Now Corporations Claim The "Right To Lie"

While Nike was conducting a huge and expensive PR blitz to tell people that it had cleaned up its subcontractors' sweatshop labor practices, an alert consumer advocate and activist in California named Marc Kasky caught them in what he alleges are a number of specific deceptions. Citing a California law that forbids corporations from intentionally deceiving people in their commercial statements, Kasky sued the multi-billion-dollar corporation.

Instead of refuting Kasky's charge by proving in court that they didn't lie, however, Nike instead chose to argue that corporations should enjoy the same "free speech" right to deceive that individual human citizens have in their personal lives. If people have the constitutionally protected right to say, "The check is in the mail," or, "That looks great on you," then, Nike's reasoning goes, a corporation should have the same right to say whatever they want in their corporate PR campaigns.

They took this argument all the way to the California Supreme Court, where they lost. The next stop may be the U.S. Supreme Court in early January, and the battle lines are already forming.

At the end of the article it is pointed out that Chief Justice Rehnquist actually disagreed with the preamble to the 1886 Santa Clara decision that is the illegal precedent to defining a corporation as a "person." In the 1978 Boston v. Bellotti decision he wrote:

"Early in our history, Mr. Chief Justice Marshall described the status of a corporation in the eyes of federal law:

"'A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of creation confers upon it, either expressly, or as incidental to its very existence. These are such as are supposed best calculated to effect the object for which it was created.'..."

In the 1978 Boston v. Bellotti decision, the Court agreed, by a one vote majority, that corporations were "persons" and thus entitled to the free speech right to give huge quantities of money to political causes. Chief Justice Rehnquist, believing this to be an error, argued that corporations should be restrained from political activity and wrote the dissent.

Those are the two basic "corporate civil rights" cases and both should be overturned. I am shocked and hopeful to find that Rehnquist agrees with me on that.

Thom Hartmann is the author of "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights." www.unequalprotection.com The entire article is copyright by Thom Hartmann, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as this credit is attached.