What did Mitt mean?
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What did Mitt mean?
Of course, Warren was arguing against a straw man. Romney certainly hadn't said that corporations cried, danced, or generally had the qualities of human beings. But this is the nature of political discourse; hammering away at pre-determined talking points without addressing what the other person says.
It doesn't help much that the phrase "Corporations are people" is pretty difficult to parse. It can be interpreted to further conservative or liberal agendas:
Mitt sez:
A corporation is just people. A corporation ultimately consists entirely of people. We shouldn't make it harder for people to act collectively than individually.
Liz sez:
A corporation is run by people. Human beings ultimately make the company's decisions. People should be held accountable for the actions of corporations.
But neither of these is the popular interpretation of "Corporations are people." I asked a few friends what it meant to them, and whether they thought the answer was "yes" or "no." Here's how they responded:
Chat with AH: No. Corporations are kind of a... they're a concept that lets us manipulate and understand and attribute things to an entity. I think people are... I guess like, I didn't think about this, but when I think about people I think of live human beings that have, you know... some sort of sentience. I think of myself as a person.
Text with NA: No. To me, the word "people" means the category of humans, i.e. organisms of the species Homo sapiens, while a "corporation" is a social and legal abstraction for a joint commercial enterprise, and abstractions are not organisms.
Chat with AE: No. So... corporations are, from my perspective, a series of legal documents that are created by people... that basically construct whether something is defined as an LLC or as an incorporated company... It's basically just leveraging the existing legal system to define an entity that other humans can use to accomplish whatever it is their goals are.
Text with BI: Hell no. "People" can hug one another, love, give birth, and make individual decisions to exercise our agency in every domain of life. It's very possible to be an individual person in a corporation that's doing wrong, without being clued in to the big picture. The guy/gal who fixed copiers at Lehman Bros likely had very little view on what was going to blow up there. For a corporation to act — for right or wrong — a group of individual people have to come together to make choices. "Corporations are people" is, IMO, a way to claim power and agency while disavowing individual responsibility. It's the kind of thinking that brought us Nazi Germany.
In every case, the interpretation and the response amount to this:
A corporation is not a person.
This is at least in part a reaction to recent decisions by the Supreme Court to grant certain privileges of people to corporations. And we'll go into these decisions in detail later in the book.
But the Supreme Court will be quick to point out that of course corporations are not human beings; it's simply useful to occasionally treat them as legal persons in order to allow them to do business. In other words, calling a corporation a person is sort of a shorthand for the people who represent it.
I am going to take a different approach. One that I haven't seen advanced by liberals, conservatives, or Supreme Court Justices.
I'm going to make the case that:
A corporation is a person, just like you & me, and:
Treating corporations like people is a good thing.
In other words, if you look at all the entities we've talked about so far:
I'm going to try to convince you that:
If I've done my job so far, you are at this point skeptical, maybe annoyed, perhaps even outraged.
And this is why Corporations are People is a book for my friends. I think of myself as a liberal. Most of my friends are liberals. So I'm not trying to change anyone's liberal values.
Rather, I'm trying to provide a framework that advances our mutual values, even though that framework appears at first glance totally oppositional to them.
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