Fleshing Out the Corporate Person by Doug Henwood

There was a witticism circulating—it embarrasses me a bit to say—on Facebook recently that went something like: “I’ll believe that coporations are people when Texas executes one.” Though I’m no fan of capital punishment, but that was the best argument in favor of corporate personhood I’ve ever heard. Because while corporations have the rights of actual living people—more, maybe—they have none of the responsibilities. Corporations routinely get away with murder. Is the problem that they’re legally persons, or that they’re not consistently treated as such?
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I’m getting similar feelings now that corporate personhood has exploded onto the scene—first in the wake of the Citizens United decision, and more recently with OWS. There’s a fixation on the legal status of the corporation at the expense of some other, more important things.

As much as I am disappointed by Obama - I wish he had somehow got the public option; I wish he had focused more on the Fed and filled vacancies; I wish he hadn't smoked the green shoots - I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt. I think a lot of the bipartisan stuff is for electoral purposes. He did come on the scene with the "red state blue state speech" in 2004. One of my favorite moments was during his State of the Union Speech when he looked at the Supreme Court judges sitting in front of him and criticized the Citizens United decision.

Still I'm disappointed when I learn that the Obama administration is against a financial transaction tax. That hurts. But then apparently Obama had been in favor of nationalizing Citigroup.