Posted on 09/17/2009 2:09:37 PM PDT by Admiral_Zeon
Where in the constitution does it say that business entities that incorporate under state law are "persons" within the meaning of the Constitution? Show me the article and section or the amendment.
You ask me that question? Do you even read what I said? Do you know what is meant by the phrase "straw man fallacy"?
Now show me where in the constitution a corporation created under state law is a "person".
I understand your point and it is not a valid point. She is talking about rights of corporations created under state law. The Supreme Court in the 19th century created a fiction that corporations created under state law were "persons". That was an expansion of the constitution, just as the right to an abortion was created by the supreme court. The fact is that Corporations are not "persons" and they are created to sheild "persons" from personal liability and personal responsibility in their businesses. Now show me where in the constitution a corporation created under state law is a "person".
No. You don't understand my point and you apparently don't know what a straw man fallacy is. Else you wouldn't be asking me such a lame question. Of course corporations don't have unalienable rights.
As I said:Look at the full context of her statements. It's a free speech case. Sotomayor is hinting that she believes individuals who freely associate with other individuals in a group(in this case a corporation) can have their free speech rights denied. Sotomayor is setting up a strawman fallacy. It's not about corporations having rights. Its about individuals having the right of free association and free speech.
the left are in bed with many big organisations even the media groups
Exactly what I was thinking.
Now show me where in the constitution the federal government has the power to limit free speech.
Great post! Sotomayor creates the false parable of appointed judges ruling on the law and elected legislators making the law, and then equates judicial bribery to campaign financing. It’s not about supporting the person you want for your representative, it’s about bribery, hence speech must be regulated. That nasty private money. The real solution: a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Sotomayor and ACORN Joined at the Hip
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/07/sotomayor_and_acorn_joined_at.html
They don't have that power.
Now answer my question.
But the problem lies not in Corporations but in the elected
officials whom betray our Republic by taking bribes through
special favors and business deals.
When the White House gave 2 billion taxpayer dollars to Petrobras
in Brazil and it came to light that Mr. Soros held a major
interest in the company where was the deafening uproar?
Is it no question that these are paybacks for election
rigging and bankrolling Alinskys open society?
It is not the corporations that are the problem it's the corruption.
P.s. Thank you for a very honest and intelligent reply.
Now that's a different take. Mostly 'freedom of contract' is invoked in attempts to defend corporate personhood.
Still, the argument goes nowhere. Rights are not social constructions based on shared experiences. That is a Marxist idea!
Rights only inhere in individuals, as part of the nature of our creation. Groups DO NOT QUALIFY for rights.
'Individual right' is a redundant phrase, while 'collective right' is an oxymoron. Ayn Rand made this crystal clear:
Since only an individual man can possess rights, the expression “individual rights” is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today’s intellectual chaos). But the expression “collective rights” is a contradiction in terms.
Any group or “collective,” large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.
A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations.
Any group that does not recognize this principle is not an association, but a gang or a mob . . . .
The notion of “collective rights” (the notion that rights belong to groups, not to individuals) means that “rights” belong to some men, but not to others—that some men have the “right” to dispose of others in any manner they please—and that the criterion of such privileged position consists of numerical superiority.
This is important stuff, I wish more people understood why.
The concept of individual rights is so prodigious a feat of political thinking that few men grasp it fully—and two hundred years have not been enough for other countries to understand it. But this is the concept to which we owe our lives—the concept which made it possible for us to bring into reality everything of value that any of us did or will achieve or experience.
Uhh - excuse me, but corporations do typically employ PEOPLE.
Now answer my question.
I already did. See my above answer from post #243. Now please move past the Sotomayor created straw man fallacy.
----
Now show me where in the constitution the federal government has the power to limit free speech.
They don't have that power.
Good. So then the government doesn't have the constitutional power to prevent individuals from exercising their freedom of speech rights and their freedom of association rights with campaign finance laws targeted against corporations, right?
The more things change... I remember reading about how, in the days of the Alaska purchase, there were so many monied interests, foreign powers, lobbyists and cronies involved that it was calculated that the US congress had been bribed by 300%. That is, on average, each and every congressman and senator had been bribed three times.
But as far as corporate law goes, I wouldn’t put it down so much to corruption as the evolution of litigation.
For example, railroad car coupling and uncoupling, with a man inserting a pin to hold two cars together, was obscenely dangerous. So the men who did it were highly paid, and frequently mauled or killed. Finally, somebody invented the automatic safety coupling, that would couple and decouple without the need for a person between the cars.
But one State bitterly objected, because it had a major switching operation that would no longer be needed, and they would lose a bundle in revenue. So they sued the railroad, insisting that no safety couplings be allowed in their State, or in trains passing through their State.
So it ended up with the federal government restricting how States could regulate corporations. And this is just one out of hundreds of cases, many of which, in an effort to treat just one corporation or an industry fairly, changed the rules for all corporations.
A lot of those old cases are still in legal textbooks, because they were very narrow in origin, but ended up national in scope.
I think my favorite involved a railroad employee who carried a burning torch for light, while looking for hidden hobos. He looked in the wrong hole, right when someone in the passenger car flushed the toilet onto his face, and was so angry that he shoved his torch up into the passenger’s rear end. This resulted in the first major corporate liability suit in the US, with the decision that corporations could be held liable for the actions of their employees.
And that decision still impacts every corporation, from family farms to Enron.
Exactly
and their freedom of association rights with campaign finance laws targeted against corporations, right?
Not necessarily.
Corporations are not people. Many corporations are foreign controlled but are registered in the United States. Clearly Congress has the right to limit their participation in the electoral process.
While individual stock holders and individual employees of corporations would clearly have all the rights and privileges of "persons" under the constitution, Corporate business entities have no such inherent rights or privileges.
The fact that so many American corporations are owned and controlled by foreign citizens or even foreign countries should make you think twice about whether you want corporations as business entities having the same rights as individual citizens of the United States.
Giving Corporations the same privileges and rights as individual citizens sets up a system where our country and our representatives could be unduly influenced by the likes of Communist China or Saudi Arabia.
Please Pull the Trigger
I must have missed it. Are you saying that the Constitution does expressly give statutory corporations the same rights as individual citizens of the United States?
Yes or no.
Any one person or groups of people as in corporations or unions or PACs or churches should be allowed to donate as much money as they went whenever they want to whichever candidate they want as long as there is fill disclosure as to who paid how much to whom.
For example let us say some crazy trillionaire backs a candidate as his sock puppet to run for president and donates millions to get him elected. That sounds like the rich crazy guy wins but if people see his funding comes from that source they would reject him accordingly.
Freedom firggin works! Let Freedom Ring!
The full disclosure over limiting spending is not my idea of course but I can't recall where I first heard it - if anyone can so we can give credit to where it is due I appreciate it.
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