Just recently, Americans celebrated the two-year anniversary of a Supreme Court decision that changed the way we look at money in politics and liberated a horrifically oppressed group, finally giving them the rights that they deserve. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was decided in a 5-4 vote along party lines (you know, like every SCOTUS decision nowadays), declaring that for the purposes of free speech corporations are, in fact, equal to human beings and should therefore have the First Amendment right to practice their free speech by dumping as much money as they like into elections in an unfettered orgy of capitalist politics. The people cheered – at last those poor, underserved corporations were getting the freedoms that they so richly deserved. Mitt Romney, who knows a little bit about huge sums of money and the makeup of corporations, famously quipped “Corporations are people too, my friend”. It was a heady time.
There were, of course, a few unruly liberal whackjobs who were strongly offended by the concept that a corporation is equal to a human being. I, friends, am one of those wackjobs. So in the spirit of figuring out just where the difference lies between living, breathing homo sapiens sapiens and enormous faceless entities whose sole purpose is making money, I offer the following treatise on precisely why corporations are not humans, and if they were, we would have to radically rethink how corporations are treated by the law.
Why Corporations Are Not People
I’m not sure I even really need to write about this. I mean, it seems pretty fucking straightforward to me. Allow me to demonstrate with an abbreviated version of our popular (which is to say, my dad likes them) series Face Off:
 People |
 Corporations |
|
| Component parts | Mostly carbon atoms, which form organs and other biological necessities. Lots of water. Possibly a “soul”, if that’s the sort of thing you go in for. | A bunch of people, a building full of cubicles and staplers, piles of cash. |
| What does it make? | Poo-poo and pee-pee. Sometimes other people. | Money. It makes money. Sometimes it does this by producing things like shoes or iPads, but mostly it just makes money. |
| If you cut it, does it not bleed? | Sure does. | Cut what? A corporation doesn’t even have a body and therefore cannot be injured. In this sense, it’s more like a Grue than a human. |
| Can you kill it by running over it with a lawnmower? | Gleefully! | Every day lawnmowers are run over the headquarters of the world’s corporations, doing no harm whatsoever to the corporation and, in fact, improving it aesthetically. |
Logic: corporations are not people. Some will argue that corporations are people in that they are made up of people. This is surely an interesting opinion, but does that mean that a high school class is also a person? Is this a person:
No. A group of people isn’t a person, it’s a fucking group of people. A person is made up of cells. No matter what pro-life dickwits want to tell you, a cell is not a person and a person is not a cell.
If Corporations Are People, They Are Terrible People
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that corporations are in fact people. Should they not then be subject to the laws that people are subject to? Because they most certainly are not. Here are just a few things that corporations get away with that people can’t:
Slavery: In the corporate world there is a concept known as the “subsidiary”. A subsidiary is a company owned by another company, which exists mostly to support and enrich its parent corporation. Subsidiaries are regularly bought and sold between corporations, auctioned off and shifted around at the whim of those with the money to do so. Sound familiar?
Cannibalism: Sometimes a corporation will absorb its subsidiaries, folding them into the owning corporation until there is no trace of the original company. The unusable parts of the devoured company, like redundant employees or assets, are flushed out and disposed of.
Horrific Serial Murder: Mitt Romney has recently come under fire for the work he did for Bain Capital, a corporation that frequently purchased smaller companies, violently forced them out of business, then cut up their assets and sold them off for great profit. This is some Sweeny Todd-style shit, people.
