Corporations do not have "human rights"

[clear eye]

I strongly object to the ACLU'S and the Supreme Court's muddle-headed attribution of free speech rights to corporations, especially political speech, as nothing in the Constitution gives such interpretation any support, and as the consequences directly conflict with the political rights of individuals which are constitutionally protected. Only lawyers could possibly get so confused about what sort of entity is referred to in the phrase "civil liberties" and what is the "human" in "human rights".

To clarify: a corporation is a particular type of contractual ownership freeing the owners from certain liabilities in exchange for accepting certain limits on the use of the assets covered. The only "rights" a corporation has are those the state includes in its charter as necessary to carry out its contractually defined business.

This limitation is vital to the exercise of many of the rights of individuals, since corporations have the advantage over individuals in often controlling wealth amassed from many people and not being subject to many of the penalties that can be imposed on human beings. Additionally the individuals both who own and who are employed by corporations are constrained in the use of corporate assets to speech which furthers the one legal goal of a for-profit corporation, i.e. creating profit, no matter how they may feel personally on any particular issue. Therefore ALL such speech and representations are commercial speech. There is an element of extortion, in opposition to human rights, in extending the corporate contract to the use of earnings from the labor of individuals to influence elections in ways those individuals may feel are against their own interests and with which they strongly disagree. The speech of the corporation is not the speech of the individuals connected with it, but is, in fact, commercial speech. That is the basis for the distinction between for-profit corporations and other types of associations (like the ACLU) which may be organized expressly to advocate for points of view held by those who choose to join them.

Even without outright advocacy, corporations exert undue influence on individual expression because of their ability to threaten withdrawal of advertising revenue from the few mainstream media outlets with large audiences. Granting them the "right" to use their deep pockets to dominate political discussion in those few readily available mainstream media outlets only further causes individual speech to take a back seat to commercial, i.e. corporate, speech.

Restrictions on corporate speech would not prevent the investors from withdrawing or borrowing against a portion of their assets to use for expressing their viewpoints according to their consciences either solo or in concert with others. It is another issue whether representative democracies have the right to limit how much may be spent by a single entity on political expression, and whether such spending limitations detract from or enhance civil liberties, political expression, and human rights as a whole.