Forum Post: Well thought out consequences if Corporate "Personhood" were to be eliminated.
Posted 12 years ago on Oct. 30, 2011, 1:41 p.m. EST by PhilArthur
(54)
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I for one would like to hear some well thought out consequences that would follow if an amendment to the Constitution said that Corporations are not people. What impact would this change have on lobbying and campaign reform if corporations no longer had the RIGHT to engage in those people activities. What kinds of laws do you see being enacted as a result of government having to once again listen to the voices of constituents instead of cowtowing to corporate monied interests?
Where does the common sense approach to such an amendment lead and what would its impact on the 99% mean in real terms?
Supreme Court will now use their decision as precedent to invalidate any attempt by congress or the president to eliminate corporate personhood. The only way to get it overturned is to amend the constitution.
Call an Article V convention, and take every single state legislature to hammer through the will of the people. It is very much a revolution to do this, and we're not on track at all. OWS is failing.
Agreed. Article V is the way to go. We could do it rapidly too.
You should vote up posts you agree with to make sure they stay on the top of the tree for longer.
Absolutely agree. A constitutional convention is the way to go.
There is one other way and all options should be made available, agree? We are not looking at how 99ers in other countries are keeping their SCOTUS in check. Hubris was clobbered by Nemesis. 39 nations have adopted a New Guard system at the insistance of the public. The 99ers commission Jason Bourne to indict or impeach justices who after an investigation are shown to be corrupt. Jason works for the public as the justices work for the public but never is this New Guard to be appointed by the Gov. This duty is for the 99ers to provide for their future security. Our New Guard from our Declaration of Independence has been developed, refined, tested and proven over 200 years and now employed by 25 OECD nations. The only reason this ruling was made was because we never adopted our own system. Two states have and you can bet their superior court justices would never consider such a ruling with Jason standing over them ready to clobber. We can go with article V but this will not address us doing our duty in providing this guard.
Yes, a constitutional amendment would be required.
I agree completely about using an Article V convention, but think your wrong about OWS failing. OWS is the mechanism for putting pressure on the states to call for a convention, and that mechanism is growing stronger everyday. We just have to figure out how to get so many different groups all acting by consensus to agree to a goal like this. I think this specific goal has merit because
This would be a good way to sniff out opponents of such action, organize recall elections the way Wisconsin did recently on their state senators, then push for a candidate who supports such action on a party other than dem or gop. the ows party or something
It depends upon what you mean by revoking it. As is made clear in the well-written wikipedia entry on the topic "corporate personhood" is a complex beast that ranges from the legal permission for limited liability companies to own property and to sue or be sued for their actions as well as the more broad interpretation expressed in the Citizens United decision that corporations have free speech rights. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Corporate_political_spending
In the broadest terms if you amended USC $1 you would eliminate the ability of companies to exist in any real sense because they could no longer own buildings just as unions could not longer have offices. That might even prevent an organization like OWS from existing in its current form. On the other hand if you wanted to reformulate the law according to older statutes or caselaw that held that corporations as creatures of statute were not entitled to the same rights as humans but could still own property, etc. Then that might be different.
One point that I have always wondered about is punishment. Can corporations be sentenced to death? They can kill people, and at least in Texas that means death for a person, why not a corporation?
Thx for the response and clarifying what I mean here. I personally believe that for-profit corporations should be able to grow, i.e. use profits to buy other assets, such that the size of the corporation becomes larger. People accumulate larger pieces of property all the time. It would be the owners that are actually making their property larger... the property being the corporation. But yes, the details of what was actually happening here would indeed become more complex, but at least it would be real.
Foreseeable consequences of revoking the rights of corporations to freedom of speech and the freedom to assemble would be that corporate officers would be limited to strategies and managerial decisions to generate profits and growth; they would not be able to lobby or influence the political process to reach these business goals though. Laws would be a natural outgrowth of this process to define what is meant in various murky areas that require further clarification.
Not sure what you mean by punishment here. If corporations are not people, they can't be killed, they would only be liquidated property if action was taken against them. If you are questioning who would be responsible if someone died as a result of the action of a corporation; I think here again laws would result as a consequence of removing personhood and liability/responsibility would not be a whole lot different from what we have now.
In some ways you could get the consequences by making officers actually responsible for the conduct of the company. Under present laws corporate officers are allowed to claim little to no responsibility for the actions of the corporations. Until Sbarnes-Oaxley it was ok for the CEO and finance executives could send out reports that were false and claim no responsibility for the contents (i.e. Enron). But still for many acts such as "rogue traders" and various levels of environmental damage the executives are "not responsible" in any personal way thus they can have the company do these things and then get away with it.
With respect to punishment I was making a comment about immunity. Functionally companies are immune from meaningful criminal penalties.
The doctrine of "Legal Personality" is the doctrine by which an individual may hold accountable a corporation for human rights violations, among other things. So you can't simply say "Corporations are no longer people" and leave a void in its place. You must explicitly define what a corporation IS, its rights and responsibilities and you better be damn careful about the words you choose especially if you are mucking around with the Constitution itself in doing this, because it is fraught with the risk of unintended consequences.
Point well taken, I agree. Corporations would still be legal entities IMO. They just would not be people with all of the same rights guaranteed to individuals by the Bill of Rights.
There would be no consequences only a better functioning still broken system. The impact of eliminating bribery would mean balance, in real terms income equality. But you want to hear consequenses. We would lose 1% of us to dire nightmares They would suffer a complete belief system crash needing psycotheapy. The 99ers would have to provide a safety net for them that we could not afford. We could have crazed 1%ers screaming in the streets for power to return to them causing us to not get any sleep.
I really think corporations would just find another way to get their foot in the door. Lobbyists would just change their tactics a bit. As long as Senators and Congressman are there to pass the laws corporations want, the problem will not go away. A law passed such as you suggest along with term limits so the 'buddy' system would go away would be very effective. (Just my 2 cents)
No doubt there will be illegal activity. The difference now is that such activities would carry legal penalties instead of operating freely as it is done now.
Very simply... they would cease to exist. And as long as legislation exists to regulate the behavior of those incorporated, there will be attempt to influence.
Why would corporations cease to exist? As property, corporations would still exist, they would just have owners instead of being "people".
For instance, corporations might like to continue to pay dollars to lobbyists to influence; but as a result of the amendment I can see that a consequence would be that lawmakers would enact laws where use of paid lobbyist would be unlawful. The voters would demand of their representatives that laws be made to keep corporate money out of politics.
Anything done behind closed doors to influence lawmaking by corporations would be a punishable crime.
Semantics... it's semantics; no corporation can exist unless for and as an association of people. That is why villages are said to be "incorporated." You are attempting to separate us from the machine; and no conglomeration of machines can be said to be a corporation.
Why can't corporations exist as property? I own a house but my house can't contribute to a political candidate, nor can my house lobby for anything. I must do those things.
But a corporation uses its assets (an extension of that property) to pay for lobbyists or to support a candidate. If corporations did not have that right, then the owners would have to take the cash out of their pocket for such activities.
Once you reduce a person to speaking only for him/herself, instead of their property paying for such activities, you level the playing field. I don't think this is just a matter of semantics.
Remember, if a corporation doesn't have the right to freedom of assembly nor speech, they could no longer actively organize nor engage in lobbying from the boardroom.
I see the elimination of corporate personhood resulting in individuals facing the prospect of paying income out of pocket to influence their lawmakers. I think you would you would be hard pressed to find unanimous support for specific corporate business issues if individual stockholders paid out of their pocket for influence instead of it coming from the boardroom where it is influence is neatly packaged and organized. Individual owners (shareholders, corp execs, etc.) all have a multitude of other issues they support and I see K-street growing smaller as a result of Corporations becoming property.
Because the house you speak of is an asset of your personal corporation.
Assets are inanimate, non human...
You yourself speak for your asset; that house would not exist without human direction.
A corporation may own assets but.... all corporations are human devices... there is an association of people - board members, employees... affiliated associations, a seller and a buyer, etc.
This is not an argument of "personhood" - the corporation is not a person but an association of people. And corporations don't influence legislation - people do, either singularly or in association, in the form of backroom deals.
The only way to eliminate attempts to influence government for the purpose of favorable legislation, is to remove legislation entirely - eliminate all of it. These are human negotiations, not robotic or machine negotiations, that consist of deals and favors.
No matter, you will never eliminate the 37000 attorneys as lobbyists... or the attorneys in Congress. The problem is compounded by the fact that many corporations have already grown too large, too powerful, within the scope of law- they have unlimited resources with which to bargain.
The one point ur missing is that corporate funds are used to control all this activity right now. If corporations were not permitted to use funds in this manner those people would need to influence their legislators in other ways, either individually or by forming a true association outside of the corporation boardroom.
The influence playing field would be leveled if corporate money was barred from the field.
Soft money is little more than legalized corruption under the guise of freedom of association. But without this vehicle the perspective of an official would not be possible because there will always be attempts to influence. We could eliminate all law, eliminate the legislator, but we could never eliminate the intermediary representative or Congressman because a nation of 300 mil can sit down for a face to face with a Pres, it's physically impossible. As long as we have representatives, however chosen, and attempts to regulate the corporation, there will always be attempts to influence. The alternative is to eliminate republican government, and leave it to survival of the fittest - militaristic dictatorship, fascist communism, in essence, the totalitarian crime syndicate.
There has been some reference to government without hierarchy... direct democracy.... that is exactly how this nation began. For 150 years, or approximately seven or eight generations, we lived under this form of government. Our present form is the result of attempts to confederate for the purpose of combined defense, initially, and then, following victory, attempts to establish central governance in unbiased, non prejudicial, diplomatic form. It was intended as the polar opposite of dictatorship inclusive of the stop gaps. It is not a perfect union; there are pros and cons to various aspects... but the stop gaps are very real. If we're going to approach this honestly, then soft money as disclosed is the only viable means.