Corporate Personhood means the end of Democracy for all

Two hours ago, five conservative Supreme Court Justices ruled that corporations have the same rights as people.

This is probably the worst thing to have happen to our sacred rights as citizens since George W. Bush peed all over the constitution with his Patriot Act crap and his removal of the Magna Carta from our system of law.

Actually, this is worse.

Multinational Corporations are now the same as people.   They can now sue you the same way a person can.  They can now run for office.  They can now be a voice in our democracy.   Corporations that aren’t even based in this country now have the same rights as you and I.   Actually, they have more.  They live forever – humans don’t.  We go to jail if we break the law.  They don’t – Corporations have tons of immunity.

Corporations don’t live in houses, make babies, have kids to raise or worry about how they are going to feed themselves or their kids when money is low.    In fact, they are usually the reason why we end up having to worry about things like paychecks and maintaining our standard of living.

Michael Moore tried to warn us with his movie about our love affair with Wall Street.  But most Americans still don’t get it.  And understandably, they probably won’t for a very long time.

I know – because I used to have my own kind of love affair with the notion of working and succeeding within a corporate structure.  Right out of high school, I went to a trade school to become a legal/executive secretary.  Since 1984, I worked as a temp for some of the biggest and baddest corporations out there – I dreamed of making it big, taking home the same kind of gigantic paychecks they did.  But as the years went by, I saw what they really were all about.   I finally learned that while there are humans who work there, the people who run them are not.  They are entities that are immune from laws that they break.  Okay, sometimes they get “caught” breaking the law, and have to pay us humans for damages.  But please know that corporations fight very hard to keep from getting caught from breaking the laws.  Lawyers are like vitamins – they keep corporate criminals healthy and free – out of jails and out of the news (especially since they own them, too).

I just don’t know what else to say.

But I’ll bet you’re wondering why no one is saying this on the news.  News organizations are owned by giant multinational corporations which care only about public relations and advertising, which protects their profits, because it keeps the general public in the dark about who they really are.

Imagine yourself as a huge multinational corporation.  Let’s say you’re in the business of selling health insurance or pharmaceutical drugs.  Now let’s imagine your corporation has having recently been discovered as making huge donations to a number of elected officials, lawmakers, judges (yes, you can do this, too), and anyone else you’d need to keep you out of jail for all the lies you told – I mean, all the unsafe products you’ve put out on the market.

Imagine how worried you’d be as a giant drug company who has been selling drugs that don’t work at all – but you’ve managed to fool people into buying them.  In a world where the laws protected consumers, you would be worried about consumer groups coming after you.  You’d be worried about news stories exposing your harmful products.  You’d be worried about negative feedback by consumers and complaints by families of loved ones who’ve died from your faulty products.

Well, under this new law, and the previous administration’s generous heap of protection on corporations (that’s why Bush installed the last two judges – they are VERY corporate-friendly), you’d have every right to retaliate against – i.e. sue anyone – who spoke out against your product (even if it was true), you can hire judges (the technical process is called an arbitration – but corporations call it judges-for-hire), and you can sue for lost profits and can even prevent news organizations from saying one damned thing about it.

Because, afterall, corporations are just like you and me.