Quick fix for Supreme Court corporate sell-out: corporations with ANY foreign investors can't give

[yurbud]

Remember the cow the right had about Al Gore fundraising at a Buddhist temple and possibly taking money from foreigners?

This argument follows a similar track: if corporations are composite people, if any part is not a citizen, the whole thing isn't, and it would be allowing foreign interference in our elections.

I could see righties even agreeing with this out of their profound zenophobia if not a love for clean government.

This would be a pretty simple bill to write and pass. What are the chances the Democrats would even try though?

To my mind, however, the first step is pretty obvious. Congress should prohibit any corporation from engaging in this new political spending if it has any non-American shareholders or owners. Because after all, foreigners have no 1st Amendment protections.

The “logic” behind the SCOTUS ruling is that a corporation composed of individuals ought to possess the legal attributes of its individual owners. Thus the same logic ought to require that partial foreign ownership renders the corporation a foreign body at least in part. The foreign parts of a corporation have no constitutional right to free speech. And since there is no practical way to distinguish the legal rights of the parts from the rights of the whole corporation (that presumption underpins the SCOTUS ruling), then it’s impossible to give American constitutional rights to part of a corporation but withhold them from another part.

Hence it is constitutionally permissible to deny a partly foreign-owned corporation from spending on political speech within the United States. Congress should act to do so immediately.

Why make this a priority? There can’t be many large corporations that are entirely owned by American persons. Indeed large corporations would not find it easy to determine the legal status of their actual human owners (that’s the rotten core of the Supreme Court’s insistence on treating corporations as if they were homunculi, or composite persons). And it should be obvious that the last trade-off that corporations will want to make, in order to be able to interfere directly in political contests, is to drive away foreign investors.

http://www.unbossed.com/index.php?itemid=2797

[krispos42]

1. Brilliant. K&R n/t

[Uncle Joe]

2. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, yurbud.

[glitch]

3. Short and sweet, and no loopholes. K & R. nt

[izzybeans]

4. It should say "Can't run advertising on our airwaves for anything but their commercial products"

They still can't "give" to campaigns. But they can run those sleazy PAC-style ads willy nilly.

Imagine trying to reform healthcare and have the healthcare industry run an add that says essentially "If you do this, we will simply raise your rates and there is nothing you can do about it."

We see these adds now, but the funders are second party. This edict by the court makes it cheaper to run propaganda campaigns because it makes the middle man unnecessary.

[blue97keet]

5. If you offshore our jobs you can't buy our elections. great

[im1013]

6. k&r!!

[JohnWxy]

7. I like it!

[unblock]

8. that is actually brilliant, from a theoretical perspective, and even from a populist perspective

but logic doesn't cut it with the fascist five on the supreme court. they'll keep finding so-called intellectual arguments to further the concentration of powers into behemoth corporations until the day they die, because at the end of the day the only "principle" they have is "might makes right".

in the meanwhile, we should work around them any way we can. even continuing to pass laws that SHOULD be constitutional even knowing the supreme court will knock them down buys you a few years. ugly, but it works.

[Vidar]

9. K&R.

[Permanut]

10. If a corporation is a person...

We should be able to do rectal exams on them, or colonoscopies. Sorry for the visual, I stole this from a KPOJ listener on Carl Wolfson's show this morning.