traffic non-whites, women, children, disabled and differently-abled as a sacrifice on the altars of Mammon and Molech, for the lust of money, sacrifices will be made. Should they not be made by those who know the risks and are willing, that the generations behind us may have a chance? And if not human chances, than whatever life may survive, because when these servants of greed, slavery, rape, and pedophilia will sacrifice the flora and fauna, they're already sacrificing the air, water, soil, so all that remains are the battles of ~~wands~~ ~~wills~~ fire (and possibly brimstone). To put it as someone far wiser than I:
Kill off mankind and give the Earth a chance. Nature may find, in her inheritance, some seedlings of a race less infinitely base.
Not that this is my preferred sentiment. I'm just saying the battles are coming, and people refuse to do the minimum to prepare. It would behoove all of us to face* our demons, that they become our holy guardian angels, before then.
Do what you will shall be the whole of the law. The Magnum Opus is not for the faint-hearted. Destiny looms.
Deus miserere nobis. In nomine patris et filii, et si spiritus sanctus.
I have to post this to proof it. I hope it's legible and makes sense to you, since it turned into a stream of consciousness.
I mean, I'm not entirely on a different page from you, but we have a lot of work to do to prepare and we have precious little time to do so. Investing too much energy in a constitution that is going to prove itself insufficient soon enough anyway seems like wasting time. Right now we should be prioritizing building resilient face-to-face networks to mobilize resources and people. I'm less worried about mankind being eliminated, and more concerned about who is going to be left, and the prepared shall inherit the earth. Lessons from the past, union movements, the underground railroad, the logistic and institutional frameworks show us the way. An army fights on its stomach and wars are won by supply lines, not just spears or bullets.
They want you to believe it's hopeless. That we need them, that we can't survive without them, that they are "inevitable" and that's just not true. Theirs is the path to ruin but we need not follow. Same as it ever was, community is the path to tomorrow, and we need to remember that. The hands of the kings are the hands of the healers. Those who work to make themselves worthy to serve their communities when they are needed, by the sword in defence when necessary, but more importantly by the hand of care. They build tools to break the ties that held us together. They feed us lies to make us hate. We can do better. We can weave a web of humanity through the fetid corpse of a nation and build something better, something wiser (always foolish, but ever wiser), but first that starts by putting a welcoming hand out to try again, not cursing the hand that was burned before. We will have time to mourn past failures some day, and the host of whatever lies beyond will weep with us. Pray we do not forget to do so when we get there, for it has been our curse since time immemorial to forget.
The wise man sometimes plants trees, whose fruit he will not live to see. It's a big task, and I am weary already, but I will rise for we are called; by 4 billion years of ancestors, if not something more. I hear your plea, and I'm sorry I cannot bring rest, but if I can perhaps offer some hope, that will carry you for now. We are alive, and where there is life, there is hope, however faint it may seem.
I mean, that was kind of the original point of my comment to which you replied, and my first reply to you.
I agree with you in principle, but I will note that in the US it is hard to agree on anything new, and at least the Constitution has stood for 200+ years as something we all agree on, even as we disagree on how to interpret it.
And please expand on what you mean about Portugal. I am ignorant on their history, but according to Wikipedia they got their current constitution 50+ years ago, after a military coup. I would like to avoid a coup here, because I can't really guarantee which side the military would pick....
Sigh.
Can't you at least try to imagine improvements, from execution to safeguards? You know the United States exists because of violent revolution and no one could guarantee the outcome, right?
As it is now, if we don't start taking steps to educate ourselves, the outcome is most assuredly guaranteed.
No, you dont get it. My objection isn't that the outcome is uncertain, it's that if the US military stages a coup in the US, it's not clear to me which side it would be fighting for.
You don't get it. There are other implications.
Did you mean amendments?
One of a great many reasons.
I said what I said.
No.
First of all, we're not there yet, but to maybe avoid any future conflicts depicted in scifi, we should narrow the rights protected to persons, and then define what a person is that doesn't constrict it to human. Or at least leave it open enough to allow different concepts of self aware beings while cutting off the very broad definition that allows a company to qualify.
How does that change the current law, though?
I'd be in favor of a rule that explains that organizing into associations doesn't change the rights of the individuals who form the association, but also that the association would only have rights that relate to the actual purpose of forming the association in the first place (whether it's a corporation, LLC, partnership, joint venture, other unincorporated associations).
So a church gets religious freedom. But a sandwich shop does not. A newspaper gets freedom of speech and may exercise editorial discretion on what goes on its pages. A telephone company does not, and cannot discriminate against the viewpoints expressed over its phone lines.
There are trickier issues: can a government ban halal slaughter, and would a Muslim-owned butcher shop be entitled to a religious exemption (if, assuming, individuals were granted that exemption)? I'd argue you have to look to the nature of the business or organization to determine whether that particular right applies to that organization, so the butcher shop can invoke the religion of the human butcher, and possibly even the human customers who want to buy halal meat.
But the framework makes sense to me, and is closely related to the principle of organizational standing, where something like a nonprofit association of apple growers can sue on behalf of apple grower rights, despite not being an organization that actually directly grows apples. That's how corporate rights should work: look to the reason for incorporating and the nature of the organization, and how it relates to the nature of the right at issue.
How does that work with indie pharmacies and birth control, or bakeries asked to decorate pro/antitrans cakes?