The Bush-Packed Supreme Court Thinks Corporations Are People Too

By Scott Klinger, AlterNet. Posted January 22, 2010.

Corporations now have all the privileges of citizenship, without any of the responsibilities.

This week's Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case removes all limits on large corporations to finance and influence federal elections. In its ruling the court reverses a decades-old ruling barring companies from using their general funds to fund political campaigns, and guts pieces of the popular McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation. In so doing the Court implicitly embraces a 125 year-old precedent in the case of Santa Clara v. Santa Fe, where the Court first developed the legal doctrine of corporate personhood, explicitly granting corporations the same political and civil rights granted to human beings (historian Thom Hartmann discovered that the principle originated with a corrupt court clerk who added it to the case summary, rather than with the court itself).

But what if we accept corporate personhood as the current reality and instead focus on changing the rules so that corporations would also have to be bound by other limitations of humanity? How would corporations be different if they were indeed human-like?

Read on...

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