ROMNEY: Corporations are people, my friend.
If the corporation is a person than he/she is a sociopathic, unpatriotic, greedy, narcissistic, environment killing, soul crushing and just a plain, evil person. It should be locked up and put away for its own and the public’s safety.
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. "
-Abraham Lincoln
Ever since the SC bestowed personhood, and the rights that that confers, on corporations, we are stuck, whether we like it or not, with corporations having the loudest voice in the house and being the ones who demand all the attention from those who count, the government and the media. What they want seems to rate more than anyone else for time and attention. They have lots of cash to get all the attention they want.
Corporate cash hoard in the trillions:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/...
per·son
NOUN:
1. A living human.
Legal personality (also artificial personality, juridical personality, and juristic personality) is the characteristic of a non-human entity regarded by law to have the status of a person.
A legal person (Latin: persona ficta), (also artificial person, juridical person, juristic person, and body corporate, also commonly called a vehicle) has a legal name and has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and liabilities under law, just as natural persons (humans) do. The concept of a legal person is a fundamental legal fiction. It is pertinent to the philosophy of law, as is essential to laws affecting a corporation (corporations law) (the law of business associations).
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
But what kind of person is the corporation?
While the voters slept, the corporations stalked the halls of congress, bribing their way to unprecedented power and corrupting our whole political system in the process: From a president , who is expected to raise a billion dollars this campaign season, to aSC that makes every ruling in their favor, to the halls of congress that comes with swinging doors blurring the distinction between those who go from K street to WS to Congress, we should not be celebrating how much we have raised for every campaign. We should be asking, what are the strings attached to this money? What do corporations get in return? Why does it take so much to run? Are we keeping good people from running with this cost of being elected?
The Corporate Supreme Court.
http://www.commondreams.org/...
Five Supreme Court Justices--Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito and Kennedy are entrenching, in a whirlwind of judicial dictates, judicial legislating and sheer ideological judgments, a mega-corporate supremacy over the rights and remedies of individuals. The artificial entity called "the corporation" has no mention in our Constitution whose preamble starts with "We the People," not "We the Corporation."
Taken together the decisions are brazenly over-riding sensible precedents, tearing apart the state common law of torts and blocking class actions, shoving aside jury verdicts, limiting people's "standing to sue", pre-empting state jurisdictions--anything that serves to centralize power and hand it over to the corporate conquistadores.
http://www.commondreams.org/...
For examples of rulings for corporations in the SC see the corporate court:
http://www.afj.org/...
It is pay to play and legalized bribery on the grandest scale.
To see who is giving and who is getting:
http://www.opensecrets.org/
The corporation has no redeeming qualities. They are unpatriotic: They lobby to get lower taxes while their taxes are some of the lowest in the world, and some pay zero taxes while getting as much out of our national treasury for themselves as they can. They are hungry pigs feeding off your tax dollars while they try to take away your health care and social safety nets.
They are not loyal: They have cut and slashed jobs and employment in this country, off-shoring manufacturing and a lot of labor, and making others contract or temporary employees, inscreasing job insecurity here at home.
They are greedy. As profits rise and taxes go down, and jobs recede, and the rift valley of division of wealth in this country between the upper and the lower has grown in leaps and bounds, as they get richer, the people get poorer.
“the U.S. is already one of the least taxed countries for corporations in the developed world.”
http://thinkprogress.org/...
corporations that paid no federal taxes:
http://money.cnn.com/...
12 corporations that paid negative taxes on 171 billion in profits.
http://www.ctj.org/...
They are selfish. Signing Norquist’s tax pledge is just an in your face slap of that which has always been known: Money buys influence, contracts, subsidies and special favors for the privileged few. It buys our government. It is why so much time is spent in Congress on pork bills, which they are all against, unless it is their state, and then they brag about getting them. And the loudest public discussion is on not raising taxes and cutting social safety nets, as the last debt ceiling debate showed. This is their main issue. The number one concern of people is jobs. Corporations are not job creators they are job destroyers, and the markets climb on any job slashing or mergers, which also lead to job losses. The people have gotten left behind in the consideration of DC. We don’t have enough money to make them listen to us.
income gap widens between richer and poorer.
http://www.salon.com/...
Colbert is using his superpac with the slogan “making a better tomorrow, tomorrow”, to shine a bright light and try to expose some of their financial manipulations of our political system.
http://colbertsuperpac.com/
pork spending
http://www.cagw.org/...
Corporations go overseas to pay workers less and get away with terrible work conditions that they would never get here. They are not just national, but global menaces.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Corporations have historically had restrictions placed on them.
But now corporations have attained vaunted, VIP, preferential treatment in our country and government, and front line recognition from presidential candidates. All their malignant tendencies have grabbed the attention and thrust their personhood into our faces. We need to say “enough”. But maybe it is too late and their personhood too entrenched. Congress acts like it works directly for them:
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, led by Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California, sought to investigate allegations that the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was mismanaged by its Democratic majority, misused taxpayer funds, was compromised by conflicts of interest and colluded with Democrats in Congress as they sought to pass a financial reform bill.
Instead, the 400,000 emails and documents obtained by the investigative committee show that Republican commissioner Peter Wallison broke confidentiality rules by leaking documents to Ed Pinto, a colleague of his at the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent right-leaning Washington-based research and policy organization.
The partisan bent of the report, its findings and the investigation that led to it lends credence to the central criticisms that's long dogged the panel: A commission led by former politicians rather than prosecutors and economists would never get to the bottom of the financial crisis, and its findings would inevitably be viewed as a political report rather than as an objective look at the companies, policies and practices that caused the most punishing downturn since the Great Depression.
The Federal Reserves every move seems calculated with corporations in mind.
The Federal Reserve's massive stimulus program had little impact on the U.S. economy besides weakening the dollar and helping U.S. exports, Federal Reserve Governor Alan Greenspan told CNBC Thursday.
In a blunt critique of his successor, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Greenspan said the $2 trillion in quantitive easing  over the past two years had done little to loosen credit and boost the economy.
"There is no evidence that huge inflow of money into the system basically worked," Greenspan said in a live interview.
The former Fed chairman himself has been widely criticized for the low-interest rate policy in the early and mid 2000s that many believe led to the 2008 credit crisis.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
"The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press, that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at no cost." -- Bernanke, November 21, 2002.
QE I and QE II made life for corporations and wealthy Americans return to their pre-2008 meltdown levels, while doing little for working men and women.
“I don’t want to be a prophet of doom — and I don’t think we are approaching doom — but I think we’re going to slide into intensified social conflicts, social hostility, some forms of radicalism, there is just going to be a sense that this is not a just society,” Brzezinski said, adding that a decimated lower middle class is most likely going to be the catalyst for Greece-like civil unrest..
http://www.infowars.com/...
Trade Deficit Widens.
The deficit rose 4.4 percent to $53.1 billion in June, the largest imbalance since October 2008, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. Imports fell 0.8 percent to $223.9 billion as crude oil prices fell for the first time in nine months. Exports dropped 2.3 percent to $170.9 billion, the biggest decline in more than two years.
http://finance.yahoo.com/...
So the question for DC is: who are you serving, the people, or the person called corporation?
It seems our whole government has done everything in its power to help the person called corporation. But what have they done for the people who elect them? As our trade deficits widen, jobs continue to be scarce, taxes for corporations fall and trade deficits and national debts continue to grow, I only hope we can imprison or kill the corporation before they kill us.
Corporations might be persons in some sort of perverted legal sense, but they feel none of the pangs of hunger, or shivers of cold, or tired feet from standing at work all day in a deadend job, the worry of health problems with no insurance, or despair or depression from not being able to find a job. I will accept that corporations can be persons when I see them die.