Corporate Personhood

I don't think there are many people who talk about getting rid of corporate personhood would, if drilled down, think that a corporation shouldn't be a legal entity with its own rights and responsibilities. That is after all, why corporations came in to being in the first place.The issue is more over what power the logical entity that is a corporation should have. In the most recent situation, corporations were granted a semblance of "freedom of speech" by the virtue that this is a right we grant to natural persons. The problem I see is that there many other instances where we deny a corporation freedom of speech for perfectly legitimate and mostly non-contoversial reasons.For example, a corporation cannot publicly state that their product is effective for the treatment of a disease without the government's approval. That is explicit censorship of ideas that corporation might certainly want to make and may even be true but does not have the right to make without consulting a body that is the product of our democracy.Corporations are also uniquely FORCED to produce speech in certain circumstances. You cannot sell food in the US without a nutrition label and you cannot sell tobacco products without a warning.In other cases, a corporation having the freedom of speech is of utmost importance. The ability for a corporation to ignore a gag order about a NSL was vital in protecting everyone's freedoms in an ever growing security state.So right or wrong, agree or not, the current state of our democracy supports the freedom of speech for corporations in some cases and not others. The argument is therefore about where to draw the line.I for one think that rather than abolishing the concept of corporat personhood, we need to establish a CLEAR concept of corporatehood and give it an explicit set of instructions such as a Corporate Bill of Rights.One of the items in there that I think would be important would be to make sure that in the case of corporations, assets are not considered speech. Fundamentally that means that a corporation is NOT allowed to do whatever it wants with its money. That way, if we decide that corporations cannot donate to political campaigns or run political advertisements, we can do so by virtue of controlling their spending without limiting the content of their speech that may be good in other circumstances.

Yes. Straight out of the opinion. The implication is that a corporation has the same rights as a citizen. And the last time you saw a calorie count on a bake sale cookie was....? Congress has the explicit authority to regulate commerce. There are laws about from which sources and under what conditions a corporation can buy the basic good its needs to provide the sevices that are in its charter! All this would regulate would be the amount of its assets a corporation could spend on media outside of its charter. We do this for non-profits right now. They have to spend at least 51% of their money on non-political activities or else they loose their status. They are going after Karl Rove's Crossroads group right now for that. There is absolutly no reason why we couldn't expand the consequences of the regulation from loosing non-profit status to the ability to stay organized as a corporation to begin with. I may be unique as a liberal in that I don't think unions should be able to spend unlimited money either. Thats how California got its regressive 3 strikes laws. Prison unions were involved in lobbying for the change to boost business. So you would be limiting the speech of the person donating in that they could not announce that they were the source of the donation? All you are doing in that sense is perserving this notion that money == speech while at the same time restricting ACTUAL speech in order to make it work.I agree that public financing would be the best bet.

I think we are talking about the same thing. I never suggested that Citizens United explicitly declared corporate personhood. That IS the interpretation though of some. My original quote was: I believe is supported by that quote. I do understand. One is regulated commerce and the other is not. In exchange for limited personal liability, Little Debbie must abide by the laws regarding the speech they MUST produce when engaging in the sale of food stuff. An individual is forgoing that protection when selling grandma's brownies at a bake sale and if you give someone salmonella then you can be sued personally. Thats my understanding. I could be wrong, but more importantly is why do you consider that surprising? A corporation, as a legal entity, can be a target of regulation under the commerce clause (as can an individual). It just so happens that what is being regulated in this case is speech.We just consider it over burdensome to require grandma to put nutrition labels on her brownies when at a bake sale while we consider it perfectly okay to REQUIRE a corporation to do so. This is a perfectly sensible regulation of the speech of corporations. Political donations and unlimited advocacy of a candidate are different things. Note that contribution caps were explicitly kept in place by Citizen's United. They was essentially a minor victory for the critics of Citizen's United in that the notion that money == speech was somewhat refuted by the fact that donation caps remain constitutional.My whole point, which I don't think you adequately responded to, was that corporations can have their advocacy limited by regulating their purchasing power of media outside of the scope of their corporate charter. We ALREADY do this for some classes of corporations like I described before. We simply would need to expand that idea to include all corporations.Don't take away their free speech, just don't let them saturate the media. Free speech does not give you the right to stand outside my door with a bullhorn. You have the right to your ideas, you have the right to express them, but you do not have the right to dominate the public sphere by the sheer might of your voice. I submit that until the Internet gave us some hope, the market actually does a pretty shitty job of allocating resources for the transmission of speech. The fact that the currency of our political discourse is a 30 second TV commercial is a testament to how poor the situation really is. It is precisely the problem that a single individual can saturate the existing free market media that demonstrates the need for reform of which corporate regulation is only one part of the solution.