"Corporations are people, my friend," quipped Mitt Romney, in rebuttal to a crowd shouting that corporations should be a source of revenue instead of taxing people.
He argued "that everything that corporations earn ultimately goes to the people."
How Republicans love to speak for the American people, without saying much about which people. Corporations are not people. They are tools that entrepreneurs use.
Incorporation provides limited liability and reinforces long-term organizational identity, which does not die like we do.
Much of our material prosperity in the last century sprang from the strength and productive efficiency of corporations manufacturing goods, often at increasingly lower prices. We became strong, and rich, and corporations became multinational entities larger than many nations.
There are growing pressures to constrain such big business from forgetting the broader economic, social and environmental impacts their expanded roles now have on us, the real people.
Corporations are like machines. A corporation is essentially a well-oiled hierarchical organization headed by a supervisory board and executive managers.
In Germany, half of a supervisory board is made up by representatives of the employees, resulting in an orientation that builds up the entire nation.
In our case, corporate policy has undercut and undermined the social and economic structure of America by exporting jobs and markets, as shortcuts to maximizing profits and minimizing costs.
They have created a society burdened by an economic crisis affecting real people, underpaid or unemployed real people, who are now unfunded consumers.
The bulk of our wealth is concentrated in the uncaring hands of a tiny fraction of us who are astronomically rich. Those few are now free to lavish money to con us and to influence who will be in Congress.
Talk about the redistribution of wealth. Romney took his cue from the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court, which forbade the government to regulate political spending formerly banned by the McCain-Feingold Act.
Corporations buying political ads will supposedly not lead to corruption, the court said, because money would not go directly to or be controlled by the candidates themselves!
Now there's a fiction spun on top of an absurdity. It is not right, and it is not democratic. The corporate model has allowed for the socialization of costs, and the capitalization of earnings, i.e. the accumulation and centralization of wealth.
Because the individual stockholders are many, the costs of raising initial capital is spread to society in general. Stockholders and wage earners traditionally got return, but lately CEOs have grabbed outlandish portions, and the expertise of their leadership has increasingly focused on the short term, almost unrelated to their performance.
Unfortunately, there is another form of socializing cost _ that is to externalize it, to ignore the responsibility to clean up the environment after themselves, thereby defaulting such expense to consumers and citizenry.
The U.N. has been studying the cost of the environmental damage left by harmful industries that are often subsidized or spared by loopholes they have paid to have carved out of the relevant regulations.
The current trends, also "bought" by the influence of corporate wealth, of privatization and laissez-faire deregulation, show the close connection between maximizing profit while minimizing costs.
The mantra of conservatism is "keep it like it is," dedicated to the interests of the haves. It is no wonder that they deny the whole range of scientific warnings about global warming. They cannot allow themselves to see the horrific long-term change that is on its way.
Nor are they willing to acknowledge the large-scale increase in poverty and the destruction of our middle-class dreams in which children are blessed by economic improvement.
That is gone, and to maintain their false sense of moral worthiness, they blame the poor and the unemployed as lazy, prone to be dependent, and forming unions to protect themselves from responsibility.
What blatant hogwash!
The same mentality fuels the success of Walmart, which offers cheap products to the impoverished unemployed or under-employed, who desperately use credit for necessities now made in China.
We need the massive change of creating new, green industries. China is already doing this, while conservatives veto any government leadership to develop and support such an effort here. But that is what would bring manufacturing jobs back home.
Meanwhile, poverty is insidiously damaging the future potential of up to 40 percent of our children. These children are people. The corporations are but inhumane machines, selfishly run by an elite who insulate themselves from the social conditions and economic consequences they are fomenting.
William Masters can be reached at wmasters@thedailystar.com.
William Masters
'Corporations are not people; they are tools that entrepreneurs use'
- William Masters
-
-
Schreibman tops Chris Gibson on women's issues
As the time to vote draws near, we need to remember how money can run politics more than we can. Raising funds is a prominent (if not the dominant) task of getting elected. Raising issues is also crucial, but those efforts are subject to distortion and fear-mongering.
- Republicans feelentitled to allthey can garner An entitlement is a legal benefit available from the government to individuals who are within a defined category of recipients, such as needing insurance for unemployment or health services.
-
Romney focuses on self; Obama emphasizes unity
Mitt Romney criticizes President Obama for saying a person's success is rooted in his community, and is not all his alone. Romney belittles this with his belief in individual initiative. He is better at the put-down than the push-up.
-
Romney shows little regard for common man
The Republicans in Congress have voted over and over, 33 times, redundantly and uselessly, to rescind what they call Obamacare.
-
Scouts' gay ban creates problem where none exists
The Boy Scouts of America's "emphatic reaffirmation" of its vow to exclude any and all homosexuals from its hallowed ranks is ill-considered and pathetic, especially in view of its having reviewed the matter for two years.
-
Health care should be seen as way to help others
What is health care? Well, first and foremost it is having care, or empathy, for the distress of others. Health care is extending efforts to alleviate the distress for a person who is ill. The opposite, if you think about it, would be torture — using the power to harm to win your own way.
-
Romney sees his way as the right way
Meet Mitt Romney, seeking the power of the presidency. He seeks to convince us that his conservative economic theories will save us from ourselves.
-
Congressional candidate offers sound solutions
Mitt Romney has clinched the Republican nomination for president. If he can lick Barack, he will be the president of all of us. He must be taken seriously, but for me, up to now, he has been like a big bell being hit with a cooking spoon.
-
It's refreshing to hear our president dismiss prejudice
Race and sexual identity both sponsor problems of social discomfort. Abstractly, such traits are fixed, but in life they are roads on the map of our cultural values, which change.
-
Time for lawmakers who put needs of society first
Richard Lugar, after six terms as a Republican senator -- known for his middle of the road rationality and his foreign policy finesse -- has been ousted by a Tea Party extremist backed by outside right-wing funding.
-
War not worth gambling with lives of soldiers
Are you not tired of our war in Afghanistan? It had a point, once, after 9/11. Bush couldn't distinguish his myopic personal agendas from the nation's needs and let Osama escape, dropping the ball entirely, causing many deaths.
-
Titanic was a microcosm of U.S. economic disparity
Haunting reminders of the Titanic tragedy have wafted over us with the centenary of its sinking. The maiden voyage of an impressive, state of the art vessel, was a little like that of the Challenger space shuttle, at the cutting edge of developing technology. But the shuttle carried our pride in science and space exploration, not hundreds and hundreds of people.
-
William Masters: Nation stands divided between 'us' and 'them'
In February, Trayvon Martin was shot dead as "suspicious" by a volunteer neighborhood watch man. The case has aroused community reaction in Sanford, Fla., and is still echoing across the country.
-
A quarterback can't win the game alone
What is the relationship between democracy and wealth? Democracy is a political system, while wealth relates to economics. We have equal political rights, but we don't all have money. Extreme differences destroy the continuity of community solidarity.
-
Playing Left Field: Some blur lines between laws of church and state
We have freedom of religion in this country. A clear separation between churches and governmental agencies is constitutionally mandated. Government power may not favor or advance a particular religion.
-
Humans need to look at long-term impact on Earth
Global warming is real and we are smugly oblivious. I recall the USS Nautilus making a journey to the North Pole decades ago, and poking its conning tower dramatically up through the ice right at the pole itself, an arrival theretofore possible only by dog sled and arduous effort.
-
Playing Left Field: Meaning of 'liberty' lost in GOP's translation
COLUMN BY WILLIAM MASTERS .... Now, during the Republican presidential primaries, we hear a lot about liberty. It is a leave-me-alone type of liberty, suggesting the license to do what one may choose in the sacred call of business activity. Much is sought in the name of freedom.
-
Government no longer about power of people
In my time, the idea of conservatism has been turned upside down. Men in my family wore neckties even when just reading the paper at home.
-
Americans should respect right to bear arms
Early one morning a while back, I answered a phone call from Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, warning that the sky is falling _ no worse: that the U.S. is participating in a U.N. treaty effort to deal with the irresponsible international transfers of small arms.
-
Inequalities breed social dysfunction
In my most-recent column, I presented recent epidemiological evidence that the inequality built into a society underlies the sense many of us have that the country is going in the wrong direction.
-
Schreibman tops Chris Gibson on women's issues
