Comments on: Aside The Point

By: Bryan

Bryan — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 03:01:48 +0000

I would say give them all the rights they can handle – if they can get a Florida driver’s license.

The Supreme Court says corporations are people, but the state of Florida wants me to spend over $100 getting the documentation together to prove I am a person, after walking around for over 60 years.

By: Mustang Bobby

Mustang Bobby — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:45:52 +0000

It's also interesting to note that conservatives are willing to grant the rights of citizenship to entities that aren't entitled to them -- Shell Oil or a clump of cells in a woman's uterus -- but deny them to gays and lesbians. Funny how that works. (No, not really funny at all.) .-= last blog ..Buy and Large =-.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:29:44 +0000

In reply to Steve Bates.

Frankly, what is needed is a case challenging “corporate personhood” directly, and, in a perverse way, today’s ruling advances that possibly by overturning a lot of the precedents that have been passed down since the original case.

Justice Sotomayor has already indicated that she would like to address this issue, which wasn’t part of this case, because it was felt to be “settled law”. Well, the law has been unsettled, and it should be litigated to end this stupidity.

Money isn’t speech, and it should never have been ruled that it was because the Constitution says “free speech”, not “fee speech”.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 04:59:00 +0000

I am always dumbfounded at the notion that any nonpersonal entity has the same right of speech as a flesh-and-blood human. That’s nuts, on its face… but over the past half century, it has grown to be law.

So… how much speech does a corporate “person” have a right to? Does a stockholder carry one additional unit of speech-right in addition to his or her own? per stockholder, or per share of stock, or per dollar of current value? or is it just one per corporate “person,” and who decides what the speech shall be, the CEO?

I think we received the answer to that question today: a corp has however much speech they can purchase on the open market. How wonderfully capitalist… and how wonderfully anti-democratic. We mere flesh-and-blood human-equivalents, with our extremely limited purchasing power, might as well STFU.

I believe I heard several of our nation’s Founders turn in their graves just now… and I know I heard my Mother and Father turn in their urns in the living room. This ruling must somehow be reversed… how, I haven’t a clue, but I will not rest until persons (the human variety) have the right of speech again, and corp’s don’t.