Corporations Aren’t People, My Friend

Hypocrisy from the Left and the Right

Just over a decade ago, back in the Before Times — before the pandemic, before Trump, before the Republican Party had morphed from the party of big business to the party of QAnon — Mitt Romney, while campaigning for president, upset many on the Left with his smug assertion that, “Corporations are people, my friend.”

While his statement happened to be true as far as American law is concerned, its context and motivation were deeply troubling to many. Romney’s statement was made right in the midst of the Occupy Wall Street movement, at a time when activists were bravely calling attention to the absurd and ever-increasing wealth disparities in the U.S., particularly with their focus on “The One Percent” (that is, how 40 percent of American wealth is held by just 1 percent of the population).

His statement also took place shortly after the Supreme Court’s now-infamous Citizens United decision, which declared that corporate political contributions are protected as free speech under the First Amendment and are therefore off-limits to government regulation. The immediate result of this was the explosion of SuperPACs and other “dark money” organizations and the subsequent unleashing of political propaganda at levels of intensity (and dishonesty) never before seen in American history.

So understandably, those seeking a more egalitarian society and those wishing to promote and preserve democracy were disheartened, to say the least, that a leading candidate for president would so blatantly trumpet what seems an insult to common sense. How can a faceless legal abstraction be granted the same rights and privileges as a living, breathing human being? It strikes one as the height of absurdity and injustice. Yet it’s right there in Title 1 of the United States Code:

the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals

The irony, however, is that in recent years, many on the Left have seemingly come to fully embrace the concept of corporations having the same rights as individuals. This transformation has been bizarre.

Just look at the common response to complaints from the Right that Twitter has been engaging in censorship through its “deplatforming” of unpopular speakers for violating its terms of service. The standard defense by those on the Left has been that as a private corporation, Twitter has a First Amendment right to silence whoever it chooses to on its own private platform. Once again, as a matter of American law, this is true. But if it was tone-deaf for Romney to invoke it, why is it any less so for defenders of corporate censorship to invoke it?

Another area where this championing of corporate rights has become prevalent is in the increasingly common practice of companies imposing a set of “corporate values” upon their employees. Many view this as a positive development for the cause of social justice, with rich and powerful organizations at last taking a stand for human dignity.

But what about the rights of the employees? What happens, for example, to an engineer who enjoys designing and building things, and needs a paycheck to feed and shelter his children, but who doesn’t particularly like or agree with the values being foisted upon him by his company without any input on his part? What choice does he have other than to remain silent (and irritated) or to quit?

And furthermore, since when has imposing values on others been considered a good thing? Last time I checked, doing so was the standard mark of the missionary, of the colonizer, of the imperialist oppressor. But suddenly it’s celebrated and encouraged when enacted by corporate “people”?

I for one, find it a complete travesty that corporations are considered people. I think it’s emblematic of everything that’s wrong with modern America. It perfectly captures the rampant greed and materialism that plagues our society on every level. It perfectly embodies (if you’ll pardon the pun) the glaring lack of empathy, of generosity, and the general lack of respect for individuals that’s tearing this country apart.

I think it’s time that the American citizenry — that is, actual flesh and blood human beings — start insisting that, no, corporations are most assuredly not people. That corporations are just abstractions, just a semantic convenience whose rights should never take precedence over those of the people who constitute or are affected by them.

But doing so begins by not being a hypocrite. If you don’t like dark money ruling our political process, you shouldn’t like unelected tech billionaires deciding who gets to talk and who must instead sit in silence in the naughty corner. If you don’t like companies getting to destroy the environment at will, passing along the costs to society as “externalities” while they reap insane profits for themselves, you shouldn’t like companies colonizing their employees’ personal lives through the imposition of their arbitrary “values.”

At the end of the day, corporations are either people, or they’re not. Either a crusted douchebag like Mitt Romney is a prophet of truth, or the truth itself is an Orwellian nightmare and is as badly in need of being driven from its position of unearned power as Big Brother, Ingsoc, and Newspeak. I know where I as a person stand on the matter. Do you?

Colby Hess is a freelance writer and photographer from Seattle, and author of the freethinker children’s book The Stranger of Wigglesworth.

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