American culture writing work
Topic 1: Formal legal equality of corporate and human persons
In the U.S., corporations are considered persons in some limited ways under the Constitution.
The fourteenth amendment guarantees that states, like the federal government, cannot deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. In 1868 the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution freed slaves, but it has been used 10 times more in court cases to defend the rights of corporations which are considered, in legal terms, “‘artificial’ persons” (Pruitt). As you saw in the video, the Supreme Court has upheld and extended corporate personhood over the last 150 years.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, the power of corporations in U.S. society has also grown until, today, it outpaces that of citizens and perhaps even governments. During the Fordist compromise of the middle of the last century, labor unions, corporations and governments shared power and profits, ensuring that worker-citizens’ rights were protected and wages grew. During the rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s, corporations and governments have successfully weakened labor unions and challenged worker rights. Union membership has dropped from 20% of workers at the beginning of the 1980s to only 10% today. The minimum wage, a key measure of workers’ power, has actually declined by more than 25% in real terms (purchasing power of money adjusted for inflation) since 1968.
In other words, the power balance between corporations and workers has changed dramatically over the last 50 years, and that may have something to do with the “legal fiction” of corporate personhood.
For one thing, treating corporations as legal persons give them an advantage over human persons. Corporations cant die, which means they cannot be executed for their crimes. They also can’t go to jail. Corporations typically only face monetary fines, and unlike most human persons, many of them budget for regulatory actions in advance.
As the “law” keyword points out, the law is supposed to be a neutral arbiter of fairness and justice (Spade 149), but just as Adam Smith believed contracts needed to be made only between roughly equal individuals, the law must also apply to roughly equal individuals to be fair. Perhaps it makes sense, then, that since corporations and individuals enter contracts all the time, and particularly for credit, corporations should be treated as persons so as to be equal to individuals. But as the keyword reading also points out, law in the U.S. is actually quite unfair when it operates on the formal legal equality of individuals rather than the material inequality that stratifies U.S. society.
A key example here is money bail. Many U.S. states allow judges to impose money bail on individuals arrested for crimes. Those individuals with money to bail out may never spend a night in jail, while those too poor to do so may spend as much or more than a year in jail, without being convicted of a crime, just awaiting trial. Two individuals could be equally guilty of a crime, while one enjoys freedom outside of jail before trial and the other is incarcerated, all because of their material, financial inequality.
Bail bonds services are poverty lending services that take a one time fee from a defendant (or their family on the outside) of 10 to 15% of the required bail in order to lend that defendant the money they need to bail out. If the person arrives for their court date, the money goes back to the bail bondsman and all is well. If the person “skips bail” a bountyhunter may be employed to find them so that the bail bondsman does not forfeit the bail they lent. If appear in court, the poor person never gets back the fee, meaning that they pay more than the wealthy person to live in their home as they await trial.
When it comes to corporate lenders and the individual consumers borrowing from them, material equality also exists beneath the formal legal equality of these two persons. The corporate lender will likely have an army of lawyers and lobbyists, draw up complicated, lengthy contract language that the individual borrower cannot change if they wish to use the service.
What’s more, even if corporations are fictive persons, they are one particular kind of person. For-profit, especially publicly traded corporations have a fiduciary duty (legal financial requirement) to increase the profits of their shareholders by whatever legal means necessary. They cannot take into account the impact of their actions on communities, the environment or other stakeholders, as long as they are acting legally. Therefore, corporations spend billions of dollars each year lobbying Congress and other public officials to get policy in place that helps them profit more. Some of that money goes to political action committees to elect corporate friendly politicians. Since the 2010 Citizens United decision, such donations were deemed to be “free speech” protected under the first amendment for corporate persons. With such rights secured, corporations have the money and power to continue to increase their money and power, something only a tiny sliver of human persons can do.
Pruitt, Sarah. “How the 14th Amendment Made Corporations Into ‘People’.” History.com, October 15, 2018,
https://www.history.com/news/14th-amendment-corporate-personhood-made-corporations-into-people?(????????) .
Formal legal equality – Corporate Personhood Debate
Debate the following proposition: Corporations should be treated as people.
If your last name begins with a letter between A and M, you are FOR corporations being treated as people and must argue this perspective.
If your last name begins with a letter between N and Z, you are AGAINST corporations being treated as people and must argue this perspective.
Each participant must make at least one post and two responses. Use the facts and context you learned in this topic to support your arguments.
Discussions are graded pass/fail. Follow all instructions to pass. If you do not include any element, you will fail.
