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Supreme Court Rolls Back Corporate Campaign Spending Limits
lorenlal writes "The Supreme Court of the United States must have figured that restrictions on corporate support of candidates was a violation of free speech, or something like that." From the AP story linked above:
"By a 5-4 vote, the court on Thursday overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said corporations can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to pay for campaign ads. The decision, which almost certainly will also allow labor unions to participate more freely in campaigns, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states."
We need to replace the "conservatives" on the supreme court who don't understand that corporations should not have the constitutional rights of citizens.
Developers: We can use your help.
welcome our new Disney overlords.
Unions too.
Best Slashdot Co
Right of free speech + right of association = right of groups, as corporations, to speak freely.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Then perhaps we should amend it! In the meantime, free speech (and a free press) isn't just a good idea: it's the law.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Why?
Do you believe individuals should have the right to spend money on campaigns? (I do; your money, do with it as you wish.) If you do, then why shouldn't groups of individuals have the right to decide as a group what to do with money owned by the group, using whatever governance structure the group has previously agreed to?
[Chief Justice] Roberts said he was not prepared to "embrace a theory of the 1st Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their views on matters of public concern."
But [Justice] Stevens and the dissenters said the majority was ignoring the long-understood rule that the government could limit election money from corporations, unions and others, such as foreign governments. "Under today's decision, multinational corporations controlled by foreign governments" would have the same rights as Americans to spend money to tilt U.S. elections. "Corporations are not human beings. They can't vote and can't run for office," Stevens said, and should be subject to restrictions under the election laws.
Maybe China now has something useful to do with the trillion+ dollars they have burning a hole in their pocket.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Since corporations are able to possess the 1st amendment as a whole body, are they not entitled the remaining amendments?
Ok, that IS crazy. But what isn't is that, come election time, I wouldn't be surprised if pink slips get issued in order to free up some money to run messages for/against our tastycrats and fingerlick'ans.
I have to agree.
Corporations and unions have been given the right to buy who ever they want without any back alley deals...as long as the money doesn't go directly to or is coordinated by candidate.
import system.cool.Sig;
then clearly the Constitution is defective.
You're thinking about this the wrong way. The constitution is not defective. Finally, all this anti-corporate ideology is on the wane, and true social equality will soon be reached when we get a corporation as a supreme court justice.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I, for one, welcome our new psychopathic, immortal, politically empowered, corporate-person overlords!
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.
- V
It's not the Constitution that's defective. It's the Supreme Court ruling in 1886 that effectively gave corporations personhood. THAT is what needs to be overturned.
The U(F)SA is now a de facto fascist state.
(citation needed)
Or, perhaps just a functioning definition of the word "fascist," which you clearly don't have. Idiot.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
That's still government by the people.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
A corp has no real responsibility, no sense of morals, and rarely ever is punished for many of its crimes. ANd yet, we equate it to man. That single warped logic is killing us.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
At issue is that under the Constitution, the Federal Government has no explicit power to regulate even political campaign donations.
This is my sig.
The problem is that corporations are legal fictions which seem to have been given all of the rights of real people, but with NONE of the consequences or responsibilities. Freedom without responsibility is social destruction.
The problem isn't the constitution. The courts ruling is correct. The problem is that Congress declared Corporations "persons" under US law. Give them the legal recognition of a person and they have all the rights too. Congress can undo this by simply making Corporations a legal entity that isn't a "person" under US law. Unfortunately this will never happen because to many people in congress benefit from corporations being "persons". It gives corporations all the benefits of being a "person" without any of the risks (such as going to jail). Congress did this, not the courts.
I haven't read the decision and the dissent yet, but I'm fascinated by how immediately negative the comments prior to this one are, especially the comments that try to argue that corporations should have fewer free speech rights than people. Part of the nature of free speech is that there's always some category that one would often not want to apply it to. For the Slashdot crowd that seems to be corporations. But the whole point of robust free speech is that you give it to any who want to use it. Concern over what this will do to elections is understandable as a policy concern but that's a pragmatic consideration that shouldn't impact such basic philosophical decisions. Moreover, what this really does is level the playing field between corporations. As it is now, Fox or MSNBC or any major newspaper can effectively push for a candidate or policy they want simply by the bias in their coverage. But a corporation that isn't involved in "news" or the like has its hands tied. And as for the impact this might have on elections: It should be apparent from the election of Obama that if a lot of people actually care about a candidate they can give in both time and money a lot more than even many large corporations. Of course, that candidate might then turn around and sell people out, but that's a separate problem...
If corporations want to be individuals, it's time we start taxing them like individuals.
Exactly! And those individuals do not require a corporation has a vehicle to exercise their constitutional rights. They can do that already as individuals. What's next? Giving corporations the right to vote?
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Here you go, idiot.
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Good point. Since corporations were granted their personhood in 1884 there has never been a corporation as President or even Governor. By now we should have seen a Senator Dow Chemical or a Representative Monstanto, but there's obviously a pervasive bias in the system that keeps corporations down.
Sure, they have nearly infinite amounts of money, are essentially immortal, require no sleep, clean water, fresh air, or safe food, and have two political parties and 60% of the Supreme Court at their beck and call. But, could that have ever made up for the pain they must have felt knowing that they couldn't fully exercise their 1st Amendment Rights?
Thank God the Roberts Court has righted this injustice and ended over a century of disenfranchisement of our most vulnerable pseudo-citizens.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
From wikipedia
Fascism, pronounced /fæzm/, is a political ideology that seeks to combine radical and authoritarian nationalism with a corporatist economic system, and which is usually considered to be on the far right of the traditional left-right political spectrum.
To speak: This ruling allows corporations unlimited spending, which tends toward corparatism. The fact that the Executive Branch's power has grown after 9/11, and has not retracted under Obama, along with the "you are with us or against us" patriotic thuggery from the far right, has the US tending toward (though not there yet, thankfully) authoritarian nationalism. Finally, the conservative judges made this possible, along with the far right being the harbinger of the nationalism, and we are well on our way.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Because remember, kids, "fascist" means "something I personally don't approve of."
[A U.S.] Supreme Court ruling in 1886 ... arguably set the stage for the full-scale development of the culture of capitalism, by handing to corporations the right to use their economic power in a way they never had before. Relying on the Fourteenth Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1868 to protect the rights of freed slaves, the Court ruled that a private corporation is a natural person under the U.S. Constitution, and consequently has the same rights and protection extended to persons by the Bill of Rights, including the right to free speech. Thus corporations were given the same “rights” to influence the government in their own interests as were extended to individual citizens, paving the way for corporations to use their wealth to dominate public thought and discourse. The debates in the United States in the 1990s over campaign finance reform, in which corporate bodies can “donate” millions of dollars to political candidates stem from this ruling although rarely if ever is that mentioned. Thus, corporations, as “persons,” were free to lobby legislatures, use the mass media, establish educational institutions such as many business schools founded by corporate leaders in the early twentieth century, found charitable organizations to convince the public of their lofty intent, and in general construct an image that they believed would be in their best interests. All of this in the interest of “free speech.”
— Richard Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), p.100
Personally, in my opinion, that's where it went downhill. A corporation doesn't need rights as an individual. If a corporation needs to speak it has many members which can be enabled to speak for it.
The problem is that the voice of a business has no bearing on the amount of individuals it represents but merely by the amount of money it can throw. If a business representing 100,000 employees only has $100,000 to contribute it won't even be registered against a tiny company of 5 people that can contribute $1,000,000,000.
If there were reasonable caps to contributions, say, $1,000 per person (people) and _no_ corporations were allowed to contribute, then the people get the power back. If a large corporation wants to push an issue, they can lobby their own employees to contribute to their cause, but the choice would again be with the individual people.
I mean honestly, if I have $300 to contribute to a politician I support, how in the world is that going to compare to a $10,000,000 contribution from Big Media when they are leaning in the opposite direction on an issue?
I'm not saying "the people" have had any real power for a long time (when compared to big business), but this just skews it even farther away from us.
Sad day to be an American...
Why do you draw a distinction between "free speech" and "political speech"? Surely our founding fathers wanted to talk freely about politics. That's the whole point. (I'm sure there's a reason you said that, I just don't see it.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Just to be clear: we're giving one set of institutions which do not have a mandate to respond to individuals (corporations) control over another set of institutions (government) which, uh, used to. And we're doing this in the name of... more liberty for people? Let me know how that works out for you...
Ur Fascism (Umberto Eco) I'm not sure that it's a terribly useful definition for the internet. It, is however, a definition.
The closest Eco comes to denouncing corporatism is in this paragraph.
13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view – one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
I'm not sure where you're getting your information, according to theWikipedia article on it, it looks like corporate personhood was decided in the courts.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I believe that individuals (i.e. real persons with citizenship) should have the right to spend any or all of their money on campaigns.
I believe they and I should have the right to band together and do so as a group.
I do not believe that my or your rights are in any way trampled merely by forcing structural separation between the groups banded together for the purpose of political persuasion and the groups banded together for for the purpose of buying, selling and producing products.
Nor should you have any difficulty understanding why groups organized primarily for buying and selling have such a corruptive influence on the process of political persuasion.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
What you are referring to is an existing construct. A PAC (Political Action Committee), SIG (Special Interest Group) or other political collective. The names and rules surrounding such organizations vary by state, but by and large they are formed around a goal and their members have bought into the goal. Those groups DO have the right to free speech, specifically their political speech is not regulated, simply because their governance structures are required to be transparent, and they have to have a clear paper trail as to where their money came from (lists of donors, etc). In other words, these organizations are treated as you describe - a group of individuals who have the right to decide as a group what to do with their collective funds.
However, a PAC/SIG/etc has to be a transparent. They have to be demonstrably a collective that is freely contributed to by individual citizens who have input as to the goals of that collective (even if their only input is "I like your ideals and I wish to give you money.") All members of a political organization have to have voluntarily joined the organization and it cannot be a condition of employment and/or other coercion cannot be applied.
This is vastly different from the organization of a company or a union. Those organizations do not have to be held accountable to the voters as to whether the will of their shareholders or sources of income are comfortable with the money being spent in political campaigns, and do not have to share their sources of income.
Separating "political" from "free" speech is a cast iron bitch, though.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Corporations are voluntary contracts between individuals, and those individuals have rights, period. If some of you Slashdot commies fail to comprehend that, that is your problem and yours alone.
"Under today's decision, multinational corporations controlled by foreign governments" would have the same rights as Americans to spend money to tilt U.S. elections."
-Justice Stevens, dissenting.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Non-American here, just wondering if this means foreign corporations can now open shell businesses in the US and spend billions of dollars to influence US elections to favour their own companies or countries? I guess in the past they would have had to convince actual US citizens (or pay lobbyists) to do the influencing for them, they can now do so pretty much directly without the middle man. Interesting.
...as in "end of the Republic" horrible. We just greased the slide to a complete fall into Fascism.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Maybe if we had a major, concerted, write in campaign in a strategic region, we can get Google* elected to Congress. (I'm wondering what it would look like trying to get Google to raise it's right hand to be sworn in!) That would then give others the ability to challenge the election in the courts.
We do need someway to break this "corporations as people" mentality.
*(Recognizable, electable, and less likely than others to abuse the power during time in office. Still carries a huge risk, I know.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
You're thinking about this the wrong way. The constitution is not defective. Finally, all this anti-corporate ideology is on the wane, and true social equality will soon be reached when we get a corporation as a supreme court justice
Why own the cow when you get the milk for free?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
If the U.S. Constitution ensures the free speech rights of corporations, as the SCOTUS has judged, then clearly the Constitution is defective.
No, the SCOTUS is defective. Talk about legislating from the bench... Talk about deciding issues that weren't before the court...
If you'll remember the court decided to take this case even though it hadn't been appealed to the Supreme Court, and even though the Court wasn't in session at the time. The question before the court was "Do the makers of an hour long politically motivated attack ad need to disclose who funded of the ad as is required by law?" The court's answer to that question was "congress cannot limit the ability of the people who run corporations to spend assets they don't own on political campaigns." In other words, campaign financing restrictions only apply to individuals.
It's pretty apparent now that Roberts and Alito committed perjury during their confirmation hearings. Somehow, I doubt that they will be impeached.
Of course, this is the court that decided that a television news organization was just exercising free speech when it decided to air a falsified story in order to benefit a sponsor. This just extends that decision so that now it's legal for a sponsor to directly pay for a falsified news story attacking a political opponent.
Democracy wasn't working out here anyway. How much worse can this make it?
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Not just all the rights, but more rights. For example, they aren't subject to the campaign contribution spending limits we are. They have stronger privacy rights than we do (they can refuse to provide information to courts for competitive reasons). When a corporation buys another corporation, that should be considered either slavery or prostitution. Corporations should be subject to prison and the death penalty.
Actually, if corps were forbidden to buy other corps, it'd do wonders for employment and innovation. Never happen, though.
They're discriminated against in the hiring process as well. I can't tell you how many hiring committees I've been on where we've only hired actual human beings. It's pervasive! I say we need affirmative action for corporations; level the playing field a bit, at least until we see more and more corporations in positions of power at corporations. True fact: nearly all corporate CEOs are actual human beings rather than corporations (Steve Jobs is the exception here).
Actually, it was the Supreme Court that decided that corporations are persons. (In truth a clerk inserted a statement to that effect into a Supreme Court decision without the Court deciding that.) But it's precedent now, and with the Roberts court precedent means everything, unless a majority of the court decides to discard 200 years of precedent, as it did in this case.
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You are close to the mark, but this is potentially worse than fascism as we have known it. It opens the possibility of an entirely new form of tyranny that the human race has not yet experienced.
If you study the history of fascism, the various ideas that "fascists" have become confusing, until you realize that fascism isn't an ideology. Fascism isn't about ideas, but achieving a specific effect: maximizing the power of an individual or group of people who have control of the government. Where it serves that purpose, fascism will embrace extremes of spiritualism or materialism, or even mix the two. Consistency doesn't matter. Authority does.
What is different about this is that we aren't talking about putting the power of the State in the hands of an individual or group of individuals. We are talking about putting it at the disposal of artificial entities; immortal profit making machines with a capacity for accumulating wealth beyond that of any individual. This is like *Colossus: The Forbin Project*, only with machines we've already built and operated.
It's not that making a profit is evil. It's that the very definition of evil (see Saint Augustine, or even Kant) is making one sided decisions. Human concerns like ethics are not part of the design of the institution of the corporation. Ethics are forced on corporations by two things: the individuals working for the corporations, and by law.
But the ethics of the individual are always under pressure in a corporation. We've all seen that. There's always the question of whether we can push the limit just a bit, and if we try it and get away with it, we suddenly have a new conception of what "normal behavior" is. We know that "everybody does it" doesn't excuse something, but we don't act that way. The law is what makes it possible for people to remain ethical. They can always say, "we will go to jail if we try that," or "we'll be fined," or even "we'll get bad publicity," which of course depends on individuals having rights that are respected under the law.
Corporations have inappropriate influence now on government, but that doesn't make a dystopia. Life is still good for most of us. But we can't extrapolate that to giving them unchecked power to make laws for their own benefit. If we do that, the safety net provided by individual ethics won't matter. Once corporations are above the law, any corporation that fails to take the profit maximizing step regardless of the other consequences won't survive.
Allow the power of corporations to grow without any check, and for the first time in human history human affairs will be governed with absolutely no regard to human welfare.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sure why not?
Could this decision by made ineffective by passing a law saying that when political / issue advertising is purchased in media, groups with opposition views must be _freely_ given an equal amount of time / space to rebut the advertisement. Perhaps even stronger, the space / time the rebuttal is given must immediately follow / be next to the original advertisement?
Can someone explain why this wouldn't be constitutionally legal? I don't see a free speech argument since any group can now advertise / make their views heard...
...when do we see the death penalty applied to them? The Ford Pinto's exploding gas tank and Union Carbide's Bhopal clusterfuck are merely the first examples that come to mind of corporations exhibiting depraved indifference to human life. Had an individual done these things he/she would be facing the death penalty; why should corporations be exempt?
Well that may be, but I'll bet they have been unfairly avoiding their civic duty of Jury Duty!
Because remember, kids, "fascist" means "something I personally don't approve of."
No, that's what "socialist" means.
We need MORE money in politics, not less.
The flaw in your argument lies with the fact that a single very wealth person could 'buy' more speech for a candidate that they favored, than a candidate that had broad grass roots support and more modest funding. This causes the candidate to give you much more influence over their agenda than a candidate that has broad grassroots support. Sure, your idea requires candidates to spend less time fund raising. They would all be solidly in the pockets of the rich, though.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Actually, no: The courts did it. Or, if you want to be more specific, the court reporter, a former railroad president, did it.
--
Runnin' around, robbin' banks all whacked on the Scooby Snacks...
IBM does not yet appoint the president, Microsoft does not have a veto on laws.
And you said he sounded silly. Individual corporations typically don't have the power to veto legislation, but industry groups (formed colluding corporations) do. Rather than veto laws, the industry groups typically write the laws and get Congress to ratify them.
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Good point. Since corporations were granted their personhood in 1884 there has never been a corporation as President or even Governor.
What about more basic rights, like marriage? Yeah, yeah, "mergers" give you all the same benefits. If that's so, why not let them call it marriage?
You ask me, get the government out of this whole marriage thing, and let individuals, their faiths, and their churches decide if they want to let AOL be "wedded" to Time Warner. In the mean time, the government can call AOL and Time Warner "civil partners".
After that, maybe we can end this horrid business of corporations being bought and sold. Disgusting!
You are right. Anything done without any human involvement whatsoever should not be given the same protections as something done by people. When corporations act with no human intent or human involvement, their freedom is without conscience or merit.
When humans act, they have freedom. That freedom deserves protection. When they do it as part of a corporation, they maintain their humanity and the actions deserve to maintain their protection.
Allow the power of corporations to grow without any check, and for the first time in human history human affairs will be governed with absolutely no regard to human welfare.
Well, I would disagree. It has happened before. It's just that there normally was a face to the government that ignored human welfare. Gengis Khan was brutal and certainly ignored human welfare. However - and this is a significant difference - what's new is that with corporatism, there is no face to a corporation that engages in cruelty. And as Penny Arcade demonstrated so succinctly, nothing makes people into bigger assholes than anonymity.
In other words, corporatism means everyone can be the biggest, cruelest asshole on the block. Lovely.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
From wikipedia
Fascism, pronounced /fæzm/, is a political ideology that seeks to combine radical and authoritarian nationalism with a corporatist economic system, and which is usually considered to be on the far right of the traditional left-right political spectrum.
To speak: This ruling allows corporations unlimited spending, which tends toward corparatism. The fact that the Executive Branch's power has grown after 9/11, and has not retracted under Obama, along with the "you are with us or against us" patriotic thuggery from the far right, has the US tending toward (though not there yet, thankfully) authoritarian nationalism. Finally, the conservative judges made this possible, along with the far right being the harbinger of the nationalism, and we are well on our way.
Wikipedia is one of the worse sources for any historical information you can get. There is no left/right argument with fascism (within the contex of US politics). In practice, collectivism has more in common with fascism by design structure. Merriam-Webster definition: fascism 1 often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.
"In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"
Ah, Anarcho-Capitalists.
I wish there was some kind of Holodeck or Total Recal memory implantation device where you could experience your desire come to fruition without it affecting the real world. I wish I could watch, so I could see your face as your state-less free market utopia turns into an oppressive dictatorship faster than you can say "What do you mean when there are no rules, the powerful make the rules?"
The schadenfreude would be delicious as the jack-booted thugs knock on your door and inform you of your tax obligation of 90% of your income and anything they fancy lying around the house. "But there are no taxes in my utopia, only voluntary exchanges of goods and services!" you'd cry, and they'd say "Well then think of it as a 'not breaking your legs and burning down your house as an example to others' service fee." What are you going to do? Call the police? Ah, but the police force is a private firm, and that private firm, according to the free market ideal, was selected by the bank and developer who own your land and your house because they met the market demand for a police force that does exactly what the corporations paying them say. It's that private police force who is at your door. You think you have the right to appeal to a 3rd party, that you have the right to leave this community for one that is not yet completely corrupted? Why? Because the ideal of anarcho-capitalism says so? But who enforces that ideal -- there's no law that says so, nor any authority tasked with upholding it. It was that very same ideal that allowed the corporations to buy the courts and police force who are abusing you! So it's just you and your fellow "decent people" against the jackbooted thugs. Your resources versus the corporations. Have fun!
I love you Anarchists. I love you because of every crazy political organization ever devised, Anarchy is the only one that is guaranteed to become its exact opposite. Every other organization is capable of being corrupted, but there is some mechanism that slows the process. Anarchy has no such stability, because it explicitly eschews any mechanism for having it. You can't even call it corruption, because people with wealth being able to buy whatever they want, with no legal recourse to stop them, is the whole point!
3
The enemies of Democracy are
"I really hate this whiny assed victim mentality so many pussies have today."
You can talk with pussies? That must come in handy.
Corporations do not have first amendment rights. They cannot vote. They are not individuals. They have no rights at all.
Amendment 1 does not require a human being, nor does it grant anyone or anything a "right".
It states: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". It is a limitation on the power of Congress.
In this case, Congress made a law abridging the freedom of the press. Bad Congress.
Why the heck would we want corporations to be able to do this?
Because we believe that limiting free speech is bad.
Voting with your wallets only works if you actually have a choice in who you do business with and if you are fully aware of those companies' supply chains. In practice, outside of very narrow situations, neither of these is ever really true.
Let's say you want to buy a computer. Whether you buy it from Apple, Dell, HP, or some fly-by-night computer builder working out of his parents' basement, your processor comes from AMD or Intel... maybe VIA. It doesn't take much imagination to think of positions that two or three companies in a similar industry would support. For that matter, it's safe to assume that in any given industry, odds are good that most companies (if not all) will generally have similar political positions on any issue that impacts them. Therefore, more often than not, your only real option when a company supports a position you don't like is to not only refuse to buy from that company, but to also refuse to buy from any other company in that entire industry. This quickly becomes impractical.
And you're also forgetting about collateral damage. Let's say that UPS supports somebody you don't like. Any product you buy assembled outside the U.S. has a good chance of having been shipped by UPS or a subsidiary thereof at some point. Any product you buy that was assembled in the U.S. has about a 100% chance of having some component in it that was shipped by UPS or a subsidiary at some point. So it does no good to say "I'll only ship FedEx from now on" because you're supporting UPS anyway.
Finally, I'll go one step further. I buy a carrot from my grocery store. If the farmer worked for a corporation that supported someone I don't like, I can probably tell by the label. If my grocery supported someone I don't like, I can tell by the grocery store sign. But what about:
The number of companies involved basically increases exponentially the farther out you look. Each company gets support from multiple other companies, which get support from multiple other companies, and so on.
And that's just a couple of hops away from the original "manufacturer" for something as simple as a carrot. When you consider how many dozens or even hundreds of companies are directly involved in the manufacture and distribution of a more complex product like a computer or a cell phone, you should easily understand why avoiding doing business with a company who supports people you don't like is completely and totally infeasible unless you quite literally dedicate every minute of your life to the task, and probably not even then.
Quite simply, there is only one way to not support a company you don't like, and that is to refuse to give any money to any corporation. Short of living an entirely self-sufficient agrarian lifestyle without the use of modern tools or equipment (we're talking about using an ox an
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Ooh but governments are evil because they impose their will on individuals with force, which they have a monopoly on!
So instead, we will get rid of government, and all interactions then will be completely voluntary, and no one will have a monopoly on force!
Hmm, but wait, what if someone decides voluntary interactions aren't to their benefit? Then we will have to impose our will on them with force...
But wait, all such force is private now, and they have more money than us...
Hmm...
LOL. You can't expect someone to understand your point who thinks they are an Anarcho-anything, like you get to choose the kind of society that will exist after you've created Anarchy. How would that work, when you have no enforcement mechanism? Anarcho-Capitalism, Anarcho-Socialism. LOL. There's just Anarchy, followed by whatever those strong enough to reign in the Anarchy decide upon.
The enemies of Democracy are
Everything you said is correct, and yet it's all wrong. I realize you could be speaking from the standpoint of the "Corporate Person" pun that got in this whole mess to begin with, but let's be clear that this is a fiction. A corporation is not a sentient entity. It does not have desires or interests of its own because "it" is not an entity capable of having them. The corporation can take no actions because it has no will. It is not immortal because it is not alive.
The desires of a corporation are the desires of its executives. The actions of a corporation are the actions of its executives and their subordinates taken in the corporation's name. They aren't separate, they are one and the same. The only way for a corporation to take an action that the executives do not desire is for one of the subordinates to disobey their executive, for which they can be fired.
You're absolutely right that corporations are anti-democratic semi-feudal organizations. But an organization is nothing but the people comprising it. So when you say that the directors should view the corporation like an untrustworthy animal, it is buying into the fictional personification of the corporation that says it has a will outside of the directors themselves. Do not allow the directors to abdicate responsibility for their own actions in this way. It may be a legal reality, but it is not a literal reality.
Nobody would speak of, say, the 1st U.S. Army have a will or interests outside of the General commanding it, excepting that the General has lost control of the people under their command. You can't nuke "the concept of the 1st Army" though you can nuke the people in it. It is "immortal" only in the sense that the concept will still exist, but that concept is nothing and does nothing and desires nothing until a new General takes up the head, and then the 1st Army's desires are the General's desires.
Or for another example, you would never say "the people of feudal Britain were oppressed by Britain", you'd say they were oppressed by the King, the executive. The idea that "Britain" could oppress the people despite the wishes of the King is ludicrous.
So, getting back to the point. This problem with this decision is not that it gives political power to corporations. The problem is that it gives political power to CEOs and directors (usually CEOs of other companies if not the same company), to use the resources of the corporation -- meaning the product of the labor of everyone working for it -- for the CEO's own political benefit.
The enemies of Democracy are