Try getting a paycheck from a poor person when they are done with us and we are gone. I pay taxes and my corporation pays massive taxes. My corporation has a right to lobby the government for the burdens they levy on me.
But that’s the point. “Sure, compare the 78% small family business to Enron...”
Why *should* the law compare those two, when they are so obviously different, other than both being called “corporations”? This is the problem of non-constitutional legal constructs. Legally the two should be completely different.
On your end, having corporate rules is a vital business construct, but though it is theoretically possible for your corporation to “grow up” to become the next ADM, to do so in the real world would require so many transitions of organization that with each level you would become an entirely different entity.
So why in the world should all of these completely different organizations be called “corporations”, or have to play by the same rules?
At your level of organization, you see correctly the great value of your corporate free speech rights. But if you look at the opposite end of the scale, at some gigantic, nebulous corporation, controlled by proxies of other corporations, sovereign wealth funds of foreign powers, and hundreds of thousands of individual shareholders, who should speak on behalf of the corporation?
Is what they are saying in their corporate interest, their shareholders interest, directed and ordered by a foreign government, or by other corporations interests? If they, whoever they are, are in fact directed behind the scenes by some scoundrel like George Soros, willing to spend hundreds of millions of corporate dollars to influence the law and public policy, does that equate in any way with the political rights of free speech by family farmers?
The law giving some degree of civil rights to your corporation makes sense. But it should not be a gateway for a Saudi prince to corrupt US law by lobbying for a parallel Sharia court system in our country, without registering as a foreign lobbyist, but by laundering money through a network of corporations he controls.