Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Back when I was an able-bodied activist, one of the discussions incessantly held within the organizations I was a member of was: Of the myriad issues troubling our society, which should we work on first? Another way this basic question can be formulated is: Which issue is of the utmost importance?

I personally wrestled with this question for a long while. At different times, I might answer human rights, nonviolence, capitalism, the environment, campaign finance reform or civil rights. However, the longer I was involved in the progressive or left wing movement, the more it came down to one issue: corporate personhood.

It is because the US court system has bestowed the rights of humans on corporations -- with few of the responsibilities -- that our democracy has gotten terribly beat up and spit out over the last century or so. Were it not for corporate personhood, many of the issues I listed above wouldn't be half as cantankerous as they are.

The Vermont State Senate is currently considering a resolution which declares that "that corporations are not persons under the laws of the United States." It is high time that more progressives got behind efforts of this ken and pushed local, county and state governments to follow suit. More importantly, we, the actual persons, should work fervently to push for an amendment to our nation's constitution that, once and for all, declares there is an underlying difference between a human being and the artificial organizational structures WE create.

As Christopher Ketcham writes in the link provided above,

The corporate person is the product of some plainly weird metaphysics. This astonishing fictional "person," accorded all the rights of a human, can split off pieces of itself to form new fictional persons, can marry many other similar persons in a process called a merger, is immortal, can change its name and identity overnight, and can aggregate gigantic streams of capital with which it somehow has the right to speak.

Strangely enough, the corporate person, who has neither soul nor body, is at the same time owned by many other persons called shareholders who buy and sell its parts every day -- it is owned, in fact, much the way a slave is owned.

Additionally, the many-limbed, mercurial, shape-changing god-person-as-chattel can connive to murder wretched fleshy mortal persons and not be hanged by the neck or electrocuted in a chair or go to jail for life as punishment. Instead the corporate person pays out a paltry sum and goes about his or her blithe business as if no murder was committed, no crime accomplished.

The corporate person can shut down whole communities by driving out business, can spread cancers in the air and water, can destroy fisheries or lay waste to forests, and do all of this with a degree of impunity provided under the vaunted protections of the Bill of Rights. The best-known and most insidious of these rights is that which allows the corporation under the First Amendment to speak freely using money -- yet another twist of metaphysics masquerading as law, and one that has not gone unnoticed by the highest jurists in the land.

The "useful legal fictions," launched into society as creatures of commerce and ostensibly at the beck and call of their creators, have freed themselves to wreak havoc on the people they were designed to help. Mere humans are arrayed against a dangerous automaton army, the army of the fictional corporate super-persons that deploy power with real-world consequences...

If you think about, the corporation is not unlike Frankenstein's monster. We created them to help aid us in building a better society, yet the monster has now turned on its masters and is wreaking havoc throughout the land. The whole thing has become a horrible movie and no one can seem to find the button that will turn the projector off!