No- They just favor business owners and the above average earners more and are highly distrustful of those not working or not making enough money. Extreme capitalists!
Sounds pretty evil to me. This is where you get the idea of 'corporations are people' to give more rights and them some to businesses to defend against your average person.
The legal basis of Citizens United was that individuals don’t lose rights by coming together as an organisation. So the NYT has free speech rights because its owners have free speech rights. And if a propaganda film like Fahrenheit 9/11 or Bowling for Columbine can be sold by a film studio a group of people can come together, whether as a for profit or not for profit corporation to produce their very own propaganda films, of whatever political valence, or tv ads or books, etc.
The US has by far the strongest free speech protections of any nation. It’s not really that surprising that the Supreme Court ruled that forming a corporation doesn’t annual free speech rights.
Nobody is talking about annulling free speech rights, the issue is granting extra free speech rights to entities that are not people, as well as considering activities speech, and therefore protected, that are not speech. Like donating money to political campaigns.
People can still donate their money, but to allow corporations, which are explicitly created to concentrate money and power, to donate money to politicians, that has a massive impact.
The people working for a company can have free speech without the company itself having free speech. In fact, some companies having a tendency to curb free speech through contracts denying people the right to talk about certain things.
And then there's also the issue that corporations get used to dodge personal liability by their owners and employees. If corporations don't share their people's responsibilities, why should they get to share their speech? Corporations are very explicitly a separate entity, and not merely the group of people working for it.
I explain this is the comment you reply to. You say that corporations should have the same rights as people because they're made up of people. But corporations are quite explicitly a way for those people to avoid liability for what the corporation does.
My argument is that only people are people. Corporations are explicitly different, and there's no good reason for corporations to automatically have the same rights as people.
The whole problem with Citizens United is that it uses the 1st amendment right of free speech for people to grant corporations the right to make political donations, which makes no sense. Corporations are not people and donations are not speech. It's no wonder that this leads to a political system that represents corporations more than it represents people.
I apologize if I'm rehashing some points covered a million times. What you described sounds prima facie reasonable, but then doesn't it follow that organizations should speak with the voices of people they're grouping together? So using your example, NYT should speak with the voices of its C-suite, or board, or investors - and not with the voices of its 4300 employees[0]! That is, the "voice" should not scale with the company size. Scaling like this sounds like cheating to me, given that companies are mostly made of people who have no say in anything.
