Romney in Iowa: “And pigs can fly, too, my friend.”
Image: abcnews.com / AP
It was an evil day at the conservative think tank when an unnamed researcher looked up from his Adam Smith concordance, slammed his palm to his temple and shouted, “I’ve got it. Corporations are people too!”
We all know that corporations are treated as entities, so-called “legal persons” under the law, so they can be held to account—so they can sue and be sued, enter into contracts, and so on. Their governance structures collectivize accountability while simultaneously reducing the risks that the individuals who run them would not be personally wiped out in the event the corporation fails, er, dies.
The utility of this legal fiction—that corporations are legal persons, or corporate personhood—is self evident from but one perspective, the viewpoint of a fictive legal universe, the universe of law. The problem with our think tank researcher is that he (in these cases it’s almost always some poor, deluded guy) conflated legal personhood with being an actual human being.
When the gang at the think tank stopped to ask themselves how to get the word out, they seemed to have settled on, “Let’s tell Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Mitt Romney; they’ll know what to do with it.” Thus, we have Citizens United and Mitt’s famous line, “Yes, Virginia, Corporations are people too.”
That line. So…humanistic. Optimistic. Sunny, even. Or perhaps, humanistic as in almost human. As in, as if.
Let’s run down a little checklist here. Corporations: do they need air? Water? Food? Do they sleep, pee, love, speak, hug, think? Do they die? Well, on that latter point, yes they do. They, like vampires, die when they lack one essential ingredient. No, not blood, silly. Money! They die when they run out of money. And that, in their natural ecology, is the only way they die. Yes, you could say they die when they are acquired, but really they live on but in another form. So deep in the DNA of American Airlines, there exists the legacy DNA of TWA.
So right off the bat you can see they are…different. (I know, when we run out of money it feels like we are going to die, but we aren’t actually. Besides we can always go to a church door, or better, Ron Paul’s door, and personally ask for help.)
Corporations don’t need air, or water. So they can trash the air and water like Massey Energy did and they can still survive. Granted, Massey didn’t. They screwed the pooch by acting like criminals and so they were acquired. Corporations going to jail? Don’t be silly. What do think they are? People? Granted, Don Blankenship as CEO and Chair of Massey could have gone to jail if the rule of law had been applied in his case, but it wasn’t because his company was so rich that it more or less owned the government. Amazing, I know. But here’s the thing. Only the individual people, the actual people who run a company can go to jail when they act like criminals. Because, although this may surprise John G. Roberts and Mitt Romney, you can’t actually throw a corporation in jail. Try as you may, it just won’t fit.
One wag whose name I forgot recently did a cartoon in which a Frankenstein figure with the word corporation written on its clothing got up off the gurney and uttered just one phrase, “I want money.” And that’s true, because, if we follow the logic of our research at the Adam Smith Lab, corporations only exist for one reason: to make money for their shareholders. They don’t raise children. They don’t help out Mom. They don’t—I know this is hard to believe—care about democracy. How do I know? Because they sometimes thrive in non- or anti-democratic societies. No, I’m not kidding. Their board members and officers may be passionate about democracy and, I believe they are at least somewhat passionate because they are so eager to participate in democracy by giving money to candidates who talk like them. No, not about clean water, or food to eat, and not about how Mom is doing. The candidates they prefer have one characteristic line that they repeat over and over: “I want money.”
The trouble with Mitt, as I see it, is that he is a smooth talker. So when he says, “I want money,” it comes out sounding like, “Corporations are people too.” This is known by people in the trade as code. Mitt is telegraphing to the, no, not the corporations because they don’t have ears, but to the people running them, who do, a very particular message: if you give me a ton of money I will do your bidding when I am elected. Mitt’s coded message is very effective because he and the corporations to which he supplicates himself want exactly the same thing: Money. And power. Because power and money…oh never mind. Go ask Dick Cheney.
Why Mitt Romney wants to be president, I have no idea. But there is a pretty decent chance he will become president and that’s too bad because he can’t tell the difference between you and me and AT&T. He apparently thinks we all need the same things. And while that is true to a limited extent (we all need money) there are many, many things we need that corporations could not care less about. And frankly, I am amazed the Mitt doesn’t get this.
So Mitt is better at debating than his is at thinking, apparently. For example, if corporations are people too, why aren’t charity corporations people too? They possess few of the Citizen’s United rights that for-profit corporations possess under Citizen’s United. Yes, there are gobbledygook nonprofit corporations that give us such mutations the NRA: they obviously are people, right? They can speak. They don’t say, “I want money.” They say, “I want guns.” And that makes them different from an actual person because, and here we begin to get redundant I fear, people can be shot and killed while needing food and money and caring for their moms while the NRA itself cannot. But that’s a story for another day.
Today, we’ll stick to one point only. Mitt, Adam, Bob, corporations are not people. Not. Not. Not.
* * *
Postscript: I am aware that Mitt’s actual quote to the “heckler” at the Iowa State Fair last month was, “Corporations are people, my friend.” But personally, I prefer the Santa association inferred by my version.
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Ken Honeywell
AndreaF.
Brian Carter
esmense
Dr. Matthew Lynch
Stephen Weil
Salon.com
Comments
There has always been a corporation - that’s everyone not us whether a board of directors or a Kremlin, an elite minority who have usurped our power over ourselves for their own ends.
We have spent centuries exchanging one corporation for others. Sometimes at the ballot box; sometimes at the point of a gun.
As you can see by our present-day world, this has worked out really well........
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.
He gets it.
He is hollow and not concerned.
No comment, you've pretty much said it all.
Or is he perhaps a concoction fresh from Central Casting? That is, is he Hollywood's idea of Wall Street's idea of the perfect candidate? Well, if we're doomed to have another actor as President, I find a pretend business man to be infinitely preferable to a pretend cowboy. We've already seen that movie -- and the remake -- and I don't believe the nation can survive DC Cowboy III.
It's easy at first glance to make fun of the notion of corporations as people, and there is truth in that, if that's true of all collective institutions, academic too, which are corporations as to legal personhood. Nothing is more of a vampire potetentially than a government in terms of its military, as to the Collective taking on a life of its own dangerous to its members, and, the more the government runs things, there is a potential of that happening, potentially at least, if the libertarians go too far with that too, and miss the consequences of a corporate despotism too. That suggests a balance between economic, non-profit social, and governmental institutions as what your really want, which means taking the key point you make, GOVERNANCE, seriously. The corporate people need to rethink somethings.
There was a reason that was done as to making it much, much easier to form corporations that in origin was somewhat defensibe as having good consequences even if in terms of inequality, although a lot of people at the time saw the likely result as different in practice. Violence and Social Orders has the history of it, as does on the opposite side, The Great Betryal, if not so much of course the latter. The point is that it used to be that you had to get a special act of Parliament, and then later one of the Several States, to pass an act of incorporation, which tended to lead to a lot of corruption of legislators, or so the story can be spun, to be fair, legislators being bribed to pass various special acts, like a toll road, but also colleges were that way too. As to being vampires, again, nothing is more vampirelike potentially than a military, and that's true everywhere. In any event, in the US, the states had moved, especially in the North from MA to do that on general incorporation laws by about 1850, (although its also part of Marshall's jurisprudence, and he wan't a libertarian type at all), and which did encourage a lot of industrial development, since the corporate form allows for a lot of the things you talk about as to being risk sharing, the Usual Suspect Rationalizations. As a Federal Question, the Great Betrayal has an interesting discussion of the case in 1882 that led to the application of the 14th Amendment of the corporation as a legal person, and it's not pretty; sleight of hand, judge should have recused, or been maybe prosecuted. It's also an imperfect world, and remember the reason that there were general incorporation laws, too much corruption on specific acts, ro at least so goes the story, and, its probably true. Then again, those guys can be... pretty insenstive about the consequences of Enclosure too, if it was efficient, if a lot more so for some people than others. On the other hand, the Violence and Social Orders people go too far, you would get a laugh out of it Steve, once you get the lingo, it's like "Rollerball is in the house: Now stand for the Chevron Anthem," as to the corporation as vampire, if not to them with tenured economics positions, since they don't talk about something in your post: governance. The economists did a lot of work on this, starting with Galbreath, him as to the separation of management and ownership, which leaves out workers though, probably because that sounded too Soviet. The original meaning of Soviet was Workers Council, and the Germans co-determination could be used in that context, and one can do that in a totally de-centralized allocation per the Hayek critique, as part of Social Security reform, say 40 per cent worker ownership, in the long run, individual though, maybe with unions as the proxy casting vote, if since per the Principal-Agent literature what's good for the goose is good for the gander. In other words, there's nothing wrong with corporations representing shareholder interests, but anyone paid to do anything called labor should be a shareholder, if you're using the public good provided by the legal system in the corporate form, if not the majority, partly because to make decisions, you need a little fascism-authoritarianism, and since if you went farther than that, the top three per cent will kill everyone, since that scares them too much per Socialism, even if, its owned individually and traded, if it might per Greenspan, reduce informational content in stocks compared today, but, it, would have an offsetting effect on the alignment of worker, as opposed to managerial, interests in the collective. If that was the case, you wouldn't maybe object to "corporate free speech," since it wouldn't be "free speech" for such a narrow class of people, that class of people being the small number of people who hold the bulk of corporate property, and, if you just do that by having Russel 5000 Index buying into private accounts, it might get you what you want, as to more economic democracy, without the risks of tyrannical centralization, if, there's always a boss somewhere.
The gargantuan amount of money described as corporate free speech distorts all notions of a citizens' discourse under current election law.
But Romney and his ilk, if you look closely, seem to be claiming broader constitutional rights for corporations as people on the grounds that organizations of people have all of the same rights that individuals possess. Yet, as you say, corporations exist for one purpose only--to maximize returns for shareholders. Where that leads is hard to say, but corporate oligarchy would seem to be likely outcome.
Thanks for mentioning the impact on Mom, too. There is just so much she can take before things start to fall apart inside of her, and at home. (Same goes for Dad and people without children, for that matter.) I hope more corporations can learn to take a longer and more holistic view someday, not see the people and earth as expendable, as theirs to trash, but we need the law to shape that. We all need to have the will to make that happen.
should we not vote for mitt because of this?
what if every candidate agrees with 'citizens united' decision, should we not vote at all? or should we vote for the one that promises a tax break to our church, or gun club?
That's why I got out of business years ago. Bad company all around.
Rated.
All so well said. Thank you.
rated with love
That said, I don't think Romney really thinks that corporations, specifically, are people, but we should never forget that they are composed of people. They are an abstract entity. So I often find myself wondering, what's the good in taxing an abstract entity? If you and Joe Blow come together, have what you think is a great idea, and want to form a company to carry that idea out, why should I tax not only you and Joe Blow, but the idea you came up with?
To me it seems anti-American, as America itself is an abstract entity and thrives only if we continue to realize that.
At times, the typo spirit intervenes with great intelligence.
As the corporation is strictly a legal construct, it is, I suppose, inevitable that a commentary on the subject by a layman will be flawed, but this post really overproves that proposition.
Clay, of course I am not saying corporations are inherently evil. Many practice a degree of enlightened self interest. Some use a thin veneer of social responsibility to mask much larger destructive effects. And they are, as Gordon agrees with me, "strictly a legal construct," therefore they are not simply "people" in the collective as PonteVedraMan holds. This is essentially where Mitt gets it all wrong.
And if, as PVM suggests, any collection of people can be considered a person, that really opens up a door, doesn't it? From now on, I guess unions are people too, and shall have all of the rights accorded to people. Yay!
Jeanette, Exactly. Let's see. A gang is a person possessing the right not to self-incriminate. Perfect. Works for corporations, too!
I think (also off topic) that certain unsavory business practices are seen as more and more acceptable, more the norm today, for example the huge increase in discrepency between employee and CEO salaries seen in recent years, with CEOs staying at companies for only a few years, which basically encourages unfettered greed and self interest. I think there should be a cap on those salaries, i.e. the highest paid person in a corporation can only make x times the amount of the lowest paid. Maybe they would attract more reasonable people, who were willing to stay with a company over the long term and care about the other people working there, too, and have a more long-term and sustainable vision.
If your employees are barely making ends meet, have inadequate or no health care, and you are making multimillions, there is something very, very wrong.
Actually, it's a basic human right (according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) that people be able to make a living wage that is adequate for their health and well being, have equal pay for equal work, and ensures "an existence worthy of human dignity." Our recent laws seem to be moving away from the protection of basic human rights for everyone, that is, each actual living, breathing person.
For other efforts, check out the work of the CELDF - Center for Environmental Legal Defense Fund - which is leading a charge in the States to highlight the path communities can take to protect themselves from corporate overrule via state charter system.
When a corporation"protects shareholder interests" (a fiction I discuss in "Malled") it forgets that the people who have paid INTO those pensions might, in fact, be quite individually horrified by the collective behavior of the money guys who make sure to maximize their profits -- by totally screwing **other** people who don't belong to these pension funds.
This is why American capitalism is in such a mess. It is a zero-sum game. I am going to win BIG -- but you, buddy, are going to lose. And, somehow, it's all your own fault.
When I worked as a retail sales clerk for The North Face, in January 2009, we were told -- workers making $9-11/hr, no bennies, no commission -- the company (whose parent, VF Corporation is the world's largest apparel maker) "could not afford" to keep us working the hours we were then committed to. I was working....seven hours a week. They cut it to five (saving a fat $22 on my labor costs by trimming two hours of my time from their books.) That month, The Wall Street Journal reported that VF sat on $382 million in cash.
"Can't afford" our labor is a fiction, a lie, a deceit, an obscenity -- when millions of Americans cannot even **find** a job.
One in 25 business leaders could be a psychopath, according to research done for BBC horizon:
http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/news/1088849/
That is, you're about 4 times more likely to run into a psychopath in the upper management of the business community than in the general public.
If you look at the checklist of symptoms and make observations, Romney seems to fit many of them. His business history DOES put him in the statistical risk group though.
(Note: I'm NOT a doctor and certainly unqualified to make such a diagnosis.. it's JUST a suspicion I have.)