If Corporations Were Human

Scott Klinger @ Common Dreams - Yesterday'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 reverse a decades old ruling barring companies from using their general funds to fund political campaign, 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. Our nation's founders would be shocked to learn that their revolution had resulted in non-human entities like corporations being endowed with the same hard fought rights secured for citizens.

But what if we accept corporate personhood as the current reality and instead focus on changing the rules such 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 more.