Corporations may be imaginary people, but last week, the U.S. Supreme Court held that imaginary people are entitled to free speech. Along with trolls and gnomes, presumably.
President Obama’s nails the problem in his weekly address:
Weekly Address: President Obama Addresses This Week’s Supreme Court Decision | WhiteHouse.gov
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Corporations may be imaginary in some sense, but they are controlled by a group of people known as shareholders, each with 1st amendment rights. Would it really make sense to strip those rights merely because they are being exercised en masse?
As far as I can tell, the case did not deal with shareholders’ rights, it dealt with corporations’ rights. The Court took the legal fiction of corporate personhood to the absurd extreme, granting the constitutional right to freedom of speech to corporations.
The case did not deal with the freedom of assembly clause, either, as far as I can tell.
Corporations can be and are are owned by people who are not US citizens. Also corporations taking political action is hardly the same thing as the shareholders acting en masse, as the shareholders are never asked.
So does this mean we can start filing criminal complaints against insurance companies (SCOTUS “new” people) when they rescind coverage for which I’ve paid? I mean, if the corporate “person” takes an affirmative action which causes me direct bodily harm…