12minds

owsposters:

Occupy Pragmatism

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Shenanigans for so many reasons.

First: Corporate personhood has been a thing for the past hundred years or so in the US. A corporation, like a person, has to be able to enter into contracts, sue, and be sued. Thus, we create a legal fiction that it’s a “person”.

Second: Based on that—and fucking common sense—no one on the supreme court would ever make such a stupid argument that corporations aren’t people. In fact, simplifying it down to personhood is dumb to the point it renders the argument meaningless, another reason why no one on the supreme court would make that argument.

Third: Kennedy will never retire. He’ll grow old, bask in his terribly-written Lawrence decision, and stay on the bench just to spite me.

Fourth: This whole “personhood” thing. Look, corporations can do certain things people can, as identified in point 1. The question is what limits they have and what under what circumstances they apply. Does the 14th amendment apply to corporations? Yes. Does the free speech clause of the first amendment apply to corporations? Per Citizens United, yes. Do I think it was wrongly decided? Sure. Not because the notion of corporate personhood needs to be revisited, but because if the past hundred years of first amendment caselaw have shown anything it’s that the court puts the notion of the marketplace of ideas above all else in this realm. But if speech is subject to marketplace analysis, then the court must consider the effect of a monopoly on these markets. And under Citizens, they don’t. 

But that’s an argument you apparently can’t put into a jpeg.