Senators, Representatives up for auction!

[CyrilsScribe]

Why would I bother to spend any money on contributions then?
Due to the fact that most money gets turned into some form of advertisement any money that I spend, usually in the tens of dollars or less will be swamped by what a large corporation (Pfizer, Exxon, Microsoft) spends in less than a second. I guess that means more talking to people directly to have any impacts and the days where you could donate and feel good are gone. Hopefully campaigns will stop calling my house.

[Dave]

My opinion on this is the same for unions and corporations both: they're not people and they don't have any guarantee of free speech. That's the end of the legal story. Moreover, they're contractual conglomerations of individuals, and nothing more. If unions and corporations feel that their interests are threatened, then they're more than welcome to have their constituent individuals contribute, but there's no reason they should be allowed to put the collective (and hence of greater impact than almost all single individual's) resources of their constituents to work for a particular candidate.

My (admittedly limited) understanding for the reasoning behind the "legal person" status, was that this was to protect the individuals who ran the company from suffering the full consequences of the business collapsing. This promotes small business formation, as the risk to you is substantially reduced when the distinction between "you" and "the company" is clearly demarked and creditors can only go after the company.

Without the existence of these protections (at least in the financial sense, I'm not talking about free speech), I would expect significantly fewer people to get into business and/or more people to be completely wiped out when their companies imploded for whatever reason. So, at least from a financial perspective, I can see the benefit (unless someone else has a better idea.)

As for free speech, I'm not currently seeing any benefits to granting freedom of speech rights to a corporation.

[Shinova]

There's limited liability companies, at least here in the US, where the company does not have identity as a person but the owner is protected from having infinite liability if the business goes belly-up.

[Master of Ossus]

I can't help but wonder if the legal status of corporations as taxable entities has added to the precedent for this case. I don't want to drag this thread into a debate on that subject, but at the same time the parallels seem to run deep.

That really has little to do with it. Corporate personhood was the way that corporations were seen even during the Revolution (although back then most corporations were essentially local affairs in the US, or were schools). Income tax, obviously, didn't kick in until the early twentieth century (at least what we would consider a modern one--there was an ostensible personal income tax levied during the Civil War and an abortive one that was struck down by the Supreme Court and thus forced passage of the 16th Amendment), although there were some interesting developments created by that (e.g., it wasn't realized that they were subjecting corporate pyramids to multi-corporate taxes on intercorporate dividends when they passed the first income tax, which was rectified the following year after everyone realized what had happened). But as Congress was considering installing a national income tax, Since then, the US has largely distinguished corporate income from individual income for reasons that are too many and too complex to do justice to in a one-off post. My point is only that corporations have consistently been viewed as separate and distinct from their shareholders and management for legal purposes, and have been conceived of as "artificial persons" dating back to English law, and that corporate profits and distributions taxes really have little to do with that.

There's limited liability companies, at least here in the US, where the company does not have identity as a person but the owner is protected from having infinite liability if the business goes belly-up.

Wait, LLC's aren't conceived of as people on the same footing as corporations? What? In what states? Even partnerships are conceptualized, in at least limited areas, as being separate individuals who are distinct from the partners. I'm very surprised that this is the case.

Regardless, LLC's and other forms of non-corporate limited liability entities are recent developments, though. Most states didn't have such entities in the 1950's and '60's, and some held out until the 1990's. They were all heavily influenced by the corporate form, which was obviously very well established by then.

[Surlethe]

I guess I had it backwards. The corporate income tax is just parallel because it is a result of corporate personhood, not vice-versa.

We now conclude this mini-hijack and return your thread to its regular scheduling.

[Shroom Man 777]

Wow. It looks like the Republicans, conservatives, and fascists are really getting their shit together. With this, and other recent events, in mind it looks like Obama's reelection is getting unlikelier as we speak...

This is how democracy dies. With lots and lots of dineros! Woo-hoo!

[Knife]

So if Corporations are people, and the boards that run them are like legal guardians running the corporate personhood, then can the courts take custody of the 'person' if the 'person' seems to be being abused? How far does this 'personhood' go? Do the laws about not using a kids money that made it by parents for their personal use come into play?

[Big Orange]

Oops, I posted this story elsewhere.

Anyway it's a good thing there is the current Haiti catastrophe to distract most news journalists and members of the public from this blatant abuse of money and power.

This is revenge for Obama dismissing lobbyists from Federal advisory boards (alongside the GOP recently winning Massachusetts).