Friday, August 12, 2011

Corporate Personhood

Mitt Romney said yesterday what most Republican politicians believe but are wise enough to not state out loud.
Corporations are people.
They are not, of course. People are people. Corporations are businesses. If corporations were people they would, at best, be schizophrenics and, at worst, psychopaths.

Corporations are anti-social. When was the last time you saw a corporation attend church, fall in love, get married, have children, vote, laugh, cry, or visit their mother in the hospital? Corporations are heartless, soulless creations.

Corporations rape other corporations with impunity (they call it "hostile takeover"). Corporations don't need clean air or clean water, in fact they can survive just fine in an environment that would kill people.
Union Carbide made $7 billion in 2009.
Corporations are much larger than any single person. They can crush a real person with less concern than a person crushes a mosquito. When corporations are elevated to the level of persons they tower over real people. Democracy is buried under corporate power.
And the people become insignificant pawns.

That is Mitt Romney's America, a place where corporations are people and people are chattel.

The Secret of Life
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Corporate personhood is probably the single greatest problem with the American legal system today.

I know that sounds farfetched, but so much of the other stuff that's wrong follows from that.

I suspect Romney was not making a statement yesterday regarding the legal status of corporate personhood, but rather just that corporations are made up of people.

Still, it's brought the topic into the news, so that's pretty great.

Because to me, a person that can live forever, can't be jailed, and has unlimited ability to be in multiple places at once is not a person... That's a god.

Aaargh. Thanks for bringing up this topic! Great blog...

Anonymous said...

By specific design, corporations are not "people" nor are they comprised of "people". By design, there is no liability of "people" when a corporation is liable. The owners of the corporation are specifically insulated from that risk. As a stockholder, that makes a lot of sense to me, since I have very little ability to control corporate conduct. On the other hand, that necessarily means that the status of corporations must be different from that of real live people who must be directly accountable for their actions.