OP-ED: 'Corporations are people, my friend...'

from aljazeera.......

"Big businesses have long had the same economic rights as citizens, yet few of the moral responsibilities"


"Thank God for Mitt Romney.

In a moment of candour he likely thought would win him much needed support from the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, the presidential candidate explained his thinking to a heckler - who asked why he didn't feel corporations should share more of the economic burden of reducing the deficit:

"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."
In fact, he's right. Corporations are people, or rather "legal persons", which is not to be confused with "natural persons", or as Romney terms us, "human beings". The original Latin term is actually persona ficta, or artificial person, which I think has an even nicer ring, because it shows that, at the very least, they weren't born the natural way. If you are one of the top one per cent of income earners in the US, UK, Israel or other advanced industrial country where so much of the countries' wealth is distributed to corporate upper management, you might even consider them to have been immaculately conceived".............

.............But of course, as the bounding inequality in the United States makes clear, the wealth is not going to the people. It is going to very, very few people - who use corporations and their fictive personhood to help ensure that skewed distribution of wealth stays that way, no matter what the majority of Americans want. That's why, in the next sentence, Romney inadvertently drops the "the" and just says the money goes in "people's pockets - human beings, my friend". He knows it's not going to the people as a society, just to those with the ability to grab as much of it as they can"...........READ MORE