Corporate Personhood

Certainly not in the material you've quoted, which refers only to association of citizens. And the First Amendment does, indeed, refer to an unabrigable right of Americans to speak both individually and as assemblies. Justice Kennedy doesn't seem to be referring to anything but that constitutional right. There's nothing in the First Amendment that qualifies that right or says that the government can punish citizens for engaging in political speech as part of a certain kind of assembly but not as another kind of assembly.I know that the common understanding of the ruling in Citizens United is that the SCOTUS found that corporations had a First Amendment right, but I'm increasingly thinking that isn't the case. The material you've quoted from Kennedy would seem to prove me right about that - he's referring to the fact that individuals don't lose their First Amendment rights to act as assemblies just because the kind of assembly they're in is called a "corporation." In other words, corporations can enjoy the First Amendment protection of their speech not because they possess some kind of fictional personhood but because a corporation is an assembly of people who enjoy First Amendment rights both as individuals and as a group. When it was for sale in a store. Are you being facetious or do you really not understand the difference between a bake sale fundraiser and retail sales of foodstuffs? You don't honestly believe that some foods have nutrition labels because corporations sell them, do you? I'd be very, very surprised if that's the actual law. Interstate commerce. And individuals? Should wealthy individuals be allowed to spend unlimited money?If the answer is "no", then you're opposed to something that has nothing to do with corporate personhood; you're actually opposed to unlimited political donations from any source. I don't specifically disagree with that, since I think contribution limits result in candidates having to appeal to a broad base of support instead of to a narrow segment of deep pockets. Maybe, but I don't think it's political speech to say to someone "hey, I cut you a check." And frankly I don't think we need to prevent people from saying that. As long as the politician can't connect a particular payment to a particular donor, it doesn't matter what people say, because they'll be drowned out by the people who say "oh, I donated" but are actually just lying. (If we want to talk more about this reform system I'll flesh out the details but suffice to say now that there's a system where the donations are held in escrow and portioned out over time, so that a donor can't say "oh, that check for $200.12 was mine; I added the twelve cents so you would know it was me." The campaign gets the money, but in the form of a lumped payment from the escrow account.) Money isn't speech, but money is how you buy speech. "Free speech" doesn't refer to its price, if you'll pardon the pun. The question is one of the allocation of scarce resources - posters, airtime, the expertise and time of commercial producers - and I see no reason not to have the market allocate those resources, the same as it always does. We can take the influence of money out of politics without having to force broadcast engineers, voiceover artists, and graphic designers into public indentured servitude.

Oh, I see. So it was actually Kennedy's secret plan to create a race of corpor-people. Well, why didn't you just say so! Viewed from the perspective of someone who is clinically insane, yes, clearly Citizens United was an attempt to fulfill the secret dastardly plan of the Framers to create the Borg. Well, I disagree. That's not how corporations work - they are, however diffusely, obligated to follow the wishes of the owners/stockholders. In fact there's legal penalties if they do not. The First Amendment grants the right of people to assemble to lobby the government. It makes no stipulations as to whether that assembly is internally governed by a consensus process (example: OWS) or by a one-vote-per-share process. Then you're making my case for me. There's nothing in that language that even obliquely refers to any notion of First Amendment rights that stem from the equivalence of corporate and natural persons. Opponents of what they term "corporate personhood" are fleeing from phantoms.You've got the four dissenting justices referring to a ruling that somehow affirms the free speech rights of corporations distinct from the free speech rights of individuals assembled as corporations. Well, fine, but show me that in the actual ruling. I'm no more inclined to take their word for it than yours, and so far, all you have is "trust me, this is the part where First Amendment rights of corporations as individuals is asserted. No, really trust me!"It's not personal, but I don't. Much like the historical existence of Jesus this appears to be another case where everybody has a lacuna about what the evidence actually is - they're sure its there but nobody can point to it.

I'll be honest, NoNukes, I'm not seeing where in any of those cites there's support for the notion that the SCOTUS in Citizens United ruled that corporations have First Amendment rights on the basis of being legal persons. The Roberts opinion does you no good unless you're also asserting that SCOTUS simultaneously affirmed union personhood, and nobody seems to think that's what happened.I don't see where you've demonstrated what I asked you to prove. I continue to think that most people's interpretation of the Citizens United decision as affirming corporate personhood (to some extent beyond legal personhood) is mistaken.

I don't understand the "despite." The First Amendment doesn't say anything about being limited to the "speech of owners." I never stated (and neither did the court) that a corporation was an association of owners. You're operating from the assumption that the speech of a corporation qua corporation as an association means that it has to reflect the speech of the owners but I don't see why that is true. A corporation is a lot more people than just the owners; it's the executives and employees, too. And perforce a corporation's speech has to represent the speech of one of those groups of people, otherwise exactly how is the corporation "speaking"? Well, ok. That's kind of what we're getting at. In what ways are corporations treated the same under the law as natural persons in ways that aren't the same because both corporations and natural persons are legal persons? What rights do corporations supposedly get from "corporate personhood" that aren't simply consequences of their legal personhood? Citizens United, to the best of our knowledge, doesn't grant any such rights. From what you've shown they're quite obviously enjoying First Amendment rights not because of their "personhood", but because they're associations of people, and the speech of associations is protected by the First Amendment.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that this interpretation is deeply flawed. I don't see how it can be, or how you can square saying

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I never suggested that Citizens United explicitly declared corporate personhood.

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and

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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.

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Seems like a direct contradiction to me. No, what's being regulated is commerce, and regardless of whether your for-retail commercial foodstuffs are sold by a corporation (Little Debbie), a non-profit charity (Newman's Own), a cooperative (Dr. Bronner's castile soap, you know, with that insane label), or a sole proprietorship (there's a local baker who sells frozen pies and cakes to all the local groceries), there's a requirement that retail foodstuffs have nutrition labels. It's not a function of who sells them, but of the fact that they are sold. (Technically at a bake sale you're giving a donation in exchange for a free baked good, like when you donate to NPR and they send you a radio. It's not a "sale.") No, exactly wrong. A corporation wouldn't have to label their cakes at a bake sale, but grandma absolutely would have to put nutritional information on her cookies to have them sold at retail. You've not yet demonstrated this to be the case.

That's fair - you can call anything you want anything you like, it's no skin off my nose. But it undercuts the case that somehow corporations have conspired with the courts to usurp rights previously granted only to natural persons. Sure, and that authorization would come from somebody in the corporation who that speech would represent. Then honestly, who cares about corporate personhood? Like I've asked before, what problem are we trying to solve, exactly, when we agitate against corporate personhood?Ending corporate personhood was the key plank of a major third party's bid for the Presidency, for instance. I'm just trying to get at the bottom of what that's all about. From what I've seen so far it's a bit of a liberal phantom.

Are you reading my posts? Like the one you just replied to? Yes, people believe it. That's exactly the viewpoint I opened a thread to explore. I think corporations have undue access to government as a function of having a lot of money, not as a function of "being people" or whatever. I've yet to see any evidence to disabuse me of that notion, but people keep saying they can provide it.