Corporate Persons

The corporation is a person and can contribute unlimited sums of money to political campaigns and candidates. But the corporation can’t vote. I think it’s an outrage in this day and age to prevent persons from voting … unless they aren’t citizens. But if they aren’t citizens, are they immigrants? If they’re immigrants they must be legal immigrants otherwise they’d be sent packing by the INS, right? It’s pretty easy to find corporations. Hell, they advertise where they are, unlike Mexican and other immigrants.

I’m awfully confused about what’s going on with corporations who are persons. That’s right, I said “who.” I could have written “that” but I couldn’t write “corporations that” because corporations are persons. Persons have the right to certain pronouns. See, that’s why I’m confused. I can’t shake a corporation's hand, a corporation doesn’t breathe, and a corporation can’t die of a heart attack. I’d like to be this type of person.

A corporation has limited liability. I don’t. Yet, we’re both persons. I think that sucks. I have total accountability for my actions but corporations don’t. Sure, they might be persons, but apparently they're children under the eyes of the law. Who else would have limited accountability for their actions but children? But if corporations are children then why are they allowed to contribute to political campaigns? Well, turns out it’s legal for children to contribute to political campaigns. Carlyn Williams, at two years old, wrote a $2300.00 check to Barack Obama in 2007. I don’t know what’s more amazing: that she had $2300 to spare, that she was cognizant enough to follow political campaigns, or that she knew how to write, fill out a check, buy a stamp, and mail it to Obama’s political campaign headquarters. Impressive.

Still, Carlyn has nothing on the corporate child persons. They run global businesses! They know math and science and organizational theory and international law and distribution processes and have manufacturing acumen, marketing prowess, and public relations know-how. They hobnob with the most powerful men and women in the world and, in fact, those powerful men and women suck up to them as toadies! And they’re children! Holy crap!

Apparently the wording of the Fourteenth Amendment leaves room for the interpretation of corporations as persons. The Courts of the United States, all the way up to the Supreme Court, have upheld corporate personhood since the late 1800s. Judges have granted corporations some constitutional rights based on the idea that they are groups of people. But … what other groups of people have constitutional rights that were granted to individuals? Corporations have been granted the rights of free speech (for political campaign contributions) which is a First Amendment right in the Bill of Rights that seemed pretty clearly to apply to individuals. Even the right to assemble is a right of individuals to gather together as a group; the group assembled doesn’t have any special rights because you can’t handcuff a group. If one of the group broke the law and the whole of the assembled group was a person under the Courts eyes then why wouldn’t other group members be considered lawbreakers as well? Arrest the lot of them as a “group” individual!

If my writing seems absurd it’s only because the laws and Court opinions of the United States are absurd. Even the U.S. Constitution is absurd. If any legal, judicial, or constitutional documents were presented in an undergraduate philosophy course they’d receive failing grades. That’s how jumbled, inconsistent, contradictory, and pitifully confused they are. Yet, those documents make up the rules that govern the lives of U.S. citizens as well as corporate persons.

If corporations are really to have the constitutional rights extended to U.S. citizens then they should have the right not just to contribute to campaigns, but also to vote and run for office. The House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and the President could all be corporations someday as they are emancipated from their status as second-class citizens and afforded the rights of all U.S. citizens. They’re persons, damnit, and they should be treated as such. I imagine a day in which General Motors filibusters on the floor of the Senate, when Microsoft becomes the House Whip, and when WalMart delivers the inaugural address to the United States as the newly elected President. I suppose a spokesman will have too deliver the address as WalMart-as-a-person doesn’t take corporeal form.

Or maybe corporations do take corporeal form! Maybe they are shadows of energy that skulk in mailboxes in Delaware, a place where many corporations legally call home. Maybe once they are afforded full citizenship these corporate people will show themselves, their wispy dark energies moving through time and space like the rest of us even if they aren’t actually human in any biological sense. The law cares little about biology or any of the sciences; the law is Word made flesh and through its utterance it has given life to what previously did not exist. In this case, corporations. The law as Word thy God, Hallowed be thy Name, has the power to create life in the form of persons. But the law did not rest on the seventh day; the law continues to create and create anew every day.

The shadowy, dark energy of WalMart may deliver a televised message to U.S. citizens about some matter of grave importance someday in the not so distant future, hovering above the chair behind the desk, shrouding its ethereal presence in an American flag, and saying to America: “If you’d like to hear this message in English, press one; Si desea escuchar este mensaje en espanol, pulse dos” and so on. The speech might take a while as corporations usually ask many qualifying questions before allowing individuals to hear the message they’d been tuning in to hear. I would imagine that President WalMart would have to respond to low approval ratings generated by this approach in order to remain popular enough to be re-elected.

When President WalMart makes … his? Her? What gender is WalMart? That could become a dicey point during a campaign and imagine the outcry there would be when Americans discovered they’d elected the first transgendered person to President. Oh, the scandal! But, of course, it might also be a great boon to the country as varying sexual and gender identities become more socially and politically acceptable.

Still, the issue of sex itself might come up as corporate persons don’t reproduce in quite the same way as human persons. Corporate persons reproduce through words, essentially legal documents, and children are known as “subsidiaries.” It’s also interesting to note that corporate persons reproduce asexually and yet not through sexual division. Their reproductive capacities are strictly linguistic.

A significant issue which may eventually arise is the enslavement of corporate persons by other corporate persons. Corporate persons can be bought and sold as so much chattel, purchased or sold by corporate persons and by human persons. Interestingly, though, the corporation that was bought can still buy other corporate persons and, in fact, can buy the very corporate person who bought … it? You’d think there’d be corporate person pronouns created by law. *sigh*

Just as those who formed the U.S., not just the framers of the Constitution but other important figures, fought for rights and liberties, so, too, might their corporate counterparts in contemporary America. The corporate version of Patrick Henry proclaiming via press release: Give me liberty or give me death! But what would death look like for a corporate person? The legal dismantling of a corporate person’s existence? I suppose. There have been many corporations who are no more. They are usually killed by legal decree; in fact, no known corporation has ever died of natural causes. It’s always been the Word that has brought them to life and brings them to death (do you think shareholders and other corporate "friends" attend funerals for deceased corporations?). Corporations live within the universe of the Word. The physics differ radically from the physical universe human persons occupy. It’s strange that these two universes co-exist. They certainly don’t do so in harmony.

It’s sort of like the movie the Matrix except in our world it is not machines that take over by gaining sentience but laws given life through the Word written by human persons. The Word has long been God, but human persons don’t seem to fully realize this truth. They misunderstand or ignore at their own peril. Truth be told, humans are slaves to the words that have been written, slaves to the words they think even when alone.

If Paul Revere were to make his ride today he might race across Interstates in a beat-up Chevy proclaiming, “The corporations are coming, the corporations are coming.” But, of course, the corporations are already here and have been well before any human alive today was even born. Instead, Paul would slump across the country holding cardboard signs at Interstate exit ramps, signs with the message, “The corporations are here, the corporations are here!” But even then he’d miss the point. The sign would more accurately read, “The Word of Law came long ago and humanity remains enslaved.”