Also, I believe it means that if someone slips and falls at your business, and decides to sue – instead of every employee of the company potentially going to jail and/or paying a fine, the company as a whole would be punished (unless there is egregious error/malpractice by employees).

Or say, if your company goes bankrupt…the banks can’t knock on your door and the door of every employee to demand their money back. Since you personally didn’t owe them money, but rather the corporation did.

That’s it. A shoe box to forever keep all your wealth where no one else can touch it, and an opportunity to be above / exempt from the law.

Perhaps it would be better not to revoke corporate person hood but to amend the constitution to restrict corporate involvement in elections. Or to have publicly financed elections.

Do I trust the legislature to come back through and pass a law requiring warrants to search corporate offices after this amendment is passed (and clean up every other unanticipated negative consequence of this broad rule)? Of course not. If I trusted the legislature to reasonably regulate law enforcement I wouldn’t need the bill of rights to protect me.

If you and I want to get together to go into the widget manufacturing business, or into the newspaper business, or into the spend-money-to-keep-Sarah-Palin-out-of-the-White-House business, we could still do that as a partnership. However, there wouldn’t be a fictitious person doing it: it be just you and me. So, if we got sued, it’d be us whose assets are on the line.

Ending corporate personhood would allow associations of persons to really be just that: a group of persons who share the responsibility for what the group does, rather than a fake person whose profits accrue to shareholders but whose debts can be erased with a wave of a lawyers’ pen.

Cowicide, I hate to break it to you, but when you voted for Obama

Toyourmother, I hate to break it to you, but I didn’t vote for Obama.

Are you ok, Toyourmother?

O_o

[Obama] … dare I say it, is a complete corporate shill just like every other president our two party system has ever produced.

You make an excellent point and it’s all the more reason we need to abolish corporate personhood.

Thanks for coming onboard!

Thanks for joining our side!: Cow apologizes in advance for any cognitive dissonance this post may or may not have caused to any person (human)… or corporation (non-human) that has become self-aware.

That’s the jist of this.

The fact that they want to use this regulatory principle against certain groups of people is a corollary.

There is no secret conspiracy with the Koch’s massive support for right wing think tanks and causes from Reason Magazine to “Freedomworks”, to getting caught paying PR firms to vandalize wikipedia and most likely articles like this. It’s out there for anybody to see.

Just as your very telling posting history on Boing Boing is as well.

I think it’s absurd to say that free speech applies to individuals, but as soon as they organize themselves into a legal group, the government can restrict their political speech.

You make it sound like the worst issue facing Americans today is the government restricting the voices of large groups of Americans. Oh, the poor corporations have no voice…

The current reality is a very small number of people who own corporations are drowning out the voices of the many with MONEY. As a matter of fact, the Koch brothers even pressure their own workforce to parrot their own voice under threat of termination.

Here, you must have missed this story, click here.

Critical thinking skills… you need them.

In a lawsuit happy United States, I think that would end must “association of people” businesses pretty quickly. Plus, you are risking a flight of assets out of the US. No person with substantial savings or assets would risk opening a business in the US, unless they can hide their money else where.

And also, how would it work for an airline company that’s employing thousands of people? One lawsuit and every one of those employees would have to pay up? Would you risk creating a new invention or even starting a bakery shop – because if that insertAndriod phone catches on fire or someone gets sick from the bakery food, the whole business can go under via lawsuits?

Think about the change of behavior: Everyone will be risk averse to the point of halting innovation.

Oh yeah, I can come up with stupid poll results too

You didn’t scroll down, did you?

61% of Americans think the government should be able to limit the amount of money individuals can contribute to candidates and 76% think it should be able to limit the amount corporations or unions can give.

Yes, more or less, I don’t think you should amend the Constitution of the United States without carefully considering the full consequences of the change you are proposing, and particularly if it creates significant negative consequences for the fundamental rights that our Constitution protects.

Thats not “dumb.” What is “dumb” is expecting the very legislatures you claim are bought and sold to protect your interests once you’ve voted to remove a large set of constraints on their power.

My point was that just because a bunch of people say something, doesn’t mean it’s true.

Corporations, or unions for that matter, CANNOT DONATE MONEY TO CANDIDATES OR CAMPAIGNS. How many times does this need to be repeated before the legions of idiots will remember it?

“The law also prohibits contributions from corporations and labor unions. This prohibition applies to any incorporated organization, profit or nonprofit.” http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/citizens.shtml

Please please please get corporations on our side fighting for loopholes for each and every person.

FTA:

Wikipedia shows Koch Family Foundations supporting causes like: CATO Institute, Reason Foundation, cancer research, ballet (because seriously: FUCK. THAT. SHIT.) …

A long time ago, corporate charters weren’t permanent, they had to be renewed- and wouldn’t be if the corporation’s existence no longer served the public interest.

It is indeed obscene that anyone can create an immortal entity with most of the right s and few of the responsibilities that natural persons have. If we want an amendment to fix it, maybe something along the lines of “All rights and duties of person under this constitution apply specifically to natural persons. Other legal persons may be created that have certain specific rights and responsibilities as defined by congress and the states through appropriate legislation, subject to the limits of their authority under this constitution.” IANAL, in case that wasn’t clear.

Freedom of the Press – The company will stop being a person, but the reporters will, most likely, keep being people for the foreseeable future. No problem there.

Freedom of Speech – People who talk… still people.

Police searching w/o warrants – Again, employees/staff are people.

So, barring secondary legislation that removes personhood from some/all people…