In 1886, the US Supreme court is thought to have ruled that publicly traded limited liability corporations were persons, and to have equal rights under the law with organic persons, based on the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. This decision, of course, was based on corruption within the court, rather than any legal perspective, because there was no other sense to it, especially from a legal point of view. But the decision still stands more than a century later.
A softball team is an association of people. A labor union is an association of people. Shareholders are the owners of publicly traded limited liability corporations, therefore they are an association of people of a sort, but mostly never meet, and therefore, are not really an association of people, at least not in any real sense.
A corporation is a legislatively created “artificial person,” at least from a legislatively written perspective. A corporation is neither an association of people or a person, but rather, an imaginary business model given life and the legal mechanics to exist and operate by legislative fiat under the legal fiction of “artificial person.”
This brings up an interesting puzzle. If the shareholders are the owners of the “artificial persons” known as corporations, and the US Supreme Court says these artificial persons have the same rights as organic persons, then would not the ownership of corporations by the shareholders be in violation of the 13th amendment which bans the ownership of one person by another? And how can a corporation have such rights if it cannot function in such simple ways as envisioned by the founders as voting? No, corporations are not persons or associations since the associations of shareholders have been ruled as being distinct from corporations.
Besides, the US constitution grants only individual rights, not group rights.
Another point needs to be made; does anybody really think the founders thought you could legislatively create anything out of thin air, label it an artificial person, and then it could be considered a person with all the legal rights and responsibilities of human beings? I don’t think so.
Most likely, a corrupt politician devised the term “artificial person” knowing that a court corrupted by big money would rule such a thing to be equal to an organic person. That’s like creating an artificial person such as a robot, legally labeling it as such, and giving it constitutional rights. Do you really think a court would rule in the robot’s favor if it demanded full constitutional rights? Okay, it might happen if there was a big push by big money to do so, which is something the corporate wing of the US Supreme court seems to favor.
But what if politicians legislatively changed the labels of raccoons or rocks to “artificial persons.” Would the corporate wing of the US Supreme Court rule that artificial humans formerly known as raccoons and rocks have all the legal rights the US Constitution grants even if big money was behind it? I don’t think so.
This suggests the people of the 0.1 percent are the majority shareholders in the US Supreme Court, as well as other judicial markets.
Only rich people looking for a way to rip off the American public could have corrupted the legislative process and the court system to get their artificial person constitutional rights for only they have sufficient money to do so.
Leave a comment