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Waste Management for the Senate!

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Something there is that makes equating human beings--persons--with corporations absurd.

A corporation is legal definition that is intended to protect the people who work for a corporation generally not liable for corporate actions.  Without that buffer, debts incurred by the legal entity would be the responsibility of the people who work for the corporation.  A bad investment, a terrible accelerator problem, or a financial depression could ruin a lot of innocent people (together with a lot of guilty ones). 

If you invested your life savings in Chrysler Corporation, and the corporation goes bankrupt, you will lose your life savings because you turned them over to the corporation, but you will not lose anything else except your reputation as an investment genius. 

So, in some limited sense, a corporation is defined as a person, legally.  It is responsible for its own actions.  It can go broke.  You can sue it.  The corporation can contribute to the political campaign of Barack Obama, or of Joe Lieberman. 

Somehow, what was intended to be a legal definition of a corporation in order to protect employees and owners of the corporation, has come to mean that corporations can participate in the political process as if they, indeed, were voters; were human beings:  persons!  That is crazy! 

Money is necessary to conduct any political campaign larger than for a school board in a very small town, and even there lots of money used shrewdly is a whole lot better than no money.

Our courts have ruled that to abridge how people spend their money is to limit their freedom of speech,
which is nearly to equate freedom of speech with money.  It does, at least, say that a lot of money is more speech than a few bucks can buy you.  And guess who has a lot of money!  Corporations do!  Not even Warren Buffet is going to outspend Exxon.  (They probably have a lot in common, anyway.) 

Wealthy people can contribute more to political campaigns than people of modest income can.  Insurance companies can contribute more than wealthy people can. 

We have every right, legally, to set limits on how much any person can contribute to political campaigns.  "One man, one vote" suggests that citizens should come to an election with equal importance.  It does not suggest that corporations should be granted a vote, too, even if for reasons of personal liability they are somehow curiously defined as legal persons. 

Let the people who have invested in the corporations contribute!  Let the employees contribute!  Let union members contribute!  Let real people contribute and vote.  But corporations should not be regarded as people, not politically!  Else someday we will elect Waste Management to the Senate.

(Let me think about that.  We may be too late.)

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