Corporations as People

Stephen Colbert’s biggest issues so far seem to be whether corporations are persons and if money equals speech. As “An Artist for VP” I’m taking charge of the National Science Foundation, as well as a number of other things this nation rarely trusts artists with. I suggest we do some rigorous scientific research to resolve these daunting questions. We must stop them bollixing up the minds of the nation’s nine supposed wisest people.

First we have to attach an electro-cardiograph to subject corporations’ chests, to find out if they have heartbeats. Some care must be taken that a sneaky CEO doesn’t substitute his or her heart to be tested instead of that of the corporation in question. An alert technician may quickly detect the subterfuge, because many CEOs have bionic hearts that beat with a machine-like regularity, unlike the erraticism of the true human heart. However we all have to be en guarde every moment, because corporate subterfuge of our culture is ongoing in every moment. Citizens Unite!

In any case, if certified ECG machines determine the corporation has no detectable beating muscle pumping blood and love from its chest, throughout its circulatory system, an immediate operation should be performed. We must search for a heart, a) to determine if it is actually there, though stopped, and b) if there, whether it is stopped permanently or can be shocked back into life. If the corporation is found to have no such human heart we have proof it never was a person. It should never have had the rights and privileges of personhood, though I would argue it should still try to cultivate the personal responsibilities of being honest, forthright, etc.

On the other hand if the corp has a heart that is not beating and can’t be revived, it is dead, whether person or not. The corp is a corpse. So, should a corpse have the right to influence elections? Maybe we could forgive one or two or a small handful of dead people who influence an election now and again, simply because they forgot to pull their names off the rolls before dying. However, since corporations were first granted the status of persons in the late 19^th century they have tended to assume this unique kind of personhood is collective personhood, in the persons of all their executives, employees, shareholders and customers. Corporate persons feel they deserve much more political influence than the rest of us persons. That just doesn’t seem right. All those individual execs, company drones, shareholders and customers also have the right to cast their individual votes, in effect giving them multiple lines of influence, each as many as the number of corporations he or she is connected with, plus the one man one vote thing that the rest of us have. Doesn’t this sound like perversion of the democracy we are supposed to be so superior for?

And then the SuperPacs bring us the issue of money as speech, but that’s for the Artist for VP’s next blog entry.