Once upon a sensible time we could tell the difference between people and corporations. People diddled around and fell in love and married each other and had kids, sometimes. Corporations diddled around and fell in love with profits and merged with each other and spun off entities. We were reluctant to give legal identities to gay marriages, but we we happy to give legal identities to corporations.
It was a simpler, happier time.
For a lot of very sensible reasons, we gave corporations legal status: they could own things, be regulated (sometimes), be sued if they fouled up, and so on. In order to hold corporations responsible for corporate activity, and to protect people who simply invested in them, but did not control them directly, we said that a corporation was a kind of legal person: it had an identity, and could itself be held legally responsible. We did not say it was a person, but that it could be treated as if it were, in some ways.
It was a simpler, sensible time. People could make distinctions.
In more recent years, the Supreme Court has nudged the legal niceties further. Toward something baffling. It said that spending money was a form of free speech. If you had a lot of money, you had a lot of free speech. Some people have a lot of money. Some corporations have even more.
Moreover, for all practical purposes, the Supreme Court has also struck down laws regulating corporate spending in political campaigns.
You put these things together, and you have an election campaign in which the simple, egalitarian idea of "one man (sic), one vote", begins to look like, "corporate money talks loudest, and people vote what they hear about". Oil money buys an awful lot of TV time. Rupert Murdock figured out how to control the microphone.
At the Republican debate in Iowa, a couple of days ago, every candidate for the Presidency said that he or she would refuse to agree to a deal to cut spending by ten dollars if it increased taxing the rich by so much as one dollar. What!
Why? You don't suppose it is because oil company money, and insurance company money, and Defense contracting money speaks very loud, do you? Who funds their re-election campaigns? Who shapes the debate? Who buys the TV time? Pays for the plane rides? It isn't the poor schnook with one vote. It is the corporation with the loud money.
How long will it be before someone as profound as Mitt Romney, who recently insisted that "corporations are people" will want to give them voting rights, too?
It was a simpler, happier time.
For a lot of very sensible reasons, we gave corporations legal status: they could own things, be regulated (sometimes), be sued if they fouled up, and so on. In order to hold corporations responsible for corporate activity, and to protect people who simply invested in them, but did not control them directly, we said that a corporation was a kind of legal person: it had an identity, and could itself be held legally responsible. We did not say it was a person, but that it could be treated as if it were, in some ways.
It was a simpler, sensible time. People could make distinctions.
In more recent years, the Supreme Court has nudged the legal niceties further. Toward something baffling. It said that spending money was a form of free speech. If you had a lot of money, you had a lot of free speech. Some people have a lot of money. Some corporations have even more.
Moreover, for all practical purposes, the Supreme Court has also struck down laws regulating corporate spending in political campaigns.
You put these things together, and you have an election campaign in which the simple, egalitarian idea of "one man (sic), one vote", begins to look like, "corporate money talks loudest, and people vote what they hear about". Oil money buys an awful lot of TV time. Rupert Murdock figured out how to control the microphone.
At the Republican debate in Iowa, a couple of days ago, every candidate for the Presidency said that he or she would refuse to agree to a deal to cut spending by ten dollars if it increased taxing the rich by so much as one dollar. What!
Why? You don't suppose it is because oil company money, and insurance company money, and Defense contracting money speaks very loud, do you? Who funds their re-election campaigns? Who shapes the debate? Who buys the TV time? Pays for the plane rides? It isn't the poor schnook with one vote. It is the corporation with the loud money.
How long will it be before someone as profound as Mitt Romney, who recently insisted that "corporations are people" will want to give them voting rights, too?
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