Supreme Court Rules On Corporate Privacy 408
heptapod writes "The Supreme Court unanimously decided (PDF) Monday that AT&T can't keep embarrassing corporate information that it submits to the government out of public view; 'personal privacy' rights do not apply to corporations. 'We trust that AT&T will not take it personally,' concluded the ruling."
good start, long way to go (Score:5, Informative)
we still have quite a few other personal rights that have been given to corporations that shouldn't have
No need to break what isn't broken (Score:2, Insightful)
we still have quite a few other personal rights that have been given to corporations that shouldn't have
I'll be glad when this fad goes away. The whole reason for corporate personhood is to protect the rights of the people involved with the corporation. If the US dismantled the corporate personhood machinery, it would have to be replaced with something else that does pretty much the same thing. Else groups of people would have their rights trampled. It's not rocket science.
Also, note that even moderately controversial decisions (such as the frequently reviled Citizens United v. FEC case) are decided by nar
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Yes, but without a constitutional amendment those new rights could be taken away without much trouble. As it is we need to pass a constitutional amendment declaring corporations to not be people. Which is a lot harder.
Re:No need to break what isn't broken (Score:5, Insightful)
Has a company ever been put in prison?
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No, but they've been fined millions of dollars or ordered to do various things.
Re:No need to break what isn't broken (Score:4, Insightful)
Which typically amounts to a slap on the wrist.
When a company is fined, who pays? (Score:5, Insightful)
When a company is fined, who pays the price? For public companies (most of the companies we care about), the answer is basically shareholders -- almost all of whom had no part in the wrongdoing. So the main effect is that some people in the company do something wrong, then all shareholders get fined. I think more fines should be leveled on the people who actually did the wrongdoing (although fining the company is still somewhat useful as it does provide an incentive not to break the law -- it's just that the burden of the fine is mostly misplaced).
Re:When a company is fined, who pays? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:When a company is fined, who pays? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with that is that the shares are filtered though so many layers of mutual funds and derivatives and hedge funds and private equity and TLAs and who knows what else that the majority of the shareholders don't even realize that they even are shareholders at all!
Re:When a company is fined, who pays? (Score:4, Insightful)
When a company is fined, who pays the price? For public companies (most of the companies we care about), the answer is basically shareholders -- almost all of whom had no part in the wrongdoing.
False. Their part in the wrongdoing was voting for the board that hired the people (...that hired the people...[repeat as necessary]) that did the wrongdoing. Do you think just because your ownership is in the form of stock, that you have no responsibility to even investigate whether the people generating your dividends are trustworthy enough not to lie, cheat, steal, maim or kill?
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"Do you think just because your ownership is in the form of stock, that you have no responsibility to even investigate whether the people generating your dividends are trustworthy enough not to lie, cheat, steal, maim or kill?"
Yeah. I have IRAs and mutual funds that are made up of dozens of stocks. Maybe you have the time and resources to investigate all of their chief officers and board directors, I don't.
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"Do you think just because your ownership is in the form of stock, that you have no responsibility to even investigate whether the people generating your dividends are trustworthy enough not to lie, cheat, steal, maim or kill?"
Yeah. I have IRAs and mutual funds that are made up of dozens of stocks. Maybe you have the time and resources to investigate all of their chief officers and board directors, I don't.
All right, I'll make you a deal. When I get cancer because some company knowingly dumped carcinogens in my drinking water for thirty years because it was more profitable than disposing of them properly, instead of suing, I'll just say to myself, "schwit1 might own some stock in this company, through his IRAs and mutual funds, and it really wouldn't be fair, after letting him profit from the same actions that gave me cancer, to then take some of that money back from him, because gosh darnit, he just doesn't
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Well, I do.
I believe it is up to the individual to be able to negotiate their salary/bill rate and benefits. If some one, a management type, can somehow pull off convincing someone he is actually worth millions a year, etc...then more power to him. The people hiring him are the idiots.
I know what my skills are worth in the ma
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When a company is fined, who pays the price?
Until now I thought that it is the customers/consumers that pay for the company's services/goods/products. Shareholders may earn less, but they pay nothing.
CC.
Re:When a company is fined, who pays? (Score:5, Interesting)
The risk that shares will lose value is part and parcel with the whole concept of "share". In fact, shareholders are already coddled today much more than they were historically. At one time, getting an LLC was a major thing, not just some paperwork. People actually had to put their own assets on the line with "partnerships". Limited liability stock is a luxury by comparison.
Now, as a pragmatic matter, I strongly suspect that targeting individual corporate officers with criminal penalties when they do criminal things(ie. if somebody knowingly exposes workers to unreasonable hazard that proves fatal, don't dick around with corporate fines, treat that somebody the same way you would anybody else who subjects others to unreasonable hazard - put them up on manslaughter charges) would have a salubrious effect on corporate behavior, and would be a good public policy move. However, there is absolutely nothing unjust with punishing corporations in ways that damage the value of shares. That is sort of the whole point. (On a separate; but related, note: it sure would be nice if corporate charters were amended such that shareholders had much greater actual power, so they would have some chance of heading things off, rather than just voting with their feet once the clusterfuck started...)
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Re:No need to break what isn't broken (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem is then that you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that person's involvement with each element of the crime. Part of the reason we tend to prosecute the corporation as a whole is that it's often not easy to pin the whole crime on any specific person given the distributed nature of responsibility in most large corporations.
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RICO is good at nailing individuals in distributed organizations. I think it would possible to use a similar idea for corporate or corporate employee malfeasance.
Re:No need to break what isn't broken (Score:5, Insightful)
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So who do we send to jail or fine for the Toyota gas pedal problems? Ford & Firestone's tire issues?
Hint: Everybody from the top down (you know, the people who have money to afford a lawyer) will point the finger at the assembly line worker, and say "it's his fault."
Good luck collecting your multi-million dollar award from that single assembly line worker, and enjoy destroying his life in revenge for the damage (most likely accidental) that "he alone" caused you.
Re:No need to break what isn't broken (Score:4, Interesting)
So who do we send to jail or fine for the Toyota gas pedal problems?
Well that one is simple, the journalists whom made the whole thing up for the pageviews.
Good luck collecting your multi-million dollar award from that single assembly line worker, and enjoy destroying his life in revenge for the damage (most likely accidental) that "he alone" caused you.
The aviation industry solved that by always blaming the pilot, whom coincidentally was dead. An unintended consequence would be the auto industry increasing their lethality so the driver always ends up dead, thus can take the blame.
Metalworking shops etc already carry hefty liability insurance. The social engineers in congress would have an interesting problem, as thats currently paid pre-tax but if individual worker had to buy first of all they'd be screwed to higher prices just like health insurance and secondly they'd be paying post tax money. So it would be quite a drag on the economy as a whole, although insurance companies would make more, and special interests love to donate to politicians, so I suspect its inevitable in the future...
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Sounds like a worker's paradise, truly.
I don't understand why we haven't introduced more inefficiency and waste into the system before now! Abolish corporate personhood today!
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No, it would be much easier as we would have to charge individuals with crimes
Think about it. It's already illegal for individuals to commit crimes. It's already illegal for groups of people to commit crimes too. Collusion is already illegal. And police already can arrest people and courts convict and mete punishment for crime.
So given that all this illegal activity is by definition illegal with a big stick to back it up, why do you suppose that Stormy Dragon said it'd be harder to police corporations without charging the corporation itself for the crime?
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Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work like that.
Who would you hold accountable if something went wrong like that. You face the same kinds of issues any institution... even government faces.
Implementation is everything... and asking a court to decipher responsibility in an institution is extremely difficult.
Whose to blame? The individual worker? Their manager? The director? The CEO? The contractor?...
What if it was really just a worker screwing up... say a construction workers accidentally collapses a bu
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Our current legal system has laws that differentially govern the activities of organizations and individuals, so no - organizations could still be held legally accountable for their actions. It could adjust to have more targeted at organizational activities if really necessary. It's not like you can extract conceptually different legal remedies from criminal vs civil prosecution of a corporation currently; no corporation is doing jail time.
Besides, if such a change occurred and it led to more prosecution
Re:No need to break what isn't broken (Score:5, Insightful)
Many countries make a distinction between natural persons (i.e. humans) and a legal person (entities, corporations). I have to assume that there must be some distiction between the two in the US too, though it is smaller than elsewhere. If not, a corporation being a natural person would have a nationality, and if it is a US nationality, it would have the right to vote in elections, which is not the case.
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If not, a corporation being a natural person would have a nationality, and if it is a US nationality, it would have the right to vote in elections, which is not the case.
Voting merely requires living there and (in some states) not being a convicted felon. Plenty of illegals vote, no one cares. The puzzle is how to deal with non-national elections. If a corp is based in CT for tax purposes but all its real property is in WI (primary residence) then where does it vote? Even weirder, if the corporate agent lives in IL.
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If I were to post about how everything went downhill after 1913 and the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, I think most knowledgeable people in the world would quickly be able to identify me as a US goldbug [wikipedia.org] or the like. Further, they would have at least some sort of balanced perspective on things. A central bank may have undesirable features, but it does work - at least most of the time. Sure you might grant that there could
Re:No need to break what isn't broken (Score:4, Informative)
There's an excellent (and funny) summary of the oral arguments at Slate.
http://www.slate.com/id/2281715/ [slate.com]
To sum it up less elegantly, the issue is the Freedom of Information Act which defines an exemption for "personal privacy". It also defines many other exemptions that apply to corporations.
The case hinged on whether artificial persons such as corporations had a right to "personal privacy". A lower court had said yes --- based more or less on an argument-by-grammar. "Personal privacy" contains the root "person", and hence all persons must have it.
The Supreme Court decision pointed out that this is not much of an argument. Flesh and blood people have "personal space" and "personal issues", but corporations probably don't. They also pointed out that the legislators had clearly written exemptions into the law that applied to corporations, and so AT&T was asking for essentially a massive extension in what the law does vs. what Congress had intended.
It gives me a small amount of confidence in this court to see them rule against a major extension of rights for corporations. Maybe it will become a trend.
Re:No need to break what isn't broken (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure they can. For instance, if corporations are property, thanks to asset forfeiture [wikipedia.org] it's possible for the government to charge property with a crime and confiscate it.
Or alternately, assume they are neither property nor persons. That means that Congress can pass whatever laws about corporations they like (since they nearly always fall under interstate commerce), and the state where the corporation is incorporated can also exercise unchecked control. Either of them could pass a law that states something like "Corporations who commit criminal offenses will be tried as criminal defendants."
One could argue whether either of those is a good or bad thing, but it's hardly a situation where they can't be charged with a crime.
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How does giving a corporation personal rights and freedoms somehow protect the people within that corporation? Are their personal rights not protected by the same constitutional provisions that protects those of us NOT in a Corporation? By what moral impe
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What happened with CU is that previous to the case, individuals in a corporation were allowed to make political contributions to whoever they chose to (up to the personal limit, which is $2400, IIRC). In the ruling that came down, corps were then allowed to donate whatever they wanted to out of their own accounts, and essentially without limits. So, because of this (monumentally bad) ruling, corporations could essentially drown out the voices from individual contributors, by spending millions from the cor
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A dog can't be charged with a crime but if it kills someone it's shot.
simply apply the same to corporations.
commit a serious enough crime, company gets liquidated.
you don't have to be human to be punished.
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if corporations lack personhood then they can't be charged with crimes.
Why do you say that? What's to stop the government from passing such laws?
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I wonder if all the people saying "Corporations are not people" have fully thought through the implications of that stance. For one, if corporations lack personhood then they can't be charged with crimes. Policing them will be much harder when criminal charges all have to be tied to a specific person within the corporation rather than the organization as a whole.
How? Almost all "corporate crimes" are charged against individuals anyway, and almost all policing of corporations goes through civil actions. When the attorney general sues a corporation, that's not charging it with a crime, that's a civil action.
Re:No need to break what isn't broken (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is, "the public" is not what you think it is. that does not mean you or me but "major shareholders" which is the top 1% of the population. Liability to you or me, even if we hold 1,000 shares is nothing. liability to the guy that owns 20% is there.
the public was sold a bag of goods that was rigged from the start to protect the riches of the top 1% and NOT that of the public.
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Problem is, "the public" is not what you think it is. that does not mean you or me but "major shareholders" which is the top 1% of the population...
the public was sold a bag of goods that was rigged from the start to protect the riches of the top 1% and NOT that of the public.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
(in fact, I think you just defined it not to mean what you think it means...)
Re:No need to break what isn't broken (Score:4, Insightful)
Wouldn't those people's rights be protected by, ya know, being people?
Re:No need to break what isn't broken (Score:4, Insightful)
Wouldn't those people's rights be protected by, ya know, being people?
No. Even in the US that isn't true. If your rights have been violated by law or action, you still have to act to redress your grievance, either in the courts or through communication. What you don't get is that procedures frequently have to be implemented in order for the right to be properly honored.
For example, the Miranda warning is a judicially mandated action that was deemed necessary so that people who were arrested would aware of their rights. It doesn't follow naturally from the Constitution and didn't come about until about 45 years ago.
Similarly, corporate personhood is a legal invention. It came about precisely because the courts of the time deemed it necessary in order to honor the rights of the people making up the corporation.
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Wouldn't those people's rights be protected by, ya know, being people?
No. Even in the US that isn't true. If your rights have been violated by law or action, you still have to act to redress your grievance, either in the courts or through communication. What you don't get is that procedures frequently have to be implemented in order for the right to be properly honored. For example, the Miranda warning is a judicially mandated action that was deemed necessary so that people who were arrested would aware of their rights. It doesn't follow naturally from the Constitution and didn't come about until about 45 years ago. Similarly, corporate personhood is a legal invention. It came about precisely because the courts of the time deemed it necessary in order to honor the rights of the people making up the corporation.
If you'll hang in there with me, I'm genuinely curious and trying to step outside my normal "corporations = fuck 'em" assumption set. Your angle on this issue is quite different from what I'm used to seeing. What rights of the people in the corporation are we talking about, and how might they be violated? I'm trying to give your position the benefit of the doubt, but being all vague like this I'm not inclined to assume it's the rights of lowly cubicle drones but rather the rights of executives and, well,
Re:No need to break what isn't broken (Score:5, Informative)
Corporate personhood is not invented to protect 'natural', 'constitutional' or 'legal' rights of persons.
For one thing, the concept originates from before the US constitution. It at least dates back to the Dutch East Indies company (1608 IIRC). Separating investment from liability (other than the invested sum) is a means to allow a multitude of people to invest in a company without the risk of being taken down in a bankruptcy (for more than their invested sum). It is a pure tradeoff between the the security of the investors and the rights of creditors and has nothing to do with enforcement of pre-existing rights.
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Good point. Excellent post. But I question whether this original 1608 form of corporation truly required the concept of personhood in order to exist. Perhaps a government that believes the trade off you speak of is one that is beneficial to society could simply grant limited liability against potential creditors directly to investors and leave it at that without invoking the whole corporation-as-person concept. The government could even just grant the individual investors a certain level of immunity from cr
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The reason for corporate person hood is so that if you are working at your $5 / hour minimum wage job at McDonalds and serve someone coffee and they burn their face off, they don't sue YOU for negligence.
Without corporate person-hood there would be no way for anyone to sue corporations in civil suits.
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I don't think it has to do with the employees, it has to do with the investors. If I own stock in McDonald's I don't want to be personally sued when some idiot serves scalding coffee and burns someone. If I could be held to that sort of liability then I'd never bother to invest in anything. I'm willing to take financials risks, not legal risks.
Imagine you have a company 401(k) plan which invests in a mutual fund, and within that mutual fund is a company that is discovered to be committing human rights viola
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The reason for corporate person hood is so that if you are working at your $5 / hour minimum wage job at McDonalds and serve someone coffee and they burn their face off, they don't sue YOU for negligence.
They wouldn't do that in the first place because someone working at McDonalds wouldn't have any real money. No one should be able to sue someone (and win) when they spill hot coffee on their face anyway. Hot coffee is what they ordered. This sort of evasion of personal responsibility is so pathetic and part of the reason why corporate personhood itself is such a bad idea. People have to take responsibility for their own actions.
On the other hand if you are waiting tables and spill hot coffee on someone's fa
Re:No need to break what isn't broken (Score:4, Informative)
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I not sure how you read what mrvan wrote and decided that corporate personhood is a bad idea.
"It is a pure tradeoff between the the security of the investors and the rights of creditors and has nothing to do with enforcement of pre-existing rights."
The personhood part of a corporation basically sets up a fake 'fall guy' so that shareholders and investors aren't sued into oblivion if the corporation goes bankrupt. No one would become a shareholder/investor if the risk wasn't just "lose the money you investe
Re:No need to break what isn't broken (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a big difference between having some form of legal entity and personhood. The one big thing that must be brought back is actual enforcement of the requirement that a corporation be in the public interest. Breaking the law is never in the public interest, so a corporation that does so is dissolved.
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Breaking the law is never in the public interest, so a corporation that does so is dissolved
Death penalty? I guess only in Texas :-)
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Not necessarily, but that's the stick. Then offer the corporation a one time only deal that provides for full restitution and actually discourages future crime rather than effectively just applying a 10% tax to it like current fines do. Include purging the executives that allowed the crime to take place as one of many conditions. Take the deal without complaint or be dissolved.
At some point, perhaps when the corporation has committed 3 felonies, the dissolution becomes mandatory. Should that happen, first d
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There's a big difference between having some form of legal entity and personhood. The one big thing that must be brought back is actual enforcement of the requirement that a corporation be in the public interest. Breaking the law is never in the public interest, so a corporation that does so is dissolved.
My view is that people aren't held to this ridiculous standard because it would be both impossible and harmful, so on similar grounds of practicality and ethics, corporations shouldn't be either.
Consider driver's licenses. If I'm caught speeding slightly, my license isn't dissolved. Often the punishment isn't significant either, a "slap on the wrist" as someone else in the thread would put it.
If for some reason, we actually did enforce a stupidly rigorous law for drivers like you outline above for cor
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If you speed enough, your license most certainly is dissolved. If you commit more serious crimes you go to jail. That means loss of income and freedom. If you commit 3 felonies you will run afoul of 3 strikes laws (but corporations seem to be exempt).
It's not all that unusual to use the threat of a severe punishment to encourage acceptance of a more creative solution either. DUI offenders are routinely offered a choice between DUI school or loss of license.
If you were a corporation, you could get caught spe
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I mean that isn't this the reason to incorporate, so that the person (human) is legally seperate from the company? Or is it just for tax purposes?
Usually (although it varies) small corporations spend more overall on taxes than sole proprietorship. I very specifically say "spend more overall" because the accounting and legal forms get kinda expensive, and there's a lot of tax inspired yet not directly tax payment related juggling revolving around salaries. When you add all accountant and lawyer and paperwork fees, corps probably pay more than any other form of ownership to keep the govt off their back, at least when they're small (less than 1000 emp
"personal privacy" rights dont apply (Score:5, Interesting)
About frakking time. Corporations should have no more access to human rights than a tree or rock or building. If an entity can not vote, then it should not have rights.
Privileges like trademarks and advertising? Sure. But such privileges should be strictly regulated and limited (unlike individual speech rights which should be unlimited).
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Shhh don't give them ideas!
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At least buying a politician is more likely to achieve a change than voting for him.
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Wait, I have an idea! We should form a corporation, invite every citizen to join, and then pool our money together in it for lobbying. This way we can out-lobby the big corporations and finally return control to the people.
I propose we call this new corporation "Federal government of the United States".
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We will need to elect some kind of board of representatives to make timely decisions on behalf of all the shareholders.
How shall we chose them?
Re:"personal privacy" rights dont apply (Score:4, Informative)
This is about interpreting the FOIA, not Constitutional rights, so the "rights" involved are whatever Congress wanted to specify in the law, which could have included things relating to corporations if Congress chose to.
Congress wrote in the FOIA that people can generally request government records, and the government must respond to such requests, except in a list of specific exceptions where the agency is allowed to withhold them. If Congress had wanted to, they could have included "the request would reveal sensitive information about a corporation" in the list. This case just holds that Congress did not in fact include such an exception, implicitly or otherwise.
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If Congress had wanted to, they could have included "the request would reveal sensitive information about a corporation" in the list. This case just holds that Congress did not in fact include such an exception, implicitly or otherwise.
Don't worry. I'm sure a new revision of the FOIA is being hammered out by the Corp lobbyists for the Congress Critters to pass in the next session.
Re:"personal privacy" rights dont apply (Score:4, Funny)
If an entity can not vote, then it should not have rights.
Of course corporations can vote. They just use the special ballot that lists Benjamin Franklin as a candidate every election.
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Corporations should have no more access to human rights than a tree or rock or building.
Unlike trees or rocks or buildings, corporations are made up of people. And those people have rights. Hence, there are things you cannot do to corporations without violating the rights of the people who comprise that corporation. Corporate personhood is merely a legal invention for enabling efficiently those rights that already exist.
Re:"personal privacy" rights dont apply (Score:5, Insightful)
So non-citizens residing the US have no rights? Or children?
Also, have you considered the full implications of that stance? Could the US, for example, censor Busboy Productions, Inc. on the grounds it has no first ammendment rights? Could they sieze Twitter's computer servers without a warrant on the grounds it has no fourth ammendment rights? Can they tap your wokplace phone without a warrant because your employer has no expectation of privacy?
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About frakking time. Corporations should have no more access to human rights than a tree or rock or building. If an entity can not vote, then it should not have rights.
More importantly, if a corporation can't be put in jail for wrongdoing, it shouldn't have rights.
Corps have far more "voting" rights than commoners (Score:2)
Corporations can lobby politicians, who ignore commoners. Money, power, fame are the only ways to get noticed by politicians. Corporations have all three.
And they really donate when the politicians are running for office.
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Part of the price you pay when committing a serious legal violation is forfeiting some of your rights, otherwise we couldn't have jails or prison terms at all. There are some unfortunate cases where somebody is incarcerated despite being innocent, but by and large losing some rights is necessary for the functioning of the state.
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And how, exactly, does permanent (12 states) or temporary (36 + DC states) disenfranchisement assist the "functioning" of the state, assuming some value of "function" that is more meaningful than "letting the scumbags in charge stay in charge?"
Answered will be checked for spelling and logical coherence.
What do they care? (Score:2)
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Don't Worry AT&T (Score:2)
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Re:Don't Worry AT&T (Score:4, Informative)
I believe that is direct contributions, not total political expenditures.
Take the Koch brothers recent activity in Wisconsin. They donated $43,500 to Governer Walker's election campaing. But, they also donated $1M to the Republican Goveners association (which spent over $2M in Wisconsin) and funded another $2+ million in political activity in Wisconsin through their Americans for Prosperity PAC.
So if you look at the Koch's contribution to Walker, it doesn't seem all that significant. But if you look at their spending, it's tremendous.
True, that example is at the state level and the list you linked to is at the federal level. But I would really be surprised to find that that chart includes all investments besides direct contributions by all PAC and subsidiaries and their PACs by all of the groups listed.
-Rick
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Nope it will be a rider in the "telecommunications terrorism prevention act."
I'm NOT joking. They will pull this shit.
OK (Score:4, Insightful)
Hahahaha! That's like a big middle finger stuck right into the ruling. Nice!
Now that I got that out of my system...the whole corporate personhood thing is such a farce anyway. A corporation is nothing but a group of people. It could be one person or 100,000 people. But if you remove all the people from the corporation, can it make a decision? Can it sign a piece of paper? Can it continue to function at all? NO.
What's worse: the idea that people do things "on behalf" of corporations. Such as the fallacy that a corporation is to blame and not the person who does the wrong thing and rationalizes "I'm not a sociopath because I decided to pollute that river with toxic waste then obstruct justice during the investigation by shredding all those documents on behalf of the corporation."
Corporations don't commit crimes. People do. Maybe it's "on behalf of" the corporation. But it's always a person doing the deed.
Again, a corporation is its people. It's not its own person.
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Enron got a lot of press. You don't hear as much about the thousands of other lawsuits that are wending their way through the courts involving corporations, most of which don't involve deliberate, "malice aforethought" crimes - many of them involve negligence, or downright accidental events.
SO... when you slip and fall at Wal-Mart because there was no "wet floor" sign up, will you take the individual janitor and the cashier to court to cover your medical bills? Good luck collecting enough money to even co
Re:OK (Score:5, Insightful)
A single employee can function without the rest of the corporation.
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In fact a single employee functions BETTER if all the management parts were removed.
that makes Management in a corporation.... Cancer?
Dialing back corporate personhood... (Score:3)
Thankfully, this dialing back corporate personhood and granting personal rights to corporations has long been overdue. Odd case to have it happen in, as the outcome is not clearly positive in all cases, but the overall result for the law in general is a positive one.
corporations-as-individuals = insanity (Score:5, Insightful)
If corporations were individuals they would be sociopaths as this 2003 Canadian documentary [wikipedia.org] endeavors to show. In D&D they would be considered either lawful evil or chaotic evil (depending on the corporation). They are narrowly selfish and greedy to such an extent that as an individual they would almost certainly be criminals. Profit trumps every other concern without exception. So corporations are an evil institution, but are they a necessary evil? The price we pay for economic prosperity. Perhaps, but that doesn't mean we have to give them any more power than necessary to get what we (as a society) want from them (inexpensive, innovative, useful products).
I consider myself a Libertarian, but I would argue that even in a free society corporations-as-individuals should be prohibited. It simply does not make sense to grant them the same rights as an individual not only because they clearly are a group of individuals, but because corporations need to have limitations on their power and on their predictably ruthlessly selfish/evil behavior. Corporations are the only institutions that can even remotely compete with governments in terms of power and abuse of power and they should be treated warily because of this.
Reading too much into the ruling (Score:5, Insightful)
Folks here are already saying things about this ruling diminishing the "person" aspect of corporations. The ruling doesn't really do that. Instead, it rests on a question of statutory construction. In particular, the court says that "personal privacy", a phrase used in FOIA, does not merely mean the privacy of a person, as AT&T argued, but instead refers to particular elements of privacy that only carry meaning when you're talking about an actual human being.
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That was more or less my thought on this. This didn't seem to be so much a rolling back of the rights as a refusal to extend more rights to corporations. I don't really recall previously corporations being allowed to have personal privacy, and in fact such a notion would leave regulatory agencies in a tough place because typically 5th amendment protections would also apply as well as other places where privacy is conveyed in the constitution.
Businesses trying to tell us what to do (Score:3, Insightful)
Sadly, most elected officials do not realize, that we the People, ALLOW these businesses to do business in our country.
Just like they think they lead us, when the words lead, leader and leadership, do not exist in the U.S. Constitution.
The tail shall not wag the dog. End of story. Get out and vote against these idiots! It is your DUTY as an informed
electorate.
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Oh, they know this perfectly well, but for $25000 in campaign contributions they can conveniently forget it.
Re:WRONG (Score:4, Insightful)
I personaly don't see why people working together should have less rights than people working alone.
They don't. The people working at a corporation are nowhere even the subject of the discussion. The rights at stake are additional rights given to the corporation.
I personally don't see why people working together should have more rights than people working alone.
Scaling is the difference (Score:2)
I personaly don't see why people working together should have less rights than people working alone.
Scale. Gangs of thieves also don't get to have 100,000 employees worldwide. You can put a whole gang of thieves in jail, effectively dissolving their "corporation."
Thief corporations can only be dissolved and jail pretty much avoided in the USA --look at Bernie Madoff's cover-up of his 'nonexistent' accomplices. A result is that the same 100,000 thieves will be out there doing other thieving and banding together after a PR rebranding effort.
The question is which 'status' would most people choose given a de
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"People working together" is a partnership. That's something the state should not be able to prevent. But a corporation is a distinct entity, created with the permission of the state, to shield groups of people from individual liability. When we, the people, grant such permissions, we have the right to withhold any individual rights or impose duties and responsibilities as we see fit.
As a creation of the state, it should not be possible to create a corporation that is granted rights with the state itself d
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Are you suggesting that individuals are (or should be) responsible for things that you cannot prove they actually did? Life *would* be much easier without that whole "presumption of innocence" thing, wouldn't it?
The individual working alone can incorporate, and enjoy the same legal protections as any other corporation
Outraged (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently, these eight supreme court justices need to be taught a lesson.
Don't they know that the original intent of the framers of the Constitution was that corporations are persons, except when it comes to paying taxes? Also, union members are not persons.
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Should people working together as a group have less rights than those same people if they are working on their own?
Re:Outraged (Score:4, Insightful)
The people certainly not.
But why does the group need extra rights for itself, if all the people within it already have them?
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Corporations generally give those people the right to participate in the activities of the corporation without being fully responsible for those activities, and people can work together without forming a corporation, so what's your point?
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Should people working together as a group have less rights than those same people if they are working on their own?
As a corporation, yes. If you want to retain your entire set of rights, form a partnership.
I don't think it's common sense (Score:2)
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Give it a week. They'll throw a few billion dollars at the Robberbaronicans and next thing you know, there'll be a "Personal Privacy for Corporations" clause slipped into the next budget bill.
Re:I must be dreaming. (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't worry. The Supreme Court will be back to their old tricks again in Al Kidd v Ashcroft [npr.org]. They may throw us a bone once in a while, but don't think for a second that they are on our side.
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