If corporations are people, they’re little people, and they need to be given a time out
by: Dr. Wes Browning
http://www.realchangenews.org/index.php/site/archives/5997/
A question I’ve been asking myself lately is this: Why do we assume that corporate personhood entitles corporations to adult privileges? Babies are persons, too. I don’t give the baby equal say in the family planning. I might let the toddler suggest a fast-food destination, but I don’t weight his/her vote as high as the wife’s, I don’t care how much money the toddler has.
I have a lot of questions like that. I think that any single newborn baby is worth more than one Bank of America. Instead of talking about “too big to fail,” why aren’t we talking about “too important to fail?”
If a corporation is a person, and it proves to be a danger to itself or others, why can’t we have it committed?
Why is it gays still can’t get married most places, but corporations merge all the time? If two corporations are allowed to merge, which one is the husband corporation and which one is the wife? I mean, how would you know? And if corporations can be sexed, shouldn’t same-sex mergers be prohibited?
If corporations are persons, why don’t they have to take drug tests? If only Enron had to pee in a cup every six months or so. Enron was high.
Even a snotty baby in desperate need of a diaper change is less messy than Exxon. The most terrible, demanding two-year-olds are less insistent on getting their own way than are Monsanto, Murdoch’s News Corp., Microsoft, AT&T, Walmart, and even Nestlé, though they are the very best.
You can take almost any major corporation at random and scratch it, and uncover abusive practices. Nestlé for instance, makes baby formula. Hooray. Sometimes you need baby formula. But they market it to developing nations like pushers marketing heroin or crack. You see, baby formula is, in essence, addicting, since the use interrupts lactation. Nestlé starts a target market up with free samples and waits for the need to rise before charging a price.
Worse, Nestlé doesn’t take the trouble to educate recipients of the formula, before or after giving it out free, to the sanitary precautions required in its use, and doesn’t supply materials to ensure proper sanitation. It’s like the heroin pusher providing precisely one free needle with the free start-up supply, and no sterilization equipment or instructions in the need for sterilization. As a result babies introduced to Nestlé baby formulas in areas in the developing world with contaminated water supplies often become sick and die.
Your neighborhood pusher gets prison time when caught. Nestlé was caught in the 1970s and just endures a typically ineffectual 34-year-old corporate boycott. “Boycott Nestlé!” can be heard at the occasional rally along with a long list of other slogans, but every Halloween, bags and bags of mini Nestlé Crunch bars still get passed out. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. You will be promoting the tooth decay of your neighbor’s children, thereby improving the relative market position of your own children, with respect to future jobs. Isn’t competition what we want?
A corporation is an entity created by a bunch of people getting together in support of a common cause to make a profit under a charter. When you stop and think about it that way, it’s basically a prototype of the Internet crowd method for solving problems. When one person can’t do something all by himself, form a crowd.
To allow that corporations have personhood, there has to be a lot going into that charter. With no charter at all, you have a mob, and no court says a mob has the rights and privileges of a person. So the personhood of a corporation is contingent upon the degree that the charter warrants it.
If the charters of corporations don’t require the same responsibility that we demand of adult individuals, or they do but those requirements go unmet and unenforced, then corporations must be stripped of adult rights.
We’ll take away their toys, so they can’t play with us anymore.
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