Into Stratified Air

This same government, which has granted corporations the rights of "personhood," has also used its power to let corporations avoid the responsibilities of personhood -- effectively using state power to create a new privileged status that is above the law.
~ from Fears of a Corporate Police State by David Sirota ~

I highly recommend that you read this excellent article that illustrates the many ways the US has turned into a corporate police-state. For my purposes today, however, I want to focus on this solitary sentence.

Since the beginning of my awareness of the landscape of law and politics, I steadfastly have been against this insane notion that a corporation -- a human-created instrument of commerce -- is a p-e-r-s-o-n. A corporation is no more a person than the chair I'm sitting in or a bag of pretzels!

But while I outright reject the concept of corporate personhood, what truly gets my dander up is that the corporate "person" demands all the privileges [in spades] that are bestowed on human beings themselves, yet this same legal "person" equally demands to be shielded from most of the inherent responsibilities that personhood requires of each of us!

For me, it is the quintessential example of wanting one's cake and eating it too.

Mind you, the wealthy in any society have always claimed a space in the stratified air. They are the ones who first put forth the idea of supreme privilege without basic responsibility. Since the rich and powerful are the ones predominantly who control the government -- whether it be capitalist, communist, socialist, tribal or a monarchy -- the state apparatus tends to grant them their unfettered desire.

When the corporation came on the scene, it took this notion of inequality to new heights. While wealthy individuals and families have exerted great influence on the machinations of every state, they pale in comparison to the unrelenting juggernaut of the modern corporate enterprise. If they so chose, many of today's top corporate behemoths could steamroll most all of the governments in place today.

Heck, it could easily be argued that they already have!!

I will be writing more about corporations in the days to come as I have just started reading The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Power and Profit by Joel Bakan.