Professor Tamara Piety, whom we are honored to have on our Legal Advisory Committee at Free Speech For People, tells it like it is in this must-read Truthout piece on why corporate personhood matters. Read the full piece, here. 

Some excerpts below:

“Yes, corporations are made up of people, but that doesn’t tell us which of these people count for purposes of constitutional rights when, as in Hobby Lobby, the rights of the various people in the corporation are in conflict. And describing corporate speech as a public “benefit” is a stretch when the speech in question (for example, tobacco advertising) may harm the public.”

“We condemn discrimination against people because it offends human dignity. By contrast, concern for human dignity does not require us to treat all businesses alike: to the contrary, hard experience teaches us that some businesses – drugs, banks, securities, common carriers – require more regulation than others. The tax code “discriminates” between for-profit and charitable organizations without offending anyone’s dignity. Yet the Supreme Court’s new “corporate civil rights movement” obscures that fact.”

“Voters do not need to be legal sophisticates to know that something is wrong when corporations have more rights than people do.”