[Anarch157a]

> It is much harder to wipe one guy's data just because he pissed you off and get away with it.

The point parent was making is that corporations are doing that, since corpos are now persons, thanks to Citizens United, any argument about this being bureaucratic, autocratic or what not, is moot.

Fact is, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. frequently deactivate and wipe user accounts with disastous consequences for the victims.

[samatman]

Corporate personhood is a very old doctrine which is described by the law itself as a legal fiction.

Corporate personhood is what allows your anarchist grocery cooperative to sign a contract with the organic farm on the outside of town, or add someone new to the profit sharing arrangement when they sign after putting in the mandatory hours. It allows a collective, however organized, to function as though they were an individual.

It has nothing to do with Citizens United whatsoever, and it isn't the problem you seem to think it is. Business couldn't function without the fiction, and replacing it with something else would have to work in basically the same way, so it's pointless.

[ls612]

All that Citizens United means is that corporate persons can speak freely to the same degree that natural persons can. Which makes sense, collectively speaking is just as core to the First Amendment as speaking alone is.

[samatman]

Agreed, I've found that much of the criticism of Citizens United isn't very well-informed. In a way it's an embarrassment that the Supreme Court had to affirm that a First Amendment right extends to corporations, because it's right there in the plain text: "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". "The press" has always, universally, been understood to mean publishing, which is a business, and hence a corporate practice.

It was naked partisan suppression of speech to rule that Fahrenheit 9-11 is protected speech but it's 'electioneering' when Citizen's United funds a documentary. Not that I'm a fan of Citizen's United, quite the contrary, they started the whole brouhaha by suing to prevent Moore's advertisements from showing before elections. But the grounds the FEC used to dismiss that suit were equally applicable to Celsius 41.11, it was a clear-cut case of administrative overreach.

You can't have freedom of the press if the government is allowed to decide which corporations are and are not "the press", that's a loophole you could barnstorm a Saturn V through.

[anamexis]

That has nothing to do with Citizens United, which only concerned campaign finance rules in federal elections. Furthermore, the Citizens United ruling makes no reference at all to corporate personhood.

[devilbunny]

CU was a strange but IMHO probably correct decision. A lot of people don't like its practical effects, and that's certainly their right, but purely as a legal matter, it does seem odd that you would lose autonomy when you band together. It is, in a way, the ultimate conservative comeback to "government is just another name for things we choose to do together" - well, so are corporations.

Maybe it's not the way things should be, but it's hardly as though the news business has not had far more radical things happen in the past, oh, forty years.

[martin-t]

> purely as a legal matter, it does seem odd that you would lose autonomy when you band together

It absolutely makes sense. Laws set rules for resolving conflicts between entities (both people and organizations). In general, the more power an entity has, the more likely it is to abuse that power and the more damage it can do in its abuse and therefore needs more oversight and restrictions on the use of power.

Organizations are obviously more powerful than individuals so require more oversight and restrictions to keep them in check.

The only odd thing is that organizations don't accumulate more restrictions according to their size.

[CRConrad]

> It is, in a way, the ultimate conservative comeback to "government is just another name for things we choose to do together" - well, so are corporations.

Counter-comeback:

But in that case, shouldn't the limitations on what the collective can do to the individual -- limitations that are not just conservative talking points, but enshrined in your constitution -- also go for corporations, as well as for government?

[devilbunny]

Could be. Probably should. But good luck getting a constitutional amendment through nowadays.

California’s constitution is too easy to change. The US constitution is too hard to change. It should be easier to change a state than a national one; that aspect is fine, but those two represent extremes.

The difference is that corporations can, and do, fail and go out of business. That particular phrase was much bandied about and always struck me as ridiculously one-sided. The government can throw me in jail, take my money without any proof of wrongdoing (see civil asset forfeiture), kill me, force me into service (intriguingly the Thirteenth Amendment, for Reasons, does not prohibit conscription, even though the language doesn’t say that). I’m no huge fan of corporate worship, being more libertarian (but not Libertarian, if you know my meaning), but at least we have tools to break down abusive corps. It’s astonishingly hard to break down even very small, very corrupt governments.

I would happily grant at least some of those restrictions to corps if the same logic applied to government. But somehow, in our modern polity, there are a lot of people who argue that corporations should not even have limited liability for investors (even the smallest) but that government should have extraordinary powers over everything. If government were run by angels, no such control would be necessary. But it isn’t, and so we must have it. And until people will openly acknowledge that, it’s hard to reconcile the two views. I don’t think there’s a big constituency in the US for untrammeled power, and from the perspective of the typical citizen, both corps and government are very indifferent. They do not care. The argument of “but government is just a name for things we do together” very much elides this danger. There are other things we choose to do together, and we have not chosen to throw every Catholic in jail because the Church harbored abusers. We didn’t even come close to throwing all the abusers and their enablers in prison.

It’s a tough line to draw. However, you’re right that corporations should have less power than they do. Alas, that doesn’t solve the problem. Robert Moses had extraordinary power in New York as an unelected official. He set fait accompli after fait accompli in front of elected officials and dared them to try him. He almost always won. He had extremely good teachers in politics, so the law was usually on his side, because he had written it.