Noam Chomsky Quotes
A corporation is a state created institution, state supported institution, its concentration of private power, there is no reason why it should have the rights of persons.
Chomsky, Noam. Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. Seven Stories Press, 1999.
A constant major issue in industrial democracies are the perceptions, rights and responsibilities of corporations. For those like Romney, corporations should have all the privileges, empathy, rights and obligations of individual people. To most others a corporation is morally and practically a different entity. See {586119}.
McCain held this view despite the fact that most other politicians of his party supported removal of any corporate restraints.
Romney was trying to explain that the Supreme Court had recently ruled that for purposes of placing limits on campaign donations, corporations were entitled to the same rights of free speech and contributing money as people. The candidate chose this statement to express that view. However, the way Romney phrased it made many people suspect that perhaps, because of his lifetime corporate activity, he really thought that there were no differences between corporations and people. This suspicion reinforced a public feeling that Romney was much more corporately oriented than he was people oriented, and that hurt Romney with many voters.
This issue arose in 2014 with the Citizens United Case, when a 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court held that political contributions were a form of political speech and corporations had the right of Freedom of Speech. This time there were 4 dissenters.
In the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court ruled that Corporations were people in the sense that the corporations had the right of freedom of speech in general and all political speech in particular and spending money on campaigns was a form of speech. Many thought that the consequences would be terrible for the American political system and urged legislation and/or a Constitutional Amendment. They particularly attacked the notion that a corporation was a person as this quotation illustrates.
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
