Saturday, January 23, 2010

Corporations are people

There's a certain beauty to the decision. "Persons have an unalienable right to free speech, corporations are persons, and money is speech, therefore...." Given the premises, the conclusion follows inexorably; and the premises are what make America what it is today. This is just the elegant capstone to the plutocratic conquest of American democracy.

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I think there needs to be a total war on corporate power, waged by those of us people who (unlike some other people) have bodies, minds, and souls, who sleep and can die of old age, who are capable of empathy and love, who bear the image of God, who can (if we so choose) live lives that aren't devoted entirely to the unmotivated pursuit of profit to the exclusion of all other considerations. We need to take down these zombies, legal fictions which have acquired a macabre semblance of life through the unholy power of judicial sorcery.

Oh no. Hold on. I think I might be a racist. I'm saying corporations aren't really deserving of moral respect. I think they don't feel pain the same way we do. If you cut them, they don't in fact bleed, and actually I'm not even sure you can cut them. If a child of mine ever married a corporation, they should expect to be disowned. Never would I recognize a half-human, half-corporate grandchild. No miscegenation across ontological categories, not in my family!

I think I might even be advocating genocide.

Someday in the future, in a more enlightened time, human beings and corporations will walk hand in imaginary hand, look back at this moment in history, and sadly shake their heads (one real, one metaphorical) at small-minded people like me.

1 comment:

voter said...

Nonprofit charitable organizations are usually corporations, too.