Respond to the following
why corporations are not people
Milton Freedmen once answered the question about corporations being moral by asking whether a building can be moral.
A corporation is an official document giving its human owners certain rights and privileges. It cannot commit a crime, hire a lawyer, get convicted of crimes or go to jail. It is absurd in the extreme to give such an entity the rights of living, breathing humans. Do corporation have the right to vote, to enter the armed services and defend our country? Quite the contrary. The Supreme Court has banned corporations from serving our country in any unprofitable way by decreeing that corporations must act for the benefit of their stockholders thereby banning any sacrifice for the greater good even the greater good of the companies they control. For example, it is perfectly in accord with the law for a financial trust to buy a company, borrow against the company’s assets and pay the shareholder a one time special dividend before dumping the company if not driving it out of business.
Citizens United needs to be overturned if only to keep up a pretense of democracy. That such a decision was issued by the highest judicial body in the U.S. is clear evidence of the total disregard for the democratic process which those members who voted for it hold.
Money has been called the root of all evil. Perhaps that is a gross overstatement, but money has been at the heart of the subversion of democracy in America. The court has also destroyed the free press. It is not a crime for a news agency to knowingly lie to the public. How can that be?
It’s good for their stockholders.
