As our majoritarily ignominious Supreme Court re-declared, Corporations are people. The Court did not specify whether it would allow its daughter(s) to kiss or even be bedded on the first date with one of these putative people, but these are different times, Joe.
You might like to know where this unusual dickless peoplehood came from. After the Civil War, after the Union Army had left the South to its own devices, the Black people there found that they were being shafted once again and so an enlightened Court passed the Fourteenth Amendment which guaranteed freed slaves the right to life, liberty and property. About that time, privy to a logic only the pre-corporate mind revels in, lawyers for what were organizations functioning more like public trusts than what we now know as corporations, decided to petition the Supreme Court in the strident hope that their boss, the corporation, could also achieve peoplehood, and revel in all its afferent benefits. Strangely enough the Supreme Court in 1886 under Justice Waite declared using that same 14th Amendment that “the Court would not consider the question “whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbade a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the Constitution, applied to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does”
Which brings us to the present day and Chief Justice Roberts and the full fledged acceptance of Corporations as people, though not your average Harry Dick (see above) and Jane. After more than 120 years of being just folks it turns out that many corporations have adopted nicely to being like us. Such present–day corporations as Apple have been displaying a major symptom of peoplehood: revulsion for paying taxes. Apple managed to cough up 2.4 billion less tax dollars than it should have thanks to its clever high priced staff of lawyers’ (ring a bell?) reading of tax regulations. Just like any other human with an unlimited lawyer budget would. Isn’t that proof enough? Corporations really are people. And they act just like Mitt Romney.
