you may have seen something about the civil war, but it's nonsense. the idea is british in origin and older than that. stated simply, a corporation cannot appear as a defendant in a lawsuit unless it is legally treated as though it is a person. abolishing legal personhood would also make it impossible to sue corporations. you'd have to sue individual people that work at a corporation instead - and good luck demonstrating liability. that's the whole point in the first place - to make it easier to establish liability...
here's another example of the way the idea could be used to the general public's advantage: if corporations are people, should they not be taxed as though they are people? if you follow the logic through, it's really blatantly unconstitutional (in canada, at least) to give corporations specialized tax cuts. at the earnings levels they have, they should be putting 90%+ of their profits into public spending. so, why doesn't somebody force them to...?
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BrotherWoody1
Do you think the Holocaust survivors or even the Weisenthal Institute could look into both Ford + IBM for their active support of the Third Reich & their active participation in the Holocaust itself. It's entirely natural to Ford & IBM to move from one Nazified state to another Nazified state. I hope that the Court also makes them accountable for their actions before 1945 as well as after.
deathtokoalas
it's known that ibm & ford were both actively involved in the third reich. however, the biggest criminal enterprise in the holocaust was the standard oil, through it's agreements with ig farben. ig farben was the company that made the gas. it was interlocked with the rockefeller concerns, at the time.
you have to understand that the united states did not enter world war two until 1941, and was not particularly hostile to german plans to attack the soviet union. if you look at the situation carefully, it becomes clear that the american concern was damage control to reverse hitler's botched invasion (which they seemed to support until it failed) and save western europe from stalinism.
ig farben was dismantled after the war. it's major successor company was bayer. smaller successors include hoechst, agfa-ansco and basf.