Forum Post: If you say "Corporations are People" then you cannot say "It's just Business" when you close the plant and ship the jobs overseas!
Posted 13 years ago on Oct. 17, 2011, 2:19 a.m. EST by vettezeppelin
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We have accepted the line "It's not personal, it's just business" for far too long. Now the Supreme Court says Corporations are People so if in fact that is true, then they should be required to act like good human beings and not close plants here and ship jobs to the cheapest source of labor and say "it's just business". Nope, being human and part of a community comes with responsibilities. Your Mom taught you to pick up and clean up after yourself so guess what, no more dumping that pollution in the river. Your Dad told you to be nice and share your toys so guess what, time to take everyone for a ride on your corporate jet and buy 'em dinner..oh and when you get a raise and make profits you gotta share them with the workers..Yep that's what being a good person is all about so enjoy your new found personhood Mr.Corporation and we look forward to you entering counseling and coming out a new and better person without that addiction to cost cutting and maximizing profits all while having no regard for your actions on others. That Supreme Court, they are really onto something with that one!!
during a hostile corporate take-over , when a company is taken and chopped into pieces and sold off and its American jobs killed, Was there not a murder committed If corporations are indeed people? Do we not prosecute murders anymore?
I LOVE You analogy here!!!
A-FREAKING-MEN!!!!! Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you so much for posting this. God bless you. Occupy Wall Street, are you paying attention? This is the kind of irrefutable human logic you need to bring to the frontlines. You absolutely cannot argue with this cutting echoing truth. Someone needs to make a protest sign out of this one, for sure.
The ‘hard’ problem will probably be to define the difference between personal and social, or public, interest. Acting on the basis that the personal is the political (or the social) creates the illusion that personal and public interest can in principle converge and public interest can be thought of as some sort of aggregation of personal interests. However, there is a rather fundamental difference between the two. ‘Being a good person’ is not what you have defined in utter solitude and out of your personal imagination. It is a social definition of us, not the definition of the me. At this point, I think, we have one of the very fundamental problems of today’s Western societies. Over the centuries, we have conflated the public interest, especially the material interest, with the personal (or aggregated personal by whatever definition) interest. And the results are foreseeable. Now that we have arrived at the point where there exist only the personal, we are losing the difference between the social, what defines ‘us’ (in the abstract basically) and the ‘me’ (in the concrete here and now emotionally and from there interpreted as some kind of construction). And the person or the group of persons that has the most power will pursue it’s personal interests. That has been the case over the centuries, and if the basic attitude is that public interest is basically the same as personal interest, it will only be amplified. And whatever Supreme Court will support that notion. However, at this moment in our human history, honouring only the personal interests, or the aggregated personal interests, has become the most fundamental driver of today’s and tomorrow’s problems. As long as the personal is more important than the social, it will accelerate today’s problems. No matter how much would be or could be saints will rise and share their personal idea’s with us. It’s frustrating, it’s maddening, it’s all sort of things, but, unfortunately, we cannot rely anymore on our personal idea’s, feelings, emotions, whatever parts of the me. It’s over. The personal can no longer be the political. We have to (re)define what we are, not what I am, and why that is more important than what I am.