Unequal Protection: Protecting Corporate Liars

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.truth-out.org/protecting-corporate-liars/1311690878

With yearly revenues of over $9 billion, NIKE has the resources to spread their corporate message far and wide. Do they also have the Constitutionally protected right to distort or misrepresent the truth for commercial gain?
Corporations are not people, and the First Amendment should account for their unique motivation: sales.

- Congressman Dennis Kucinich, writing about the Supreme Court case Kasky v. Nike 1

The first direct shot across the bow of the doctrine of a corporation’s “right to lie” by using its “personhood” to claim First Amendment “free speech” rights came in April 1998, when Mark Kasky, a California political activist, noticed that Nike was engaged in what he considered to be a deceptive greenwashing campaign. Kasky had long been a runner and wore Nike shoes, so he was particularly distressed when he saw Nike’s communications director, Lee Weinstein, publish a letter in the San Francisco Examiner in December 1997 that said, in part, “Consider that Nike established the sporting goods industry’s first code of conduct to ensure our workers know and can exercise their rights.”2

This letter was just a small part, it turned out, of a national campaign by Nike to convince the American public that it was making sure that its contractors and subcontractors were treating their employees in Asia well. The year before, Steve Miller, Nike’s sports marketing director, pledged in a letter to athletic program directors and presidents of U.S. universities that Nike’s manufac turers complied with “government regulations regarding minimum wage and overtime as well as occupational health and safety, environmental regulations, workers’ insurance, and equal opportunity provisions.”3

More at the link --