“Corporations are people, my friend,” Mitt Romney famously said in 2011 while running for president. The Supreme Court decided the previous year that corporations could give money to political campaigns, just like people, and in 2014, the high court gave corporations religious freedom to deny contraceptives to employees, thereby letting them behave just as badly as people. If you prick corporations, do they not bleed?
Actually no, they don’t. But as of now, they can get presidential pardons.
The notion that corporations are people did not originate with the Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision in 2010. Way back in 1886, the high court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Union Pacific Railroad that corporations were covered by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. To be more precise, this question was addressed not in the decision (which resolved a local taxation dispute) but rather in a headnote that said the court “does not wish to hear argument on the question” of whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to corporations because “we are all of the opinion that it does.“ Somehow this non sequitur became legal precedent. “Later cases,” wrote Stetson University law professor Clara Torres-Spelliscy in a 2014 analysis for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, “uncritically cited the headnote as if it had been part of the case.”
You know what isn’t declining? Pardons for corporations. Trump has granted nine. These were never a thing before Trump—not in the modern era, and possibly never. According to Bloomberg’s Ava Benny-Morrison, the nine pardons wiped out $200 million in financial penalties, “some of which were destined for victims of wrongdoing.” Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri, told Bloomberg: “In any previous era no president would touch this with a barge pole. Maybe individual cases with some compelling reason, but the systemic elimination of criminal liability of major financial crime would never have happened before, and it didn’t.”
Half of the $200 million in wiped-out fines can be attributed to a single crypto company, BitMEX. The three co-founders of the company, a pioneer in crypto derivatives, all pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires maintaining certain safeguards against money laundering. Each paid $10 million in fines. Then, in July 2024, BitMEX itself pleaded guilty to the same crime, and this past January the company was fined $100 million.
You must log in or # to comment.
I want CEOs to face all the punishment for a corporation. I’ve heard they get paid so Mich cause they assume the risk. They get all the credit when the company does food but it breaks the law and how could I know everything going on. Well they get the juice so let’s blame them personally for every time they break the law.
if corporations are people why can’t we give them the death penalty when they commit mass murder?
Yes Nestlé, we are looking at you, you piece of shit.
It may be unpopular around here, but the pardon power of the presidency needs to go.
Especially the power that pardons people for all crimes
It undermines the rule of law and sets a precedent that the president is above the law
It isn’t a check on the judiciary, it’s a way to negate the idea that nobody is above the law.
Case in point: Ford pardoning Nixon Case in point: Biden pardoning his family for any crimes in a time period
I would only allow presidential pardons in case of laws changing. The broken clock moments of said pardons are due to bad laws.
the pardon power of the presidency needs to go
Just need to pass a constitutional amendment. Those are so easy to get. Just look to the ERA’s deadline chicinery.
The concept of a corporation was they would be granted special rights not usually not afforded to companies under the agreement that they would act for the public good. They had to indicate in their charter what public good they were providing and this was subject to approval by governing bodies.
Then it was a race to the bottom for the various governing bodies to grant charters for less and less public good. Now they can just say “maximize dividends and/or share value” and pay a small fee and are granted a corporations.
But despite not doing anything for the public good they still have those special rights as if they are.
Now we’re at a point where people actually believe maximizing profits actually is the public good.
Corporations are people like girl scouts or unions or counter strike clans are people. If we’re going to restrict their speech we need a constitutional amendment clarifying which groups of people are excluded from 1A. Nobody has the stones to propose one.
This notion of corporate personhood is purely for our own convenience, so corporations can enter into contracts, have bank accounts, and so on. In no universe did the folks who wrote that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” mean to include corporations on that. After all, corporations were not created by the same Creator as people, were they*?
I would be 100% in favor of an amendment that clearly spells out that the rights enumerated in the Constitution are limited to actual humans, and any corporation or other group of people are not entitled to any more inherent rights than the humans who make up the corporation are entitled to collectively. You don’t get more rights simply by paying a filing fee to Delaware!
This does not remove all of the privileges that we have granted corporations to make it easier to organize, but does mean that corporations have no inherent “right” to anything. Humans have those!
Edited to add: someone has proposed it already! https://www.movetoamend.org/amendment
* = Yes, this is Lemmy, so some snarky person will come along and say “of course they are! We made up both corporations and God!”. But, the founders were deists and believed in a Creator, so let’s try to look at it from their point of view, because that’s what our backwards Supreme Court does…
I would be 100% in favor of an amendment that clearly spells out that the rights enumerated in the Constitution are limited to actual humans, and any corporation or other group of people are not entitled to any more inherent rights than the humans who make up the corporation are entitled to collectively.
How does that change the current law, though?
I’d be in favor of a rule that explains that organizing into associations doesn’t change the rights of the individuals who form the association, but also that the association would only have rights that relate to the actual purpose of forming the association in the first place (whether it’s a corporation, LLC, partnership, joint venture, other unincorporated associations).
So a church gets religious freedom. But a sandwich shop does not. A newspaper gets freedom of speech and may exercise editorial discretion on what goes on its pages. A telephone company does not, and cannot discriminate against the viewpoints expressed over its phone lines.
There are trickier issues: can a government ban halal slaughter, and would a Muslim-owned butcher shop be entitled to a religious exemption (if, assuming, individuals were granted that exemption)? I’d argue you have to look to the nature of the business or organization to determine whether that particular right applies to that organization, so the butcher shop can invoke the religion of the human butcher, and possibly even the human customers who want to buy halal meat.
But the framework makes sense to me, and is closely related to the principle of organizational standing, where something like a nonprofit association of apple growers can sue on behalf of apple grower rights, despite not being an organization that actually directly grows apples. That’s how corporate rights should work: look to the reason for incorporating and the nature of the organization, and how it relates to the nature of the right at issue.
