Barack Obama Quotes
I don’t care how many ways you try and explain it. Corporations are not people. People are people.
Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States (Democrat, IL), United States Senator (Democrat, IL), Campaign Rally, Virginia Commonwealth University, May 5, 2012
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
McCain held this view despite the fact that most other politicians of his party supported removal of any corporate restraints.
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}.
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.
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.
The state of Texas had an enthusiasm for executions that was greater than and different from all the other states. Their execution numbers were closer to Iran and China than they were to other American states. The Supreme Court had ruled that corporations were people for purposes of being entitled to freedom of speech.
Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician and attorney who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the United States. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004.
