Quote:
Originally Posted by Shadowex3
Consider this: It's time for elections followed immediately by a legislative session in the local homeowners association. It's you as an individual and your $50k/yr income lobbying against your "neighbor" who makes over 3 billion dollars a month and every time "he" does something illegal can endlessly pass the blame around because out of the thousands of people living in his hundreds of houses no one individual can be blamed.
The metaphor kind of breaks down at that point but you get the idea. Basically corporations, when treated as individuals, have all of the rights but absolutely none of the responsibilities and are virtually unstoppable legally. Criminal penalties are rare and almost unheard of, and the single largest corporate fine in history is still less than 1.5bn, at most it's a month or two's profit out of an entire year. They can dump effectively unlimited amounts of money on politicians, dodge responsibility for whatever they want, and can literally afford to break the law.
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OMG, a world of yes. Making corporations "individuals" with the same right to lobby the Congress as real people has resulted in nothing but legalized corruption, as members of Congress become ever more ensnared by the political priorities of their "donors"-- who of course are not interested in bettering people's lives or aiding the poor and the helpless or finding ways to make more peace in the world, but are instead merely interested in their profit margins, their corporate hegemony, the lining of the pocketbooks of their senior elite.
Recognition of corporations as people under the law equals the legalization of corruption, the legalization of reckless greed, and the pre-undercutting of any future laws to curb corporate greed and recklessness, or even to more strictly regulate the marketplace.