Corporations are people?

Two recent events got me thinking about the corporations-are-people ruling that have made it clear, just how sad that decision was. It is an excellent of example of simply not thinking a thought through to the end. The first event was a sign held up at a recent Occupy Wall Street protest in New York, which read, "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one." The second was a statement Marianne Williamson made in her talk to the Occupy Wall Streeters in Berkeley, that "Corporations can't be people, they don't have souls." While each of these statements certainly have their merits, it would be too easy for my atheist friends to discount Ms Williamson's statement, so I thought it would be worthwhile to revisit the issue in a more mundane way. After all, the only word that springs to my mind when I hear the corporations-are-people phrase is "absurd." Here's why.

We can argue about whether people, that is, human beings have souls. That's fine. However, regardless of how one thinks about that, I would suggest we all agree that you can't be just part of a person, or part-person. That is the essence of what we call "discrimination". You can lose a limb or just have your appendix taken out, and you are still a person. You can have a birth defect or suffer a debilitating injury, and you are still a person. The whole part-of-a-person argument was actually put to rest when the 14th Amendment finally overcame that ridiculous idea that blacks were only 3/5 people. (In other words, this isn't the first time we've had to face absurdity head on.)

The consequence of this thought is that corporations can't, then, just have some rights and not others. If you are a person, you enjoy all the rights that other persons have, not just the freedom of speech in certain instances, like elections. This is what our first protester was getting at. Now, I'm no advocate of the death penalty, but I have nothing in principle against jail, so why can't corporations be sent to jail? It's simple enough: corporations can't act on their own, but their boards of directors, first and foremost, and their owners (read: shareholders) can, and do. If the corporation does something illegal, then, as was the case leading up to the recent financial crisis, then we know who should stand trial and if convicted go to jail. These two groups represent the head and heart of the corporation. You shouldn't have to go looking for some individual within the organization who should be punished for wrongdoing, the corporation did the wrong-doing, and that is who needs to answer for their actions. That's what it would mean for corporations to be people.

These days we like to pick and choose, to pick what's best for us and just ignore the rest. If "the markets" are comprised of "investors", as the name implies, they have a vested interest in the actions of the corporation. As many like to point out, they are the corporation. And their interest cannot be only to derive benefits and not have to face the consequences of unpleasant or even illegal decisions. Yes, I know, when you think about the sheer numbers of people that would have to be incarcerated the mind begins to boggle, so to save ourselves from this ridiculous fate, we need to let the people in the judicial old-folks home in DC know that they haven't thought their thought through to the end.