Freedom is assembly and freedom of speech add up to freedom of group speech, including unions, political groups, ethnic groups, and so on. I don't know why corporations would be special groups without that right.
But, yeah, corporate personhood and bailouts need to be revisited. It's too bad that we need to have a functional policital culture to make any significant changes like that.
I own some Apple stock. I don’t influence in any meaningful way how Apple spends its money. I don’t influence in any meaningful way their corporate policy. The owners of Apple, save for a few individuals, don’t have a real say in how Apple uses its freedom of speech. Apple is not a group of people coming together in the same way political organizations are and Apple/Google/Exxon, etc. have far more money to send on political speech than any other organized group of people.
> I don’t influence in any meaningful way their corporate policy.
And donating $15 to AARP doesn't give you any meaningful influence over its positions.
> The owners of Apple, save for a few individuals, don’t have a real say in how Apple uses its freedom of speech.
But that's mostly true of any consumer-level involvement of any very large organization. It doesn't matter if it's Apple, Greenpeace, or the Libertarian Party.
> Apple/Google/Exxon, etc. have far more money to send on political speech than any other organized group of people.
Probably, but while money is helpful to getting your message out, it's not the only important things. Worse funded candidates beat better funded opponents. If anything, incumbent advantages seem more important and worrisome.
But with a more principled perspective, there isn't a mechanism by which free speech rights can be curtailed just because someone is especially resourced. If so, shouldn't we also criticize white collar professional societies for doctors, lawyers, realtors, and the like? They're much more capable of lobbying than associations of dishwashers (as if kitchen staff had time and energy for that).
A company is not an organization of people who come together to exercise their free speech. This is especially true of large corporations. Large corporations are controlled by a few individuals and those individuals have at their disposal large sums of money. They have an outsized influence on the political process in a system that does not cap their ability to spend on political purposes. A company ought not have any free speech rights. It’s not a person and indeed is not a single individual. The free speech rights of employees and directors of a company are not in any way curtailed by limiting the ability of a company to influence the political process of a country.
As I stated in my previous post the amount of money at a large corporation’s disposal far exceeds that of any other organization of people who come together to advocate on their behalf. Professional societies of doctors can’t come close to the amount of money that Apple or Google have at their disposal. The difference in money between the dishwashers and doctors is dwarfed by the difference between doctors and Apple.
Countries like France and Germany are generally considered free and yet their corporations don’t have free speech rights and are limited in what they can do in terms of political spending. Before Citizens United most Americans considered America a free country and yet corporations weren’t considered to have the same free speech rights as humans. It’s been recognized by most people that money greatly influences elections and policy. Hence societies concerned about becoming oligarchies tend to have strict controls on political spending by a single individual and corporation.
A corporation is not at all like a professional society of doctors or of any other group of people. It’s a matter of magnitudes of scale and differing purpose. We used to have laws against one company owning too much media and yet we felt free at the time. I’m not going to convince you to change your mind on whether or not corporations should have free speech. I’m just pointing out that corporations are, indeed, not like a professional society of doctors.
A professional society of doctors is free to have a rule that members must pledge to be of a particular religion. Can a company have that rule? A company is not a group of people coming together for the purpose of influencing policy or expressing their free speech.
I almost forgot to mention another thing to consider. Apple is owned in part by people living in other countries. Most people of a given country don’t want their politics unduly influenced by people who don’t live there.
Citizens United is a conservative non-profit organization, formed expressly to influence policy. Examples of a for-profit company engaging in free speech would be the New York Times Company, or Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11.
I meant Citizens United as a reference to the Supreme Court case not to the specific entity in that case. The effect of the cas was that corporations in the U.S. have free speech rights.
Citizens United overturned a recent law. People were calling the law unconstitutional when it passed. And nobody serious says the New York Times doesn’t have free speech rights. That has been protected by previous rulings.
Most people did not have a problem with McCain-Feingold. Some people did. The effect of Citizens United is that corporations have the same free speech rights as humans. This despite the fact that Citizens United (the entity) is not a for-profit corporation. One has to look at the effect of the ruling since it’s effect is quite broad in scope and not just at the specifics of the case.
Most free societies have limits on what corporations and organizations can spend on political campaigns. This was true of the U.S. too until recently. Until recently the belief that a nonhuman should have the same free speech rights as a human was bizarre. It’s still considered bizarre in just about every other nation in the world. I suppose this is another example of American Exceptionalism. What other people could have been brave enough to grant the same free speech rights humans have to non humans!
There are serious people who believe that the New York Times has rights when it comes to printing news. Many of these same serious people believe that the New York Times should not have the right to spend its profits as they see fit on whatever political campaigns/parties/candidates it wants to.
> A company is not an organization of people who come together to exercise their free speech.
Except for news companies, entertainment companies, education companies, advertising companies, companies that place advertising, and companies whose interests need to be represented to elected officials and the public, sure.
And think of it from the other side. If the New York Times gets special free speech rights for journalistic reasons, who decides that they qualify as special? Does the government get to decide what counts as journalism? There's no mechanism for that either.
As to international concerns:
- Many of the things I mention (like deciding who gets especially free speech) are broad concerns, not ones specific to the U.S.
- Because of the principle of freedom of association, people from other countries are free to stay away from companies or countries, at least to the degree their governments allow that freedom.
It's fair to be concerned that corporations have negative impact at times. But large companies also use free speech to promote social, health, and environmental causes all the time. We don't complain about pink ribbon campaigns, global warming awareness initiatives, partnerships with nonprofits, sponsorships of publicly produced content, and other corporate speech like that.
Disagree. Those companies exercise their owner's or editors' free speech. The rest of the large organization are functionaries with severe limits on their speech, like at any other corporation.
I've yet to hear a fair mechanism for making those kinds of distinctions in objective courtrooms instead of in subjective editorial pages and message threads.
Every group has processes, rules, and norms for deciding how to produce and distribute content.
The New York Times is not an organization of people who came together to exercise their free speech rights. Its employees are there, primarily, to work. The product they sell is information/entertainment. This product does not change the goal which is to make money and does not change that it’s not an organization of people who came together to exercise their free speech rights.
It used to be the case that media had a special set of regulations regarding their ownership and how large they could be in terms of expansion. That is effectively no longer the case. The government, by the laws it enacted, has the authority to regulate media companies. Well, they used to. Society through it’s leaders gets to decide these things, for the most part. There are limits on what can legally be done by the government. Thanks to the Supreme Court that limit has been greatly expanded. The fact is that until recently few people held the belief that corporations should have the same free speech rights as humans.
Should Toyota, a foreign corporation with presence in the U.S., have the ability to influence American elections the way that a professional society of American doctors has? Allowing corporations to have the same free speech rights as humans is quite bad and will have long term bad consequences for the country.
Until Citizens United corporations didn’t have the same free speech rights as humans. This idea is a recent phenomenon. It’s unique, I believe, to the U.S. The U.S. is not the only “free” country in the world. This ought to suggest to you that perhaps something is strange with the notion of a corporation having the same free speech rights as a human.
I wish the protectors of corporate rights were as vigilant when it came to the rights of humans. But this isn’t the case in the U.S. so I’m in favor of companies not having speech limits in the U.S. for the same reason that I voted for Trump. The U.S. deserves the mess it is in. Let the road to serfdom be an easy one to navigate!
You can sell your shares if you think Apple is spending money that is not good for making its shareholders more money. You selling shares will have non zero impact on the market price of Apple shares.
The shareholder still has no input if the only option is to sell. In the same spirit a country could tell its citizens that they should leave if they don't like it here.
And Apple can have COMPLETELY open books for transparency if they choose to donate or fund political advertising and/or support. Individuals have rights. Corporations are a bargain for limited liability and should have limited rights as a result.
Corporations exist to limit the liability of owners, in particular to decrease risk to owners. Given that owners of corporations are given such special treatment, it makes perfect sense that such an organization does not inherit the rights of the citizens that are protected from the results of the corporation's actions.
Yes. And recall that, in the US before that late 1890s, only public-interest corporations were legal. Because that was the tradeoff for the ability to arbitrarily concentrate capital, with limited-liability. If a corporation violated its public-interest charter, it could be dissolved.
But then the railroad corporations got big and rich enough to buy off Congress and the Supreme Court. They got human rights before women did ;)
Corporate personhood cuts both ways. If a corporation doesn't have free speech rights or any of the rights of a person, does it have legal obligations? Can it be sued? Can it enter into a contract and be held to it's terms? The ability of courts to hold corporations accountable under the law and the constitution, in the United States, also relies on the notion of corporate personhood.
The notion that people do not lose their legal and constitutional rights when acting collectively seems to me to be a very dangerous one to want to revoke, and it's not obvious to me that any legal right granted by a specific law should entail any unstated or implicit revocation of any other such rights.
Newspapers are corporations. Do they have no right of free speech? OK so you could start carving out all sorts of technical exceptions, but that way lies madness and a bonanza for the legal profession at little benefit so far as I can see.
Finally as to limited liability, as I understand it limited liability corporations are generally subject to additional taxes as a cost of their liability privileges and that seems to me to be a practical and proportionate arrangement.
All corporations have limited liability, the limits vary as do the requirements. The fact is, they only exist because the government permits them and assigns these rules, there's no practical reason that non-living entities cannot be restricted in exchange for those benefits assigned. Except now it would take a constitutional amendment to overcome supreme court precedent.
What that means in practice is that corporations that are friendly to the establishment can say whatever they want, and those that oppose the establishment are subject to prosecution.
Evidence? This was a relatively recent decision. If what you say is true, there should be mountains of relatively recent evidence for it in the US. Otherwise you're just promoting a groundless personal theory.
This is human nature. Chelsea Manning got prosecuted, while all the other leakers don't. People with bumper stickers are more likely to get pulled over. Look at what European countries do to crack down on speech.
There is already limited liability of the whole in lieu of personal rights... there doesn't need to be any reason to restrict rights of corporations beyond any typical group.
Assembly is fine, but as far as I'm concerned, any organization that accepts donations for political purposes should be required to have open books, outlining where donations come from, and not allowing donations from foreign sources, including international conglomerates.
That's just where I stand... I go very far on personal liberty, and the ability to form groups with public receipts, but that's where it should end.
But, yeah, corporate personhood and bailouts need to be revisited. It's too bad that we need to have a functional policital culture to make any significant changes like that.