Despite what the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney say, corporations aren't people. (I'll believe they are when Georgia and Texas start executing them.)
The Court thinks corporations have First Amendment rights to spend as much as they want on politics, and Romney (and most of his fellow Regressives) think they need lower taxes and fewer regulations in order to be competitive.
These positions are absurd on their face. By flooding our democracy with their shareholders' money, big corporations are violating their shareholders' First Amendment rights because shareholders aren't consulted. They're simultaneously suppressing the First Amendment rights of the rest of us because, given how much money they're throwing around, we don't have enough money to be heard.
And they're indirectly giving non-Americans (that is, all their foreign owners, investors, and executives) a say in how Americans are governed. Pardon me for being old-fashioned but I didn't think foreign money was supposed to be funneled into American elections.
Romney's belief big corporations need more money and lower costs in order to create jobs is equally baffling. Big corporations are now sitting on $2 trillion of cash and enjoying near-record profits. The ratio of profits to wages is higher than it's been since before the Great Depression. And a larger and larger portion of those profits are going to top executives. (CEO pay was 40 times the typical worker in the 1980s; it's now upwards of 300 times.)
But, hey, if the Supreme Court and regressive Republicans insist big corporations are people and want to treat them as American citizens, then why not demand big corporations take a pledge of allegiance to the United States?
And if they don't take the pledge, we should boycott them. (Occupiers -- are you listening?)
Here's what a Corporate Pledge of Allegiance might look like:
The Corporate Pledge of Allegiance to the United States
Companies that make the pledge are free to use it in their ads over the Christmas shopping season.
Robert Reich is the author of Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, now in bookstores. This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
Follow Robert Reich on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RBReich
To the game-fixing corporations, money = speech. To the rest of us, money = votes.
You're not guessing, and their tricks aren't new. They are Old Tricks on Steroids. Look up the policies of Calvin Coolidge and his Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon. Coolidge took over from Warren Harding, who had arguably the most corrupt administration in history. Anyway, Coolidge & Mellon were supply-side top-downers who dismantled Teddy Roosevelt reforms. It led to the Gilded Age, but then the Big Crash.
History repeats.
BTW, persons within the corporation can be executed for the murders they commit.
Shareholders do indeed vote in boards who are expected to speak for the shareholders. If the board speaks in a manner contrary to the shareholders, the shareholders may replace the board.
Finally, the idea that the exercise of free speech by one group of citizens denies free speech to anyone else is obscene. What precisely does Reich fear from the full expression of speech by all Americans?
Have you ever asked 3 people at once to look after something? What happened when it went in the crapper? Diffused accountability is no accountability. It's the "corporation" that put out the poison that killed a person - no one goes to jail let alone death row.
The problem with speech, and Reich should have said as much, is a cousin to the Corpartion as person abomination, SCOTUS has held that money is speech. If I have 10 speech and you have 10^99 then for all practical purposes I have no speech, that is what we have to fear from the full expression of the plutocrats.
We need and amendment to stop corporate personhood and corporation should stay out of politics.
The Surprem court made a mistake. This one is on the order of Dread Scott.
Yes, we need the American Corporations to stand up and correct the damage that has been done to the US economy.
If Grove Norquist can get the congressmen to sign a pledge of no new taxes, we should be able to get the Corporations to pledge their oat to America’s progress as a nation.
Franklin D. Roosevelt exercised the Sherman Anti trust in 1938 to break up the big monopolies that were drowning out the growth of the economy; I would have thought Obama would have broken up the too big to fail banks too. This country needs a new economic plan, we have been out in this free wheeling hyper-global economy too long without good policies on our nations behalf.
When Paul A. Samuelson was asked this question: If you could give advice to those currently in power, what would it be?
Samuelson answered: My first piece of advice would be: choose the middle way. There is no substitute for the market mechanism-¬-but the market mechanism has NO BRAIN, it has NO HEART. Without political programs it will inevitably breed inequality¬.
My second piece of advice would be: Globalization in its current shape and speed makes the world a more insecure and nervous place. We should try to slow down, and in our own long-run interest, try to be less aggressive¬
Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Question for everyone else: why doesn't the MSM ask a question like this?
Follow the money people!
If corporations are not allowed to use money for speech, then Unions will not be allowed either. Neither will special interest groups like MADD, the Sierra Club, and possible the Democratic National Party.
Who will differentiate between an ad for a product or service and an ad that implies a political position?
Will movies with a political message be covered.?
What we really need is to require every corporation to publish an ethical charter. Part of that could be its commitment to country; other sections could include obligations with respect to environment, to communities, to workers, to customers, to other nations, etc. This document should have some level of standardization so that investors and fund managers could systematize their investments around ethical priorities. This would let our conscience play a part in how our money is invested. While there are green and ethical funds, it doesn't have a major impact on the broader market, and most of the statements on company values come out of the Marketing Deptartments, not th eboadroom. A broader commitment, and one to which a company would have certain obligations to perform, would let our collective conscience help drive investment, and would allow CEOs to behave more ethically in executing their mission.
Of course, they seem to care much more about their citizens than the American Government and it's Corporations do. In America, it is about how much money does the top 1,000 make.