Sierra Club, and other groups, says the City of Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission. Check out the resolution that they ask the Berkeley City Council to endorse:
Now therefore, be it resolved that the Council of the City of Berkeley supports amending the United States and California Constitutions to declare that corporations are not granted the protections or rights of persons, and supports amending the United States and California Constitutions to declare that the expenditure of corporate money is not a form of constitutionally protected speech.
Of course, most newspapers are published by corporations, and many nonprofit activist groups (such as, I believe, the Sierra Club) are organized as corporations — it’s a sensible way for such groups to organize themselves. And of course the only ways these groups can effectively speak is by spending their corporate money, whether to print newsletters, buy ads, run Web sites, pay their staffers to prepare press releases and reports, and so on. So if the Peace and Justice Commission has their way, all those groups would be stripped of constitutional rights. The government would, for instance, be free to bar newspapers and advocacy groups from talking about certain subjects, or for that matter expressing certain viewpoints.
Of course, other noncorporate groups share many traits of corporations. Consider, for instance, unions. They, too, have potentially indefinite life, limited liability, and other special government-provided benefits. They too were probably not considered much by the Framers of the Constitution (a point that the Peace and Justice Commission stresses as to corporations), because to the extent they were known at the time, they were quite different than they are now, and much rarer. They also lobby the legislature, and spend money to influence public debate. Yet curiously the Peace and Justice Commission would not apply the same rules to unions as it would to their customary adversaries.
Yet one more example of how a simplistic “corporations aren’t people, so they shouldn’t have people’s rights” approach — which I discuss in more detail here — can lead people to unjustifiable conclusions (even ones that they themselves might not have intended).
Many thanks to reader Marc Greendorfer for pointing me to this.
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