Thom Hartmann has written an interesting article about Nike’s claim that it deserves free-speech rights. At issue is whether corporations can knowingly deceive the public.
In the next few weeks the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether or not to hear Nike’s appeal of the California Supreme Court’s decision that Nike was engaging in commercial speech which the state can regulate under truth in advertising and other laws. And lawyers for Nike are preparing to claim before the Supreme Court that, as a “person,” this multinational corporation has a constitutional free-speech right to deceive.
About the founding fathers, Hartmann writes:
Jefferson and Madison proposed an 11th Amendment to the Constitution that would “ban monopolies in commerce,” making it illegal for corporations to own other corporations, banning them from giving money to politicians or trying to influence elections in any way, restricting corporations to a single business purpose, limiting the lifetime of a corporation to something roughly similar to that of productive humans (20 to 40 years back then), and requiring that the first purpose for which all corporations were created be “to serve the public good.”
The amendment didn’t pass because many argued it was unnecessary: Virtually all states already had such laws on the books from the founding of this nation until the Age of the Robber Barons.
(found via Kottke)