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Time for a Real Debate: Are Corporations People?
"Corporations are people, my friend... of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People's pockets. Human beings my friend."—Mitt Romney
It’s true that corporations have no ability to act for themselves. They only act through people; their officers, directors, employees, lawyers and agents. However, the important question to ask is “do corporations behave like people?” Because if they don’t behave like people, our nation faces a serious problem it wasn’t designed to handle. 
Our form of government was created in 1788 with the adoption of the US Constitution. This was a time when there were only a handful of corporations in existence (and none of the modern variety which have no obligations to protect the public interest). As a consequence, there is no mention anywhere in the Constitution of the word corporation.
This means that our government governs people and corporations the same way—through the passage of laws enacted by our elected representatives. Until such laws are passed, both people and corporations can harm the environment and other elements of the public interest to the extent they have the capacity and inclination to do so. Sometimes the passage of effective new laws can take a very long time. Sometimes such laws never get passed.
The public interest is exposed while our leaders decide what should be done. However, people are unlikely to take advantage of this situation. They generally have little capacity or inclination to engage in behavior that harms the public interest. Modern corporations, on the other hand, have plenty of both.
Protection of the public interest in our democracy depends upon citizenship. It depends on citizens voluntarily stopping behavior that is harming the public interest even when no law prohibits it. When good citizens realize they are harming the public interest, they stop. They don’t wait for the law to make them stop. They don’t lobby to keep the law from making them stop. They simply stop.
People generally stop. Modern corporations too often do not.
While companies don’t start out with the intention of plundering the public interest, it sometimes becomes evident that their now successful business is doing great harm. This is when their citizenship is tested. Almost universally, companies fail this test when large amounts of money are at stake.
When it becomes evident a citizen is harming the public interest, he, she or it has two options: recognize the obligations of citizenship and stop (the citizenship option) or take advantage of the rights of citizenship and get involved in the legislative process to delay or frustrate the passage of new laws which will prohibit their destructive behavior (the political option). Most human beings choose the former. Corporations choose the latter.
There are several reasons why people choose the good citizen option and corporations choose the political option. Most have to do with the differences between people and corporations. People generally develop a sense of right and wrong. None of us has a compelling need to harm the public interest. Corporations, on the other hand, have no conscience. The people that work for them do, but they have to follow rules that rarely result in a collective conscience. Moreover, at times companies have a compelling need to harm the public interest—when future profits and/or their survival depend upon it.
Lots of people are saying our government is broken. A huge reason for this is they see that government is unable to protect the public interest from corporate anti-social behavior.
Because our Constitution contains no special provisions for the government of corporations, protection of the public interest depends upon corporate citizenship just as it does on individual citizenship. Indeed, it depends on corporate citizenship more. A big corporation has the capacity to do more harm to the public interest in one afternoon legally than the average human being can do in a lifetime.
In the case of modern corporations with huge amounts of money invested in factories, processes and products that harm the public interest, that citizenship is not present. The reason for this has to do with state corporate laws that say, so long as corporations are operating in accordance with existing laws, corporate directors must act in the best interests of the corporation and its shareholders.
These laws encourage corporate managers to continue harming the public interest in the pursuit of their company’s own interest (profit and survival). It’s time to start thinking about changing these laws. The law should balance the duty of directors to act in the company’s best interest with safeguards that will ensure protection of the environment and other elements of the public interest.
In Iowa Mitt Romney argued that “Corporations are people.” New Hampshire is the next stop on the trail to selecting a GOP nominee for president. Two debates are scheduled between now and primary day; one Saturday hosted by New Hampshire's ABC affiliate WMUR and the other Sunday morning, a joint effort by Facebook and NBC's 'Meet The Press'. Isn’t it time all the candidates for president from both parties were asked whether they too believe corporations people?
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72 Comments so far
Show Allno.
end of "debate".
Exactly what I was going to write.
let me re-iterate the above post
no.
end of "debate".
i tend to go along with the maxim: we'll believe that corporations are real people when the state of texas executes one
agreed, the answer is "no". Time for a real debate: should we continue to pretend that corps were a worth-while invention by people?
Mitt Romney is so fricking creepy the way he talks. And I can't stand when politicians say "my friend". Stop acting like you know us or me, you over privileged piece of crap!!!
Please stop insulting crap by comparing it to Romney!
If Willard Mitt Romney and a pile of shit were both dumped into a pool the shit would float to the top.
Now wait a minute!
Does he go in with his hair product or not?
That might float him despite himself. ;)
How about the tourer of babble
Corporations are more like out of control monarchs, answerable to no one.
When left unregulated and unenforced (or worse, the insidious "self-regulated"), they are more like cancer cells. Not people, but they grow and expand by destroying people a little at a time.
Let's get out there on January 20th and Occupy Federal Courthouses with our signs:
CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE! MONEY IS NOT SPEECH!
Move to Amend: http://movetoamend.org/. Check out your state and where the Occupiers will be on that day.
Thank you Gail for reminding us all that we as people, all across the nation, are going to get together and have our voices heard on January 20th. This is a very big deal. Everyone, please find an occupy or move-to-amend organization near you that is organizing this event. If we don't stand up now and get a constitutional amendment done in the near future, we will NEVER have the tools to take our government back from the monied interests that have corrupted our democracy. Please, stand up, join up, and put some time and energy into getting this done.
"The law should balance the duty of directors to act in the company’s best interest with safeguards that will ensure protection of the environment and other elements of the public interest"
Nothing some well placed corporate political bribes can't direct
Lots of people will vote for a friendly image with no substance.
Writing that corporations act a certain way because they are corporations is crazy. Repeat, CRAZY!
People run corporations and they are the actors. Writing that corprations act a certain way because they are corporations plays right along with the nonsense that corporations are people, "my friend". LOL!
Corporations are Economic Royal Houses. Think about the term, "The King is Dead, Long Live the King".
That is what we are talking about. Corporations are antithetical, in direct opposition, to democratic self government. There is no way around this.
Talk of limited liability and shareholder protection is a smokescreen to hide their true purpose, the subversion of regulation by the government and their subordination to the will of the People.
Feudal Empires is being blunt about their true nation and it is the term I use for corporations.
Before any problem can be solved one needs to be honest about the nature of the problem.
Legislation and the use of the Police and Courts is the solution. Prisons can not be off the table. There is no making nice with Royals and Pirates. They have a complete disdain for democracy and rule by People.
I want everyone to think of the Bush Family.
Think of what Barbara thinks about "the little people".
Think about George Bush's membership in the Skull and Bones Society.
Think about what the Skull and Bones represents.
They are pirates and members of an anti-social cliche.
They are an ongoing criminal enterprise. A gang that belongs to the same Country Club and you can't be a member and I would hope you would not want to be a member.
Pirates used to be drawn and quartered but we are too nice for that. Maybe we could apply the confiscation laws to their property and banishment from civil society at the very least. Prison for their crimes would be justice. We do that to the common people all the time. Isn't about time we made all the laws and customs applicable to even the 1%??
Well isn't it citizen?
"Pirates used to be drawn and quartered but we are too nice for that."
how about photographed and quartered?
a mug shot and an eight-by-six cell for life.
Time for a Real Debate: Is America and Israel the two most dangerous and histerical governments in the world, whose privileged neo-cons will not rest until they've wrecked the entire world?
Pepe Escobar's reporting and writing on world affairs is some of the best out there. Why hasn't CD posted this article? We expect stuff like this from CNN and Fox News, not CD. To view the most dangerous global economic reverberations stemming from Obama's cave-in to Aipac and the Israelis and our own demented Congress with his signing of NDAA last weekend, Escobar's most recent article is must reading.
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NA07Ak01.html
Pepe Escobar's eloquent articles are always worth reading. He has a perspective on events like no other and he has a sense of humour to go with it.
Autonomy corrupts, and absolute autonomy corrupts absolutely. This is a great article by Hinkley that touches on why corporations and citizens respond differently to the same laws. The way I see it, corporate officers are offered autonomy from their own decisionmaking authority, so if the corporation breaks the law there's a number of ways in which that doesn't fall on any one person. Furthermore, if it does, this gives the corporation a carte blanche opportunity to avoid responsibility itself, since that is assigned to some 'bad apples' in the corporation (aka fall guys).
I've worked in corporations all of my adult life, and I've noticed that corporate officers are like surfers. They are always keenly aware of where the power is located, where the reef lies, who the other surfers are on the wave, and when is the best time to eject themselves from the wave. As such, I've seen many of these 'players' come in, get loaded with decisionmaking authority, blow it, but get promoted out of there by the time the proverbial sh8t hits the fan.
Here's the ways in which corporate officers get around the commission of a crime:
1)Surf the wave: Go in, commit your crime, make your huge profits, and get promoted or golden parachuted out of there before anyone is aware there's been a crime committed.
2)Hire a bevy of lawyers to develop a strategy wherein a law that would appear to prohibit your crime, actually doesn't.
3)Hire a bevy of lobbyists to develop a strategy wherein a law that prohibits your crime is changed, usually in the very fine print.
4)Hire a bevy of journalists to develop a strategy wherein a law that prohibits your crime is painted to be the greater crime ('gol-durn regulations!' anyone?).
Corporate officers are encouraged to go down these paths because they remove the assignment of responsibility to decision-making authority. "Yes, I dumped our Chromium-tailings in your drinking water! NO, it is no longer interpreted as a crime!" But what do we call the removal of responsibility from authority? Autonomy. And autonomy corrupts, absolutely.
The corporate 'citizen' ends up with this HUGE authority to effect the environment and the rest of society, and almost NO responsibility for having done so, certainly none at the level of individual corporate officers, where such responsibility must land if there is any hope of changing behavior. We end up with something like the 2008 finance sector meltdown and no one is responsible, except some vague finger-pointing at some overworked 20-somethings in the SEC.
"Corporations are people, my friend... of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People's pockets. Human beings my friend."
Interesting logic there, I must say. So if I eat a head of lettuce that I grow, the lettuce ultimately went to me, so lettuce are people? Or does the thing have to EARN you money? So maybe if I grow a cow then sell it to someone, the cow earned me money so cows are people. OK now I get it, If I build a nice piece of furniture, and sell it, the furniture earned me money that means that furniture are people.
So the logic here is that if something earns you money it is people. OK I think I get it now. So if I sell cow manure, that comes from a cows asshole, the asshole made me money so assholes are people, and, and, Romney is obviously an asshole so I guess we have confirmed that this line of logic is, indeed true!
No wonder I am having so much trouble telling people from corporations. They happen to be one and the same. The law really needs to be fixed to as to permit corporations and people to intermarry. Motorcars are people too. Proof: What do motorcars carry? People. QED! Television sets are people too. Proof: Who watches them?
Time to judge backwater for murder, they are a corporation and they admitted to murder, WTF Roberts court, time to shit or get off the pot! Come on Willard are they people?
Only people are people. Cororations are an abstraction. Seems like a slam-dunk to all but the co-opted.
True, but people can incorporate themselves.
Cross generation corporations are breeding grounds for incompetent and venal leadership that alone should be enough to force their periodic severe pruning.
Corporations actually have a status much higher than people. First of all, Corporations are served. They do not pay taxes but are actually given large sums of money. If they want something like the oil in another country, they can force the actual flesh and blood people to fight wars and get it for them. Not only get it for them, but pay to get it and die for it and ,when said oil is secured, it will belong to the Corporations that ordered it served up, to privatize all profits without so much as the mention of putting back money in the country that spend trillions securing it.
Corporations are above the law. You and I can be drug out of our homes and thrown in prison without trial. Corporations never have to worry about that. Corporations don't need health care. If they don't need it, why should anyone care is some flesh and blood person doesn't have any. Corporations are the MHI, so if they did need it, they would have an endless supply.
Anyway, I could go on, but the point being, Corporations are something more honored and provided for than mere humans. They are kings that are immortal and flesh and blood people are ants beside them forced to serve them with life and limb..
Very good points, corporations own America and need no health care, so besides profits for them, what good is it! That explains America.
@ textynn.............Excellent post. Thanks.
the whining about citizens united is not going anywhere.
instead of only invoking historic precedent and decrying the bad consequences of corporate political contributions, one should rather denounce directly that such contributions are a de facto usurpation of the power of money that was raised from investors small and large, private and institutional, for an economic purpose rather than for a political purpose.
indeed the CEOs of corporations usurp this power whenever they support their favorite candidates and legislation without an explicit and democratically obtained go-ahead from everybody who invested in their companies.
the duty to consult investors in a democratically credible way each time that a company wants to support a specific political candidate or party should become the law of the country. investors coud be polled, e.g., who should get their % contribution (by number of shares?) if the corporation decides to bribe... er... "finance" politicians and this could be easily audited.
why should retirees through their pension funds, e.g., end up supporting a politician unknown to them just because their pension system invested in a company whose CEO likes that politician?
this law would allow unions to recover their political voice since as mass organizations they can poll their members very readily before federal and political elections (unlike corporations).
union statutes could specify whether a simple majority, plurality, etc. suffices for the union to support candidates, parties, etc. with money, people, and resources.
let’s see what by-bribe-only judges and politicians and let-me-enslave-them-freely libertarians can say against a reform that stresses democracy and opposes the usurpation of small people's (freely after alan simpson) private property by well-heeled CEOs.
Corporate CEOs have indeed usurped too much power.
Corporate boards of directors are bought and paid for the same way Congress is bought and paid for. As a result, there is no accountability. Boards of directors do not serve the interests of the investors. Instead, they serve top management. The entire system is upside down.
I'll believe a Corporation is a person when I can either:
a) Drown it in a bathtub
or
b) See it executed for crimes against humanity.
It's time to recognize corporations for what they really are: independant nation-states. They have no loyalty except to themselves, no national attachments, their own culture, history and psychology. They need to be treated as foreign entities and subject to the same regulations and restrictions that would be imposed on foreign countries operative inside out borders.
Interesting concept Charlie. The only problem that I see is that corporations are actually above all nation states by controlling and corrupting ALL existing nation states with their ill gotten gains and wealth. I see them as a cancer that will eventually kill their host. I see them as alien entities from another planet that have conquered the Earth and everything on it. I think maybe we are at the end stage of extraction at this point. I wonder where they will fly off to after they are done destroying everything.
Or enemy combatants. Gitmo for them!
The legal fiction of corporate personhood is the main problem. Period.
Why else would Romney go out of his way to say, "of course pieces of paper that can be created online in a minute are people. Only a dummy wouldn't recognize that."
A simple Amendment would cause the whole house of cards to tumble. And they know it. Six words.
A Corporation is not a Person.
Corporations are composed of individuals who actually get more than one vote, hence, have two voices, once as part of a corporate entity and once as a registered voter. Are corporations required to register like any other American citizen? If so, who decides which party, which candidate, which state, and which precinct? Who gets to pull the lever?
Interesting point.
Here's how Dr. Paul could knock-off and peel the bark off both these whores of Empire, Romney AND Obama!
If I had been able to ask a question to Ron Paul at the UNH event that I attended last night, I would have said:
“Dr. Paul, I'm a single issue voter, but on the issue that effects many others like foreign wars, protecting our liberty, following the Constitution, and having a strong and sustainable economy --- that single causal issue of mine, and yours, that effects all these things is being anti-Empire, and saving America from its slide into Empire.
My concern on the single issue of being “Against Empire” is that you are the only candidate of either party who dares to speak out about the disguised corporate/financial/militarist Empire that is consuming our country.
Can you explain why none of the other candidates ever dares to even whisper about this most important issue of Empire killing our country and our Liberties?
BTW, Ron I shouted this question to Mitt Romney in Portsmouth last week, and he claimed not to know anything about an Empire danger, or even know what a disguised/Vichy Empire was all about”
[confronting Mitt with the question of Empire @ 2:50 into this video]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z00XFvXdzUQ
Best luck and love to Occupy Empire.
Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality
Over
Violent/Vichy
Empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
Allowing corporations to influence civics within a country is like allowing foreign dictatorships to influence civics within a country. In the cases of both corporations and foreign dictatorships, the entity cares only for its own interests, which are fundamentally different than the interests of the people.
Merkan elites will shriek that corporations serve the interests of the people, by focusing talent and energy in the most efficient/effective ways, thus somehow shielding the people from their very own incompetence. This is the myth. The fact is quite the opposite. The life force is very effectively directed within the human animal toward greater competence and effectiveness. The two basic forces working against this natural process are put into play by/for elites, through an agenda to hijack, exploit, and enslave the people.
First, the elites create an illusion that we always need more performance than the average person is capable of. But this idea is instantaneously disproven by anyone who observes that a great diversity in nature exists as the natural order, overriding so-called perfection with a necessary mutagenic function, crucial for adaptation to change. Ironically, while members of the human species strive toward perfection, their failure to achieve that maintains the species' overall ability to adapt. As you can see, elites are clueless about the laws of nature, hence their enterprises are doomed to never-ending turmoil, as their history illustrates clearly.
Second, the elites deliberately work to keep the people ignorant/confused to drive the people's dependence upon the elites and elite enterprises. Now that's a much simpler racket to understand, and hard to argue with. Simply look at the distractions and confusion in Merkan society. In a world where all the dots connect, Merkans can hardly see a single one of them.
So these two forces, an illusion of necessity of higher competence, and a campaign to spread incompetence among the people, create the mythic need for concentrated power, in das korporation. Crock of sh*t, ehh? Big one! Made In Merka. (and England before that)
Obviously, the people will thrive most by working in their small local enterprises, owned and controlled locally, producing in accordance with local demands. It's so very simple. Watch Goliath fall - brace for earthquake.
rtdrury, that was quite excellent. Only a couple of points: 1) this has been going on long before Merka and England came on the scene. Try 5000 years. Rome being the first one that comes to my mind, but there are many more examples before that. 2) I think we should probably brace for impact when Goliath falls and check for his trajectory. Good chance that when he hits the ground a lot of stuff is going to get squashed if we can't get out of the way fast enough.
They say there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes. Neither apply to corporations, therefore they are not people.
Nice observation. Maybe we need to change the signs that say "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one" to "I'' believe corporations are people when one is taxed to death"?
I have a question unrelated to this article. Does anyone know or think the corporations that manufacture our food especially processed food put drugs like antidepressants (without our knowledge of course) in our food?
This question only requires common sense.
1. People have a natural lifespan and even an evil bastard can only do harm for his natural life. Then his spoiled progeny can piss the money away and keep it circulating as it should. Corporations have no natural lifespan and continue piling up huge amounts of power and money.
2. If you apply psychological diagnoses as applied to people, corporations would be, by their very nature and charters, narcissistic sociopaths at their best, and dangerous psychopaths at worst. Normal people have some form of conscience, corporations have none. If you waved a magic wand and made corporations people, none of us would want to live among them.
3. If a human being kills someone intentionally or by negligence, there is a legal recourse. There is incarceration after legal proceedings. Corporations kill people regularly, usually by gross negligence, sometimes intentionally and the only legal recourse is a monetary fine.....the cost of doing business.....passed on to the consumer. The human CEO's just take their "golden umbrella" and usually move on to a high position in another corporation.
4. People have an allegiance and loyalty to something or someone. Corporations have no loyalty, no patriotism and one motivation......acquiring more and more money at any cost.
5. People have a great array of emotions ranging from love, hate, empathy, forgiveness, anger, sadness......it is what makes us Human.
Corporations have zero emotions unless you think greed qualifies as an emotion.
6. Corporations are an invention of man. People are an invention of a Great Creator or a process of natural selection (pick one), but certainly not man-made!
I don't see corporations as inherently evil, but I do believe that giving them personhood status openly invites and encourages their worst traits to the detriment of the rest of us.
Thanks for the laugh.
Check out Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. Buddy Roemer I thought looked interesting; however, he approves of the XL pipeline.
In their creation, function, and nature, corporations are machines. They are built and operated by people, and magnify the power of those people as a bulldozer magnifies the power of its operator. Neither corporations nor other machines have a will or purpose apart from those of their human owners and operators, so allowing them to participate in politics is like allowing a competitor in a footrace to use a motorcycle to magnify his ability to achieve his purpose.
Excellent! Well said.
"Corporations are people, my friend... of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People's pockets. Human beings my friend."—Mitt Romney
Whose pockets? Well you could call them human, but they stopped acting like the rest of us (99%) sometime in-between their privileged grade schools and Harvard. Making corporations people is just another legal way of entitling the wealthy and their wealth. The sooner we stop this nonsense, the sooner we can start to heal our very sick, broken society.
Time for a Real Debate: Are Corporations People?
It's a good idea Mr. Hinkley.
But a much better idea is,
Time for a Real Debate: Is Money Free Speech?