Today’s Supreme Court ruling is an Alice in Wonderland exercise. The five-justice majority reached the outcome it sought — an outcome that greatly expands the legal rights and political power of corporations — by trying to redefine basic reality.
No matter what the Court majority may prefer to argue or believe, corporations are not people and money is not speech. They simply are not.
Nor did the Founding Fathers perceive them as such. The notion that corporations — a useful legal fiction created by government — should have the same rights as natural human beings would have astounded Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Marshall. The theory of natural rights that animated the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that it is people and only people who are endowed with inalienable, natural rights. At the time, they did not even extend that theory to apply to those people who were held as slaves.
Corporations and unions are merely tools. And like any manmade tool, they can be remade however we wish to make them perform better in our service. They are not natural persons with rights inherent in their existence. If we choose to endow corporations with certain rights and deny them other rights so they might better serve our purposes, we ought to be perfectly free to do so. They are our creations ...
http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2010/01/21/corporations-are-not-people-money-is-not-speech/?cxntfid=blogs_jay_bookman_blog
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