Reply #201: It is because it is NOT a constitutional protection!

[cascadiance]

amongst other things... "Corporate Personhood" was a right "given" to corporations by a court clerk falsely drawing such conclusions from a case where justices didn't make this conclusion (even in a "judicial activist" way that affects other decisions). This person had conflicts of interest since he was a board member of a railroad company before working as a court clerk too.

If corporations *should* have "free speech" laws that is a job for congress to work out in newer legislation authorizing such and qualifying where such protections apply and where they don't, because they ARE NOT human beings, and don't have the same limitations/strengths that human beings have, and therefore they shouldn't derive from the rights humans INHERENTLY HAVE ALREADY that we deem they have because they are physically human beings.

Now whether they need these rights is a completely separate issue. There are many of us here who say that "corporate personhood" "rights" that are given improperly are at the root of so many of the other problems you mention as well as many others that really are critical and arguably is at the root of our pay to play corruption that has screwed up our economy, had us in so many wars, etc.

Look at the issues you mention:
1) freedom of speech - this is curtailed by a corporate press which stands in the way for us to have *equal* speech to what the corporations have if corporations own the communication paths we have with one another and with our government in society.

2) rights to habeus corpus, due process, and right to freedom from torture arguably is also affected by "corporate personhood" rights, that allow those mega companies that control the press control our perceptions of the wars we get in, that keep us in these perpetual wars, justify them on false means, that lends itself to torturing people to yield false confessions to justify these wars that feed the corporate troughs...

3) A lot of these separation of church and state issues are those where a corrupt government owned by governments continues to use stupid right wing Christians to vote for their corrupt agenda by rewarding them with passing religious changes to our laws to appease them and to continue to use them to put in place their agenda that works against all of our interests.

4) meaningful public campaign financing will never get passed unless we get rid of "corporate free speech". Until we get rid of that we'll always have a system of campaign institutionalized bribery that we call "legal" campaign financing.

5) we will never get single payer health care unless we get rid of this campaign institutionalized bribery from health insurance and pharma companies.

6) we won't get domestic spying to end (or get justified in newer laws that now make it legal) if we don't get rid of the campaign institutionalized bribery that is getting congress to immunize our telecomm companies.

7) we'll continue to have lax enforcement of illegal employment of illegal immigrants that steals away the middle class's jobs with the continued campaign institutionalized bribery in place.

8) we'll continue to have unfettered free trade agreements that build institutions like the WTO that allow corporations to supersede nation's laws to get their race to the bottom in terms of profits/costs and messing up our environment as long as we have continued campaign institutionalized bribery in place. This along with corporate welfare of agriculture subsidies (also created by continued campaign institutionalized bribery in place) puts many farmers in South America to sell of their farms to their nations' elites, and instead working in outsourcing company locations there until the companies decide to move someplace else where its cheaper, forcing them to... move up here to work!

In short, you can see (and I've just touched the surface on the many issues) that our corporatocracy is the ROOT of most of our problems today. If we get a decent SCOTUS nominee that will help take away some of these ARTIFICIALLY given "rights" they have (which should be doable in a legal fashion), they hopefully will be less controlled by the continued campaign institutionalized bribery system that the executive and justice branches are plagued by, and when we get enough justices working this way, we can at least have the courts start to fix our system and pave the way for the executive and legislative branches to follow.

I'm not disagreeing with your other priorities being important. I am saying though that this is a fundamental key to all of these issues that needs to get fixed, for us to really do more than just apply "bandaids" to our problems today.