DamnYankee
Loyal to the end
Are the Supreme's always right? Dick?
Can pinheads explain the contradiction? ...Probably not!
- Thread starter Dixie - In Memoriam
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What a fucking stupid response. I bet it did not take long to come up with.
The issue is whether the supreme court was correct in treating corporations as legal persons for the purpose of constitutional protections. The issue is not about whether corporations are actual PEOPLE, in a scientific context.
You are just a fucking moron, who drops context because it makes it easier to form stupid knee jerk reactions than it is to from an opinion based on reality.
Lao Tse
Verified User
they were wrong in their decision. If you're not a person you shouldn't get the protections of a person. You only confuse yourself with your stupidity. The rest of us see clearly.
This is the road to fascism, and you're an advocate of fascism.
Person's have the right to form groups for political action. Those groups may engage in speech and any limit on that speech would be a clear violation of the speech rights of members of the group.
The road to fascism is through your assault on individual rights of citizens which you mask by attacking the corporate form. It allows you and other fascists to limit their speech, religion, political action and privacy.
Lao Tse
Verified User
But corporations are formed for a different purpose, and as such, should not be granted the freedoms of a purely political group.
The road to fascism is through the legal fiction of corporate personhood.
The worship of the corporate form IS fascism.
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Clearly a straw man. How could they always be right if Austin was wrong? I clearly implied, as did the CU court, that they were not always right. But you being a brain dead moron make this worthless post that is nothing but a waste of time.
Were the Supreme's wrong in the CU case?
Lao Tse
Verified User
Corporations will never be people.
this decision is an abomination, leading us straight to fascism.
Oh, I thought it was as simple as deciding whether corporations are really people. A corporation formed, expressly for the purpose of political advocacy is a person or should be treated as one legally?
Your argument is the anti distortion interest that was advanced in Austin. The CU court rejected it, as it should have. It would have created an unworkable precedent and amounts to discrimination based on the identity of the corporation.
Lao Tse
Verified User
It's still not a person, though. You don't have to bestow personhood to allow contributions.
Anti distortion interest? My argument is that "regular" non-pac corporations are not people or PACS.
Are you still confused, gay-baiter?
Is a corporation formed for the explicit purpose of practicing first amendment rights (e.g., a political advocacy group, an incorporated church or a media corporation) entitled to first amendment protections?
If not then how is "freedom of the press" to be practiced? If they are entitled to such rights then you are arguing that "corporations are people" in the same way I or the court have.
So PACS ARE persons?
Lao Tse
Verified User
Corporations formed for that purpose may do it. They're still not people. Corporations formed for other purposes should be disallowed from interfering in elctions.
no. I'm arguing that corporations formed for the purpose of free speech may contribute, not that they 'are people".
Corporations formed for other purposes may not.
Bestowing personhood is a fascist overstep. This is so like you and your nudging implementation of fascism.
DamnYankee
Loyal to the end
Why all the vitriol, Dick?
Lao Tse
Verified User
No. Pacs can contribute. Again. It's not necessary to bestow legal personhood. That's a fascist overstep, as I explained previously.
Listen dumbfuck, you can try to boil down every issue into a sound bite if you like. But the issue is not whether they are actually people or persons, but persons in the context of how the law deals with them.
You are saying that some corporations are legal persons but others are not. The question then becomes whether the state may restrict speech based on corporate identity. The courts have said they cannot.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZO.html
Justice Kennedy , Opinion of the Court
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
CITIZENS UNITED, APPELLANT v. FEDERAL
ELECTION COMMISSION
...
Under the rationale of these precedents, political speech does not lose First Amendment protection “simply because its source is a corporation.” Bellotti, supra, at 784; see Pacific Gas & Elec. Co. v. Public Util. Comm’n of Cal. , 475 U. S. 1, 8 (1986) (plurality opinion) (“The identity of the speaker is not decisive in determining whether speech is protected. Corporations and other associations, like individuals, contribute to the ‘discussion, debate, and the dissemination of information and ideas’ that the First Amendment seeks to foster” (quoting Bellotti, 435 U. S., at 783)). The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not “natural persons.” Id., at 776; see id. , at 780, n. 16. Cf. id. , at 828 (Rehnquist, J., dissenting).
Lao Tse
Verified User
Listen fuckhole. That rationale of these legal tards is suspect.
it's not necessary to bestow personhood to allow PACS to contibute to elections.
Just like we don't have to declare animals to be people to protect them from cruelty.
The legal abstractions the legal tards chose to parade around to justify fascism are inept at representing an actual reality.
Do you really say gaggle of dogs, and flock of pigs? You would. You're that tardational.
You are such a failure and your every post is worthless.
I asked a question of relevance and you failed to answer. Was the SC right in this case?
You asked a stupid question one that had been answered in the preceding thread.
DamnYankee
Loyal to the end
Then why do you read them. Dick?
They are just as much people as a PAC. It's their identity you have a problem with and it is the precedent you support that leads to fascism.
....
If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech. If the antidistortion rationale were to be accepted, however, it would permit Government to ban political speech simply because the speaker is an association that has taken on the corporate form. The Government contends that Austin permits it to ban corporate expenditures for almost all forms of communication stemming from a corporation. See Part II–E, supra; Tr. of Oral Arg. 66 (Sept. 9, 2009); see also id. , at 26–31 (Mar. 24, 2009). If Austin were correct, the Government could prohibit a corporation from expressing political views in media beyond those presented here, such as by printing books. The Government responds “that the FEC has never applied this statute to a book,” and if it did, “there would be quite [a] good as-applied challenge.” Tr. of Oral Arg. 65 (Sept. 9, 2009). This troubling assertion of brooding governmental power cannot be reconciled with the confidence and stability in civic discourse that the First Amendment must secure.
Political speech is “indispensable to decisionmaking in a democracy, and this is no less true because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual.” Bellotti, 435 U. S., at 777 (footnote omitted); see ibid. (the worth of speech “does not depend upon the identity of its source, whether corporation, association, union, or individual”); Buckley , 424 U. S., at 48–49 (“[T]he concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment ”); Automobile Workers , 352 U. S., at 597 (Douglas, J., dissenting); CIO , 335 U. S., at 154–155 (Rutledge, J., concurring in result). This protection for speech is inconsistent with Austin ’s antidistortion rationale. Austin sought to defend the antidistortion rationale as a means to prevent corporations from obtaining “ ‘an unfair advantage in the political marketplace’ ” by using “ ‘resources amassed in the economic marketplace.’ ” 494 U. S., at 659 (quoting MCFL , supra , at 257). But Buckley rejected the premise that the Government has an interest “in equalizing the relative ability of individuals and groups to influence the outcome of elections.” 424 U. S., at 48; see Bellotti, supra, at 791, n. 30. Buckley was specific in stating that “the skyrocketing cost of political campaigns” could not sustain the governmental prohibition. 424 U. S., at 26. The First Amendment ’s protections do not depend on the speaker’s “financial ability to engage in public discussion.” Id. , at 49.
....
It is irrelevant for purposes of the First Amendment that corporate funds may “have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.” Id. , at 660 (majority opinion). All speakers, including individuals and the media, use money amassed from the economic marketplace to fund their speech. The First Amendment protects the resulting speech, even if it was enabled by economic transactions with persons or entities who disagree with the speaker’s ideas. See id. , at 707 ( Kennedy, J. , dissenting) (“Many persons can trace their funds to corporations, if not in the form of donations, then in the form of dividends, interest, or salary”).
Austin ’s antidistortion rationale would produce the dangerous, and unacceptable, consequence that Congress could ban political speech of media corporations. See McConnell , 540 U. S., at 283 (opinion of Thomas, J. ) (“The chilling endpoint of the Court’s reasoning is not difficult to foresee: outright regulation of the press”). Cf. Tornillo , 418 U. S., at 250 (alleging the existence of “vast accumulations of unreviewable power in the modern media empires”). Media corporations are now exempt from §441b’s ban on corporate expenditures. See 2 U. S. C. §§431(9)(B)(i). Yet media corporations accumulate wealth with the help of the corporate form, the largest media corporations have “immense aggregations of wealth,” and the views expressed by media corporations often “have little or no correlation to the public’s support” for those views. Austin , 494 U. S., at 660. Thus, under the Government’s reasoning, wealthy media corporations could have their voices diminished to put them on par with other media entities. There is no precedent for permitting this under the First Amendment .
The media exemption discloses further difficulties with the law now under consideration. There is no precedent supporting laws that attempt to distinguish between corporations which are deemed to be exempt as media corporations and those which are not. “We have consistently rejected the proposition that the institutional press has any constitutional privilege beyond that of other speakers.” Id. , at 691 ( Scalia, J. , dissenting) (citing Bellotti, 435 U. S. , at 782); see Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. v. Greenmoss Builders, Inc. , 472 U. S. 749, 784 (1985) (Brennan, J., joined by Marshall, Blackmun, and Stevens , JJ., dissenting); id. , at 773 (White, J., concurring in judgment). With the advent of the Internet and the decline of print and broadcast media, moreover, the line between the media and others who wish to comment on political and social issues becomes far more blurred.
The law’s exception for media corporations is, on its own terms, all but an admission of the invalidity of the antidistortion rationale. And the exemption results in a further, separate reason for finding this law invalid: Again by its own terms, the law exempts some corporations but covers others, even though both have the need or the motive to communicate their views. The exemption applies to media corporations owned or controlled by corporations that have diverse and substantial investments and participate in endeavors other than news. So even assuming the most doubtful proposition that a news organization has a right to speak when others do not, the exemption would allow a conglomerate that owns both a media business and an unrelated business to influence or control the media in order to advance its overall business interest. At the same time, some other corporation, with an identical business interest but no media outlet in its ownership structure, would be forbidden to speak or inform the public about the same issue. This differential treatment cannot be squared with the First Amendment .
There is simply no support for the view that the First Amendment , as originally understood, would permit the suppression of political speech by media corporations. The Framers may not have anticipated modern business and media corporations. See McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm’n , 514 U. S. 334, 360–361 (1995) ( Thomas , J., concurring in judgment). Yet television networks and major newspapers owned by media corporations have become the most important means of mass communication in modern times. The First Amendment was certainly not understood to condone the suppression of political speech in society’s most salient media. It was understood as a response to the repression of speech and the press that had existed in England and the heavy taxes on the press that were imposed in the colonies. See McConnell , 540 U. S., at 252–253 (opinion of Scalia , J.); Grosjean , 297 U. S., at 245–248; Near , 283 U. S., at 713–714. The great debates between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists over our founding document were published and expressed in the most important means of mass communication of that era—newspapers owned by individuals. See McIntyre , 514 U. S., at 341–343; id. , at 367 ( Thomas , J., concurring in judgment). At the founding, speech was open, comprehensive, and vital to society’s definition of itself; there were no limits on the sources of speech and knowledge. See B. Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution 5 (1967) (“Any number of people could join in such proliferating polemics, and rebuttals could come from all sides”); G. Wood, Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787, p. 6 (1969) (“t is not surprising that the intellectual sources of [the Americans’] Revolutionary thought were profuse and various”). The Framers may have been unaware of certain types of speakers or forms of communication, but that does not mean that those speakers and media are entitled to less First Amendment protection than those types of speakers and media that provided the means of communicating political ideas when the Bill of Rights was adopted.
Austin interferes with the “open marketplace” of ideas protected by the First Amendment . New York State Bd. of Elections v. Lopez Torres , 552 U. S. 196, 208 (2008) ; see ibid. (ideas “may compete” in this marketplace “without government interference”); McConnell, supra , at 274 (opinion of Thomas, J. ). It permits the Government to ban the political speech of millions of associations of citizens. See Statistics of Income 2 (5.8 million for-profit corporations filed 2006 tax returns). Most of these are small corporations without large amounts of wealth. See Supp. Brief for Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America as Amicus Curiae 1, 3 (96% of the 3 million businesses that belong to the U. S. Chamber of Commerce have fewer than 100 employees); M. Keightley, Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, Business Organizational Choices: Taxation and Responses to Legislative Changes 10 (2009) (more than 75% of corporations whose income is taxed under federal law, see 26 U. S. C. §301, have less than $1 million in receipts per year). This fact belies the Government’s argument that the statute is justified on the ground that it prevents the “distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth.” Austin , 494 U. S., at 660. It is not even aimed at amassed wealth.
The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach. The Government has “muffle[d] the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.” McConnell, supra, at 257–258 (opinion of Scalia, J. ). And “the electorate [has been] deprived of information, knowledge and opinion vital to its function.” CIO , 335 U. S., at 144 (Rutledge, J., concurring in result). By suppressing the speech of manifold corporations, both for-profit and nonprofit, the Government prevents their voices and viewpoints from reaching the public and advising voters on which persons or entities are hostile to their interests. Factions will necessarily form in our Republic, but the remedy of “destroying the liberty” of some factions is “worse than the disease.” The Federalist No. 10, p. 130 (B. Wright ed. 1961) (J. Madison). Factions should be checked by permitting them all to speak, see ibid. , and by entrusting the people to judge what is true and what is false.
The purpose and effect of this law is to prevent corporations, including small and nonprofit corporations, from presenting both facts and opinions to the public. This makes Austin ’s antidistortion rationale all the more an aberration. “[T]he First Amendment protects the right of corporations to petition legislative and administrative bodies.” Bellotti , 435 U. S., at 792, n. 31 (citing California Motor Transport Co. v. Trucking Unlimited , 404 U. S. 508, 510–511 (1972) ; Eastern Railroad Presidents Conference v. Noerr Motor Freight, Inc. , 365 U. S. 127, 137–138 (1961) ). Corporate executives and employees counsel Members of Congress and Presidential administrations on many issues, as a matter of routine and often in private. An amici brief filed on behalf of Montana and 25 other States notes that lobbying and corporate communications with elected officials occur on a regular basis. Brief for State of Montana et al. as Amici Curiae 19. When that phenomenon is coupled with §441b, the result is that smaller or nonprofit corporations cannot raise a voice to object when other corporations, including those with vast wealth, are cooperating with the Government. That cooperation may sometimes be voluntary, or it may be at the demand of a Government official who uses his or her authority, influence, and power to threaten corporations to support the Government’s policies. Those kinds of interactions are often unknown and unseen. The speech that §441b forbids, though, is public, and all can judge its content and purpose. References to massive corporate treasuries should not mask the real operation of this law. Rhetoric ought not obscure reality.
Even if §441b’s expenditure ban were constitutional, wealthy corporations could still lobby elected officials, although smaller corporations may not have the resources to do so. And wealthy individuals and unincorporated associations can spend unlimited amounts on independent expenditures. See, e.g., WRTL , 551 U. S., at 503–504 (opinion of Scalia , J.) (“In the 2004 election cycle, a mere 24 individuals contributed an astounding total of $142 million to [ 26 U. S. C. §527 organizations]”). Yet certain disfavored associations of citizens—those that have taken on the corporate form—are penalized for engaging in the same political speech.
When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.