Can corporations become President or get married? (Ruductio ad ridiculum)

Ha-ha! I would venture even further into the absurd than Weingarten. For the same conservatives who granted corporations personhood and the same rights as people are the same ones who believe that all rights are inalienable (meaning, no man or government can take them away) because they come from God.

Well if that's true for corporations then... Can corporations go to heaven? I mean, can corporations be baptized, receive the sacraments and be redeemed by accepting Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior? After all, the Supreme Court just established that corporations, as people, can practice religion.

Conversely, can corporations go to hell?  (If they can be damned, it's too bad that we can't even put a corporation in jail here on Earth.)

But wait, corporations already have the potential for eternal life -- a going concern. So what do they need heaven for? After all, the death of a corporation results from their economic failure -- something conservatives believe merits the "death penatly."  If dead corporations were nevertheless "good" before their dissolution, will they be resurrected by God on Judgment Day?

Furthermore, should corporations be allowed to carry firearms? After all, I'm sure that engineers could rig up robotic machine-gun turrets to the corporation's offices and other facilities that would operate independently of any er, human hand. Moreover, if a corporation "saw" with its camera "eyes" a suspicious man approaching its offices -- say, a black youth in a hoodie carrying some Skittles and a rotten egg to throw -- would the corporation be entitled to "stand its ground" and shoot him dead?

And shouldn't corporations also be allowed to vote? I mean, they have free speech (= political donation$), they can support political parties and candidates, and yet they don't have the most fundamental human right in a democracy, the right to vote!?  That seems illogical and unjust.

On the flip side, Weingarten's colleague at the Washington Post Catherine Rampell wondered why people can't enjoy some of the legal rights of corporations. I mean, we're all people, right? People are people. Therefore, said Rampell, people should be allowed to register their diploma (intellectual property) in Bermuda and and then claim their lifetime earnings -- thanks to said diploma -- for tax in Bermuda, even if they happen to live and work in the U.S. After all this is what Apple and other "American" corporations do with their patents.

In his piece, Weingarten wonders if corporations can have gay marriages and be charged with rape -- more good questions that will probably be decided by our absurdist Supreme Court soon!....

Gene takes the ‘corporations are people’ idea to a logical end: President Kraft Foods

By Gene Weingarten

July 25, 2014 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/WM4Nb5

Corporations ain't people (redux)

Yeah, but Boards of Director are people, right?  Right, but what are their incentives?  Conservatives believe in incentives, so what's the company's officers' incentive to be human beings?  Zilch.  More precisely, those incentives exist, but they are not material or intrinsic to the corporation; they exist only in the ethics that corporate employees bring to their jobs.  Because there isn't any explicit reward in the corporate structure for individual responsibility and concern for the greater good, much less self-sacrifice, which in the corporate world entails a threat to one's job security, one's compensation, and perhaps to the company's bottom line.  

Furthermore, Tapscott is right to mention that corporations are psychopathic by the definition of the American Psychological Association (and psychopathic personalities are more common in corporations).  So what holds them back?  Regulators, first and foremost.  Without government regulators, corporations would be truly scary.  Second, what holds them back is whatever morality (or lack thereof) employees bring to their jobs, as mentioned. Third, we have the courts.

And so, the only meaningful checks on the abuses of corporations come from outside the corporation, and everybody agrees on that.  That's worth remembering.  

To wit, even right-wing ideologue Dr. Milton Friedman realized corporate excesses would have to be checked somehow.  Rather than regulations, he preached that society should rely on the courts to alleviate the externalities and suffering that corporations foist on their customers and non-customers alike.  (Never mind that sick people can't be made well, and the dead can't be resurrected, by courts, no matter what penalties or monetary awards they grant in retrospect.)  Even Milton Friedman acknowledged that corporations would do very bad things if left to their own devices.

Why?  Because corporations are not human.  When it comes to human beings in society, we're very particular about assigning responsibility (or blame) and holding individuals accountable.  Yet the genius, the key innovation of the corporation, is the limits it places on each shareholder, founder's or employee's liability for the bad stuff the corporation does, as well as the financial risks it takes.  

No such limits exist, nay, would be not tolerated, by society when it comes to individuals.  Conservatives are most adamant on that point; liberals, at least stereotypically, are the ones making all sorts of excuses for individuals' behavior: nurture, not nature, and societal forces and all that, they plead.  Such liberal "excuses" drive conservatives nuts.  And yet when it comes to corporations, whose main innovation in the history of mankind is to limit individual responsibility, and thereby make individual risk-taking more palatable, conservatives don't see any contradiction with their professed ethical-moral values.

This diffusion, or rather, dissipation, of moral responsibility has recently reached absurd proportions.  For example, how could one employee of Goldman Sachs, Fabrice Tourre, be held responsible (in a civil, not criminal, suit, mind you) for $3.2 billion fraudulent trades, and yet Goldman's management escape unscathed?  OK, Goldman paid a $550 million fine to the U.S Government while admitting no wrongdoing, but that fine was paid by Goldman's shareholders -- while investors in those fraudulent trades received nothing, and company officers kept their jobs.  Where's the accountability?  

And finally, Tapscott is right to mention the influence of the Internet on corporate transparency.  Is it any wonder that the fig leaf of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) coincides with the birth of the Internet?  But yet again, the Internet is external to the corporation; it depends on active citizens to monitor the activities of the corporation.  It is citizen-sponsored regulation, or external regulation by other means, and arguably not the most efficient means.

Tapscott's conclusion is dead on: "The blanket assertion that corporations are people obfuscates the complex issues at play in the changing business world. Corporation are institutions. People are people."

Are Corporations People (Redux)? Why Jack Welch Is Wrong

By Dan Tapscott

September 16, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/U1WQKD