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If Corporations Were Human
Yesterday's Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case removes all limits on large corporations to finance and influence federal elections. In its ruling the Court reverse a decades old ruling barring companies from using their general funds to fund political campaign, and guts pieces of the popular McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation. In so doing the Court implicitly embraces a 125 year-old precedent in the case of Santa Clara v. Santa Fe, where the Court first developed the legal doctrine of corporate personhood, explicitly granting corporations the same political and civil rights granted to human beings. Our nation's founders would be shocked to learn that their revolution had resulted in non-human entities like corporations being endowed with the same hard fought rights secured for citizens.
But what if we accept corporate personhood as the current reality and instead focus on changing the rules such that corporations would also have to be bound by other limitations of humanity? How would corporations be different if they were indeed human-like?
If corporations were human, they would pause for sleep and recreation. When human families vacation, they frequently go to parks or natural places which they inherently recognize as part of the commons set apart from the marketplace. Many corporations know no such bounds; if resources are available, even in the nation's National Parks, they will seek to develop them. Today's modern corporations are 24/7 affairs, that are always charging forward. The press for continuous growth and the need to deliver the next quarter's earnings, make corporation's urgency and intensity toward time a threat to many communities, which have other priorities like caring for children and elders, not the tireless quest to produce more profit.
If corporations were human, they would acknowledge their dependence on a healthy community for their well-being and contribute financially to the vibrancy of the community through payment of taxes. Fifty years ago, corporate taxes made up nearly 22% of the federal treasury receipts, today corporate taxes contribute less than 13% to the Federal budget. The mindset of many large corporations is that of takers, looking to be supported by society with a stream of tax credits and preferential tax rates. According to a 2008 report by the Government Accounting Office, 25% of large US corporations paid no Federal income taxes in 2005 (the latest year studied) despite reporting collective sales exceeding $1.1 trillion.
If corporations were human, they would recognize that their brains are only one of many vital organs. The brain, which provides the executive function for the body whole, nonetheless consumes a relatively modest share of the body's nutrition. A brain which swells beyond a normal healthy state is a dire threat to the body and most often requires the dramatic intervention of surgery. Inhuman corporations provide ever larger amount of nutrition in the form of money to its executive function. These swollen levels of pay are a cancer that often results in excessive risk, putting both the corporation and society at risk.
If corporations were human, they would be accountable to society when they break the law and would be punished with a loss of their freedoms. When a person steals or murders, they are sent to prison, where they lose their freedom to practice their trade, and to participate in the economic and political life of the community. When corporations produce products they know to be deadly, or withhold important information on the safety of their products are they not guilty of murder? When corporations submit fraudulent financial statements to investors, or engage in deceptive marketing practices that cost people their homes or their life savings, are they not guilty of felonious theft? Shouldn't corporate criminals, particularly repeat offenders, be denied their freedom to practice business and have their license revoked?
If corporations were human, they would one day die. Unlike the finitude of human life, modern corporations can live forever under the law, growing in size and gaining political and economic power generation after generation. It was not always so. When our nation was young, people recognized both the good things that business contributed but also the risks of concentrating too much power in the hands of businesses. Business charters were granted for a set period of time, commonly a generation, after which time the businesses would be dissolved. While businesses could still prosper and grow to have influence, they were kept from becoming too big to fail, where their size alone was a threat to the social order.
Corporations can't have it both ways - insisting upon the political and civil rights guaranteed human rights under the Constitution, while at the same time refusing to live within the constraints of human life in terms of longevity, size, accountability and support of the communities which grant them their existence.
99 Comments so far
Show AllIf corporations were human they'd be relegated to a nursing home or institution for being intellectually challenged. In other words: they are stupid!
The are fouling their own nest. They think the world has infinite resources. They see no harm in corrupting sociaetal and political institutions.
They are stupid "people."
Gary
If not stupid, then certainly sociopathic.
Live Simply So That Others May Simply Live
To me, corporate behavior is most like that of a cancer: growth without limit, eventually killing the host if not cut out in time.
The closest human analog is the psychopath: self above all, always, with not even a feigned conscience unless it serves its own immediate needs.
I seem to remember an attempt by the GOP in the last few years to muzzle unions by introducing a bill that would have required a vote of the members before spending any union funds on campaigns. Perhaps now is the time to resurrect that bill and improve it by requiring the same vote by stockholders before spending corporate money for issues or campaigns. Such a measure would not deny any union or corporation freedom of speech. It would simply insure that such speech actually represented the views of the majority of members or stockholders. Effectively it would keep union leadership and corporate management from raiding treasuries without control.
That's a *lovely* idea! Contact Dennis's and Grayson's offices about it, why don't you?
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Fire every elected official at every election cycle.
Let them take billions to play corporate hand maidens.
The up side is legislatiors can shed much of the pretense they're working for us.
The world will see what a farce we've become as we continue our expanding empire proclaiming our convictions to freedom loving people of the world from tyranny.
One term, kick them out.
Our Corporatist in Chief Obama, and Congress may rail against this decision; they may even pass legislation to slow it down but I'm not buying. It's feigned outrage. They've already shown themselves to be bold faced liars who now operate behind closed doors and resurface after finding a way to rig their votes to dismiss what's in our best interests.
Congress enjoys a good charade like Congressional hearings but they're loathe to punish campaign donors. The court's decision will cement their reluctance.
Furthermore, when it pertains to corporations and CEO's, the laws we have now aren't being enforced. Military contractors, banks, oil companies, and administration officials (most recently Shelia Blair) are nearly immune from our laws right now.
US law only apply's to the peons, us.
We are in deep s--t.
What I don't get about elections is that it is one person-one donation limit-one vote. How is it that a corporation - simply an organized group of individuals isn't held to the same constraints... To be "equal" then a corporation that has 100 people on their payroll must be held to the sum of what those 100 could spend individually and each individual would have no further right to any personal donation in each election.
Live Simply So That Others May Simply Live
Why should one corporation have more than one vote?
The corporation has NO vote... only the individuals that work within it - that was my point. The corporate contribution to any election or candidate should not be greater than the sum total of what the individuals within the corporation agree to waive of their own individual financial participation in the process... AND that number could only include the documented American citizens that actually were named on the corporate charter.
Live Simply So That Others May Simply Live
Would be much simpler to simply prohibit corporate political contributions. Let the individuals in the corporations do what they want, as any other individual.
"But what if we accept corporate personhood as the current reality and instead focus on changing the rules such that corporations would also have to be bound by other limitations of humanity?"
Intersting commentary Mr. Klinger. The line I pasted above is an open-ended question and the balance of your piece suggests that the natural oder of things would make corporations behave.
I hope this is not what you're suggesting, if you are suggesting anything at all. Maybe you are just brainstorming.
Intersting commentary along lines I was too tired last night to think through after reading the news of the court's decision.
The court itself did NOT make such a decision. The court reporter at the time wrote that into the title of a decision regarding Railroads and sales tax on fence posts, and it was never corrected because the Chief Justice who asked the reporter to change it died. The reporter was a former railroad CEO. IOW, he was planted there, infiltrated the US government, and pretty much destroyed America from within.
What kind of health care plan will corporations get?
CORPORATION ---- INVESTOR DICTATORSHIP
A big corporation is actually rich investors, nothing more and nothing less,
as a corporation is an absolute top-down dictatorship ruled by the capitalist owners.
So what our capitalist Supreme Court did was give the greatest power of all, the power to be heard which is the only requirement one needs to rule, to those with the greatest ability to generate wealth.
Which is in perfect harmony with capitalism, the premise that those born with the greatest ability to achieve should rule absolute.
But isn't management the real "rulers" of a corporation? Even though subject to shareholder election, most hold on tightly to their offices. With some shuffling around of top executives from one corporation to another.
To my mind a corporation is a con-game and conspiracy to limit liabilty to the owners while protecting their capital.
But corporations ARE subject to criminal actions -- though there is no way to incarcerate a corporation itself -- management can be jailed. For bribery for one thing. Though more often they are fined.
I like Lord Bertrand Russell's comment on of capitalism: "Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate."
Gary
"Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility."
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1906
Don't know the exact numbers now, but in the 90's the top 1% owned 50% of all equities and 60% of all bonds in the U.S. They control the major corporations no matter how many individuals own 200 shares of GM or Microsoft.
The exact purpose of corporate law was what you said--to limit liability while protecting capital. It was done to encourage risk taking for entrepreneurs. Now it's turned on its head.
Think of the charges we can bring against corporations as people: everything from littering to reckless homicide. If we throw the book at them, and use consecutive sentences for *each* death, we get rid of them. Go for it!
While human persons in this country are subject to the death penalty, Corporations cannot be punished so severly that they will be bankrupted, the equivalent of a corporate death sentence. A Boardroom decision that an extra $8/car would have cost too much to save several hundred Pinto victim's lives, was pre-meditated murder. The pennypinching neglect of the plumbing at Bhopal killed thousands, is still killing people, there is no meaningful way to hold corporations responsible.
If you can't punish the legal fictions called Corporations, punish the humans running them. The CEO's, CFO's, and shareholders.
I'm thinking a scoped long range rifle would be appropriate for these vermin...
Church Services
So-called "Free Market Capitalism" (the big lie) is the state religion of the United States of Global Domination. The corporations are the un-physical body of the their God. Money is their form of prayer. "It's the economy" is one of their favorite refrains by the choir.
Equal access to justice and any semblance of democracy is anathema to this religion which worships monetary profit and mind-numbing compliance. It is no different than any other corrupt religion with dreams of UNIVERSAL domination.
Its greatest fraudulent deceit is in its invocation of that which it least represents and most desperately despises. Freedom.
The "congregation sings "Security, security, security" as the rattle of their self-applied chains and shackles pulse a rhythm. Meanwhile, the acolyte media shiver in an orgiastic frenzy of distraction as the "minister" decries the EVIL as ever-growing outside.
The "high-point" of this ceremony of submission is when the congregation files forward toward the altar, which is resplendent with phallic weaponry, in the deepest of passionate devotion, to offer themselves, or at least their offspring, to be PROUDLY sacrificed in an effort to make more room in the church for the ever-growing altar.
Amen!!!
This is a silly exercise.
There is just too much wiggle room for the lawyers of these corporation if we let them think that their corporation is a person in our society.
Lets stick with definition of personhood in this society and apply it truthfully.
"Corporations can't have it both ways."
Says who? The Supreme Court just ruled that they can have it both ways ... and they can have both parties in their pockets as well, neither of whom will screw the pooch.
Parties don't matter. "Liberals" versus "conservatives" don't matter. The only thing that matters is class and its accelerating access to power.
In that sense, Marx was right and every apologist for capitalism wrong all along.
If corporations were human, they would be diagnosed as psychopaths according to the official diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV. This is not hyperbole, as was demonstrated in the feature length documentary "The Corporation." Corporations, as "individuals," are certifiably mentally ill, and yet they are the most powerful "individuals" in the world. (They even have a god as fictional as any in religion; that is, the ideological "free market," with its "invisible hand.") As Joel Bakan wrote in his book, "The Corporation" (upon which the documentary is based), corporations are:
1. "singularly self-interested and unable to feel genuine concern for others in any context."
2. "irresponsible ... because 'in an attempt to satisfy the corporate goal, everybody else is put at risk.'"
3. manipulative of everything, including public opinion [meaning the SCOTUS has just FULLY unleashed a psychopath].
4. grandiose
5. lacking empathy
6. asocial
7. incapable of accepting responsibility for their own actions
8. unable to feel remorse
9. unable to relate to others except superficially.
For those interested, the documentary is up on HULU and available through Netflix. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. If you have time, see the documentary and read the book. There's plenty of overlap between the two, but each has some unique information. It will make your blood boil.
Hear Hear!
One of the most fascinating and informative films of this century so far...
http://thecorporation.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pin8fbdGV9Y
For any of you out there who doubt the veracity of what fasteddie75 has written, go to youtube and put the words The Corporation" in the search field. The documentary features Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and a host of other serious scholars and researchers who go through both the history and behavior of the corporation and come to exactly the same conclusion. The film ought to be required viewing for everybody in order to balance the perception of both what is wrong with our present world and how it got that way.
Poet
From today's Democracy Now!: "Bipartisan Senate Bill Seeks to Block EPA from Regulating Gases"
"Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, a bipartisan group of senators has introduced a measure to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. Last month, the EPA determined six gases endanger the environment and public health and said it would draft regulations to curb their emissions under the Clean Air Act. The “resolution of disapproval,” endorsed by three Democrats and thirty-five Republicans, would block the EPA’s move."
See? Corporations (and their worker drones in Washington, D.C.) are psychopaths! AND they own both parties.
Corporal punishment for corporate crimes!
Welcome to the New Dark Ages.
Welcome to the New Fascism.
Witness the birth of the Corporate States of America.
Now the average American will be able to see and experience first hand what the rest of the world already knows as hard, cruel fact. You will experience need, poverty, privation, brutality and repression in the name of the almighty dollar. And you will have brought it on yourselves.
You have mid-term election coming up very quickly. Those elected will be the first round of politicians bought outright, right in public for all to see. No more hiding behind lobbyists and special interest groups.
The 'elections' in 2012 won't even bother to be anything more than mummery and charade. The Corporations choice, probably Palin, will be rammed down your throats with pretty packaging and PR.
And the really sad fact will be the vast majority of Americans will still think they had a 'choice'.
Your country became a Corporate led Fascist Dictatorship in November of 2000. The fraudulent 'election' of George W. Bush was the death of democracy for you.
Obama has led you by the nose into an ever tightening police state.
And now those who have the least interest in keeping you alive will control the very quality of those lives.
You loosed this beast upon the world.
Time for you to live with the consequences.
I would prefer for the concept of corporate personhood to be eliminated by legislation. But if this is not done, then corporations which enjoy the legal advantages of being equal to human beings should also accept the legal responsibilities and penalties associated with human personhood.
This would mean that corporations which commit crimes (as they often do) would be punished in the same way as humans who commit crimes--by the loss of freedom. Of course, we cannot physically lock up corporations, but we could place them under court appointed custodians who would make all business decisions. Any profits earned during the period of the sentence would be passed to the state, any losses would remain with the corporations.
Death sentences, life sentences and sentences of more than fifty years would result in the corporation being taken over by the government and held, sold, or distributed to the people and the decision of the court.
And of course, corporations would have a limited life-time. After about fifty years (approximately the length of the normal productive adult life), the corporation would be dissolved and the proceeds distributed.
As much as I hate to say it, I predict Sarah Palin in 2012 as she is probably the best corporate puppet that $ can buy!
If the law has a disclosure rule then any person who takes money from corps.is automatically not voted for.This needs an open internet for "getting" the message out and does not require huge amounts of money.That probobly would force politicians to change the rules again and make it harder for 3rd party people to stand for election but then we would know who wants freedom and who will vote for fascism.This ruling may be a blessing in disguise because the pols will be forced to be with the people or not and if they lie then one chance is all they get to stay in office.Tony
There's something about this I gon't get. Why is this SC decision so toweringly monumental? Haven't corporations been buying elections for several decades? Is this really supposed to be some new and scary development? Unless I've been dreaming for about 40 years, corporations have been slowly but surely buying and seizing the entire political process, and the Supreme Court suddently deciding they can do what what they've been doing all along is no surprise. McCain-Feingold put the barest minimum of restrictions on what corporations could do to "influence" elections. Maybe that bare minimum has been stripped away by yesterday's SC/corporate coup, but the Fortune 500 and probably 1000 have been deciding virtually ALL public policy for fucking decades! They write nearly ALL the legislation, pay for access no mere citizen can ever have, are personal friends with legislators (you know, it's called lobbying), and own the whole shebang in Washington. We the Irrelevant People have literally nothing to do with any of it, despite our fantasies to the contrary that his is a democracy. It emphatically isn't and hasn't been for many YEARS.
How is this so very different? I'm really not getting it. Enlighten me here.
It's not that it's "different," it's that it's official. To me, this is at the same level as if the SC legaled all the private armies that are now operating in violation of the Constitution (e.g., Xe, DynCorps, etc.). It seeks to crush all hope that we can do anything about it.
It's been very official for 125 years when the court declared corporations having the same rights as persons. I know that for over 30 years I've been hearing how extremely urgent it is that we change this law, by constitutional amendment if necessary, and NOTHING HAS EVER BEEN DONE. That's what I mean: it's not as if the fact that corporations disproportionately, or rather entirely, own the whole political system and our voting is nothing more than a distraction, or sideshow, to make us believe we're participating in a democracy, that we also decide anything that matters--that this is something new and shocking. This has been true for umpteen years.
Everything I'm seeing and hearing in media makes it sound as if nothing like this has ever been going on, and now, Oh My God, corporations are going to be deciding elections! They already do, and have been for, you know, a long time, because we've never done a goddamn thing to prevent them. How can we when they already have all the power? We can tell ourselves uplifting moral tales about how we really do have the power to stop this, but they sound more and more like children's bedtime stories. The fact is, we never do anything to turn this crap around because we have no idea how to take power away from these corporations, since we certainly can't think about changing the economic system drastically enough to challenge their power. That means confronting the monolith of capitalism! And we can't go there!
I agree with what you have said Ephraim. This has just unmasked that which already was. Now the USA is officially a plutocracy. Claiming the greatest democracy ever will be more difficult now.
There will be a lot more noise and a lot more ballyhoo at election time, but this wont herald much change. The false hope that you can change things through the ballot, will fade. The false hope of getting a 3rd electoral party up and going will also fade. In my opinion it is the false hope, the illusion of democracy that was responsible for a lot of patriotism that enabled endless war.
The fact that the Supreme Court has done this illustrates the depth of degeneration that the USA has already fallen into. Currently, one word can be used to shatter the illusion of revolution via that ballot box - Obama. If you think you had a democracy before this supreme court decision, then think again.
The right wing demons that have usurped the Supreme court may secretly think that they have crushed the people, but what they might not have realized is that they have also fertilized the soil of eventual revolution some decades down the track.
Exactly so--decades down the track, when most of us here are dead and gone. It's all up to future generations because none of the present ones are up to the task. All we have is talk, even if much of it is Big Talk about how we're going Change Things. Maybe it takes a hundred years of such optimistic vowing and declaring that We Will Do It to fertilize the ground for a generation 100 years or so from now to gird up their loins and actually make it so, as Captain Picard put it. Meanwhile, we unhappy many have no choice but endure each other's contempt and ridicule for NOT doing it.
It is different, now Exxon (or any other corporate entity) can spend as much money out of their general fund as they see fit to sway any election, anywhere. Example, First Energy might wish to replace Representative Dennis Kucinich, now they can create ads and spend what ever they wish to campaign against him. Same with issues on state ballots (I think) etc.
Well, now it will be cool for your congressman to look like a NASCAR driver.
Does anyone still doubt that the "Rule of Law" has been replaced by the rule of money in America?
In Liggett v. Lee (1933), Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis described how corporations in the early years of our Repulic, were restricted by the states and charted by the states to serve the "public good".
Ligett v. Lee is a great read about the history of corporations when they didn't have any inherent right to exist. Is there any question that corporate money had a major influence in removing limits on those charters?
Remember: "Corporations had NO inherent right to exist"! So, what happened?
I'm surprised SCOTUS didn't say that a Corporate Dollar contribution will be counted as a whole unit while a Citizen Dollar contribution will only be considered 3/5s of a unit.
If Unions can be forced to not spend a Union members dues on campaign contributions if that member requests it, then consumers should have the same right concerning corporate campaign contributions that come from store sales.
You can just go to another store they'll tell you. Well, not always. In today's corporate web many communities have only national stores, prohibitive distances between stores, or very few independent operators that do not provide essential choices. Are there any national brands that do not contribute to campaigns?
If it was not considered an undue burden for the Unions to calculate what percentage was being spent on contributions, it should not be considered an undue burden for corporations.
Under the criteria of the SCOTUS ruling I am forced to contribute to someone who has no interest in consumerism, or global warming, or war, or...
Why can a dues paying member of a consumer organization be forced to make campaign contributions but a dues paying Union member cannot?
Corporations can run for President
- This proposed Constitutional amendment was brought to you by The President Corporation.
REpublican corporatist fascists have staged two coups in the 21st century. On 12 December 2000, five fascist idiots on the Supreme Court illegally stopped the voting counting in Florida, staged a fascist coup and stopped democracy in its tracks and handed the Presidency to the gangster Bush.
The gangster Bush returned the favor, and appointed three more fascist corporatists to the Supreme Court. Yesterday, on 21 January 2010, five corporatists on the Supreme Court voted to give corporations unlimited power in influencing our elections.
Corporations, which are legal fictions, which we have created for our own convenience, now threaten to destroy our democracy. We need to rein in corporate power; we need to domesticate corporations.
They've already destroyed our democracy. Keep clinging to the fiction that we HAVE a democracy to destroy, when that happened long ago, and we'll never get beyond "reining in" what has been utterly out of control for decades. We aren't going to rein in anything. They own Washington, like they have for 50 years, and they've been legally "persons" for 125 years. The Court merely sealed the deal that has been effectively operative all this time. They've ALWAYS bought politicians and elections, they've always written legislation, they've always kept the public OUT of the entire political process except the rigged voting they allow us to do, to choose one or the other corporate candidate. Nothing new here. Why is everyone in a frenzy over something that's been going on in full public view virtually forever?
Epraim: No, the "full public view" has just gotten much fuller, thanks to the latest decree of the Supreme Court. The difference is between midnight rape in a back alley and noontime rape in the public square. Yes, we were subjects of a class dictatorship last week, but it has just gotten even worse.
Well, yes, and their next step, if one needs taking, may be to just have senators and representatives openly designated as Senator ExxonMobil, Congressman Microsoft, etc. Not that they aren't already wholly owned subsidiaries of X number of corporations. Like someone else said, now they can flaunt it in our faces, with NASCAR-like logos slapped all over their $9,000 suits.
But the reality of what and whom they represent will remain unchanged. If it didn't, we'd have single-payer health care already, wouldn't be quagmired illegally and insanely in self-defeating, bankrupting Middle Eastern wars, and there wouldn't be 20% (real) unemploynment. Among other things. All these things obtain because corporations ALREADY rule the world, and certainly this country. The SCOTUS simply made it official, and the five thugs who did this are the same ones who gave us George Wanker's criminal administration, even if he did appoint Roberts and Alito. Those five are key to full corporate takeover. Democracy is stone dead now, but it's been on Code 3 life support forever.
Sioux Rose
Woops! I see we were both on the same "page" (as per the company man/woman properly adorned in the appropriate uniform in public view). I had not read the full thread before responding to your post above.