'Money Is Not Speech and Corporations Are Not People':

[Uncle Joe]

Sanders Unveils Plan to Get Corporate Money Out of Politics

(snip)

The Sanders plan aims to end the corrupting influence of dark money by dramatically curbing the ability of corporations to dominate giving to political parties, replacing the Federal Election Commission with a new enforcement agency, establishing public funding for all federal elections, and pushing for a Constitutional Amendment that makes clear that "money is not speech and corporations are not people."

The Sanders campaign said in a statement that the new slate of proposals—which can be read in full here—are designed to end "the greed-fueled, corrupt corporate influence over elections, national party convention, and presidential inaugurations" that currently exists and deliver to the public an election system the puts the America people at the center.

"Our grassroots-funded campaign is proving every single day that you don't need billionaires and private fundraisers to run for president," Sanders said. "We've received more contributions from more individual contributors than any campaign in the history of American politics because we understand the basic reality that you can't take on a corrupt system if you take its money."

(snip)

Corporate donors spend tremendous amounts of money on inaugural events. In 2016, Trump's inaugural donors included AT&T, Bank of America, Boeing, Exxon Mobil, General Motors, Coca Cola, Pepsi, and many more. Private Prisons also shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars for Trump's inauguration. And this is nothing new, Corporate donors to the 2013 inauguration included Microsoft, Boeing, Chevron, Genetech, and numerous federal contractors. Many of these corporations have federal contracts and business that comes before Congress. It is absolutely absurd that these entities are allowed to spend enormous sums of money in an attempt to garner favor with the president and vice president of the United States.

(snip)

The proposal is an indication that Sanders' vision to fix American democracy goes far beyond "structural reforms" by targeting what he perceives as the rot at the center of the system: corporate greed and massive political power seized by the multinational corporations and the extremely rich.

(snip)


https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/07/money-not-speech-and-corporations-are-not-people-sanders-unveils-plan-get-corporate

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Nice dream but reality will be heavy sledding

I hope Bernie takes a very light schedule for a few weeks, and recuperates. Politics is important, but health is even more so.

Corporations have too much money. They build palatial headquarters and corporate campuses. Consumers pay for that.

[Uncle Joe]

3. It's "heavy sledding" now precisely because

money is treated as speech and corporations as people.

Locusts are "consumers" the American People are citizens.

[jberryhill]

2. It's about time we reversed all of those rulings in favor of corporations...

First Amendment cases of note:

New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan

New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_States

Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell

Regardless of how you slice it, there are very few publications or broadcasters of note which are owned by individuals.

And if you want to make some distinction between a regular corporation, which can certainly publish stuff, and a "press" corporation, then please remind me of the business that "Citizens United" was in, if you know.

If you don't know, Citizens United was a company that was making a movie.

[Uncle Joe]

4. Corporations Are People' Is Built on an Incredible 19th-Century Lie

Somewhat unintuitively, American corporations today enjoy many of the same rights as American citizens. Both, for instance, are entitled to the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion. How exactly did corporations come to be understood as “people” bestowed with the most fundamental constitutional rights? The answer can be found in a bizarre—even farcical—series of lawsuits over 130 years ago involving a lawyer who lied to the Supreme Court, an ethically challenged justice, and one of the most powerful corporations of the day.

That corporation was the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, owned by the robber baron Leland Stanford. In 1881, after California lawmakers imposed a special tax on railroad property, Southern Pacific pushed back, making the bold argument that the law was an act of unconstitutional discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment. Adopted after the Civil War to protect the rights of the freed slaves, that amendment guarantees to every “person” the “equal protection of the laws.” Stanford’s railroad argued that it was a person too, reasoning that just as the Constitution prohibited discrimination on the basis of racial identity, so did it bar discrimination against Southern Pacific on the basis of its corporate identity.

It was a trust Conkling would betray. As he spoke before the Court on Southern Pacific’s behalf, Conkling recounted an astonishing tale. In the 1860s, when he was a young congressman, Conkling had served on the drafting committee that was responsible for writing the Fourteenth Amendment. Then the last member of the committee still living, Conkling told the justices that the drafters had changed the wording of the amendment, replacing “citizens” with “persons” in order to cover corporations too. Laws referring to “persons,” he said, have “by long and constant acceptance … been held to embrace artificial persons as well as natural persons.” Conkling buttressed his account with a surprising piece of evidence: a musty old journal he claimed was a previously unpublished record of the deliberations of the drafting committee.

Years later, historians would discover that Conkling’s journal was real but his story was a fraud. The journal was in fact a record of the congressional committee’s deliberations but, upon close examination, it offered no evidence that the drafters intended to protect corporations. It showed, in fact, that the language of the equal-protection clause was never changed from “citizen” to “person.” So far as anyone can tell, the rights of corporations were not raised in the public debates over the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment or in any of the states’ ratifying conventions. And, prior to Conkling’s appearance on behalf of Southern Pacific, no member of the drafting committee had ever suggested that corporations were covered.

(snip)

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/corporations-people-adam-winkler/554852/

[jberryhill]

5. I'm familiar with that story, but it is more along the lines of lay legal folklore

The entire point of corporations is to provide an entity which can do things like own property, sue or be sued, etc..

If you don't want corporations to be people, then you might try explaining how you would like any law at all, let alone the first amendment, to apply to them.

You either want the First Amendment to protect the activities of corporations like the New York Times, CNN, and the rest of the news and entertainment media, or you don't.

[Uncle Joe]

7. Here is some more lay legal folklore

(snip)

Schragger: For as long as there have been corporate bodies, their exercise of power has generated concern. In the 1920s and ’30s, Justice Louis Brandeis argued that the large corporations caused economic dislocation, distorted democracy, and undermined individual welfare. In his famous dissent in Liggett v. Lee, Brandeis wrote: “Through size, corporations, once merely an efficient tool employed by individuals in the conduct of private business, have become an institution … which has brought such concentration of economic power that so-called private corporations are sometimes able to dominate the state.” Brandeis further argued that the states can regulate these corporations; states had in the past limited their size and lifespan and dictated their purposes. “Whether the corporate privilege shall be granted or withheld is always a matter of state policy,” he wrote.

Brandeis was echoing other constitutional thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who worried that under the guise of corporate rights, “the most enormous and threatening powers in our country have been created”—to quote constitutional scholar Thomas Cooley, writing in the 1880s. Current-day constitutional scholars, like [University of Wisconsin–Madison professor Marc ] Galanter, also worry about the capacity for artificial persons to dominate the legal and political landscape. “At the moment,” Galanter wrote in 2005, “it appears that APs are well on their way to capturing the legal profession and overwhelming or circumventing the courts.” This was prior to the recent Great Recession, which was precipitated in significant part by the risky lending practices of giant financial corporations. It was also written before the Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court struck down (in a 5–4 decision) a ban on corporate electioneering on First Amendment grounds.

Brandeis would have a lot to say about both events. He warned against corporate gigantism, arguing that it made the American economy vulnerable to economic collapse. He called it “the curse of bigness;” we call it “too big to fail.” He further railed against treating corporations as if they had rights over and above the state, and he urged extensive regulation of their activities in order to preserve democratic government. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote similarly in his 2010 dissent in the Citizens United case. He argued that “at bottom, the Court’s opinion is … a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.”

Schauer: In the context of the First Amendment, and in particular freedom of speech and freedom of the press, revisiting the capacity of corporations to exercise First Amendment rights is implausible. Virtually all newspapers, magazines, motion pictures, and books, among other message-deliverers, are corporations, and to suggest that these entities do not possess First Amendment rights would undercut the information- and idea-providing function of the First Amendment, and would, in addition, be the occasion for a dramatic alteration in longstanding First Amendment doctrine and theory.

But to say this is not to foreclose careful thinking about the extent to which elections, like other First Amendment settings and institutions, are or should be subject to distinctive and institution-specific First Amendment rules, doctrines, tests, and principles. Thus, some election-specific regulations of corporate contributions and expenditures in the electoral process would be consistent with the increasing institution-specific nature of First Amendment doctrine, and would do far less violence to the general principles of freedom of speech and press than would the broad acceptance of the implausible proposition that corporations cannot be the holders or claimants of First Amendment rights. In a world in which many of our messages and information are created and transmitted by corporations and similar large organizations, limiting generally the constitutional right to transmit messages and information to natural persons only would be highly unfortunate.

(snip)

https://www.law.virginia.edu/static/uvalawyer/html/alumni/uvalawyer/f11/personhood.htm

[jberryhill]

8. So?

I read the entire interview, and I don't see what is the point you are attempting to make with that excerpt.

Either the editorial board of the NYT can endorse a candidate (thus conferring an electoral advantage with a calculable value of, e.g. a half page advertisement in the NYT) or they can't.

[comradebillyboy]

6. Another empty gesture from Sanders. Another proposal that won't go

anywhere. Bernie has never demonstrated he has the leadership skills to build a coalition and get things done in real life as witnessed by his lifelong lack of accomplishment.

[cojoel]

9. I always thought the "money is speech" argument was totally miguided

Money is associated with one important thing: commerce. The US Constitution gives Congress the authority to regulate commerce between the states. I don't think this is that hard, and shouldn't be for people who went to law school.