Comment & Debate
Manual Garcia. “Corporate free speech.” Counter Punch. January 22, 2010: “People have human rights and they have property rights, but property itself has no rights; it is by definition not-human (the 13th Amendment abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime; property is stuff and livestock). People can form private clubs of pooled property — corporations — because these are profitable ways of engaging in commerce. But, by bending law to debase the definition of a human being so as to bestow “personhood” on pooled property clubs, we dehumanize society. In brief: people have rights and property does not; and accumulated property does not shield the individual from responsibility for the consequences of their acts. […] We take each of these principles to disqualify corporations from legal consideration as ‘persons.'”