Virtual Persons?

By: Rick D. Massey, J.D
Copyright © 2010

Did things really get so bad so fast? Or have we all been asleep while our status as human beings was being systematically destroyed? Our country gained a lot of ground in the last fifty years. We evolved from a political system that did not understand the simple fact that all people should be entitled to the same basic human rights, to one in which it became illegal to discriminate against anyone based on color, race, sex (as long as one follows the government sanctioned and accepted definitions of sex), or religion (well sort of until recently anyway). But on January 21st, the United States Supreme Court finally placed the cherry on top of the dismantling of every moral and decent principal this country is supposed to represent.

Corporations do NOT really exist. They are fictions created by lawyers and business people. Corporations are nothing more than fairy tale entities whose only function is to protect business people from being held legally responsible for their actions. They are quite literally nothing more than a group of business people’s imaginary friends. Yet these fictitious entities gained equal rights to those of real flesh and blood human beings long before black people were allowed to sit on the bus or eat in the same room with everyone else – long before women were allowed to vote. And now, these non-existent phantoms have been handed the legal right to control our political system. If I sound disgusted, that does not scratch the surface.

The corporatization of this nation has now reached an unprecedented low that could well mean the end of any pretense that we still have a democracy. The highest Court in the land has officially placed the control and leadership of America on the auction block for sale to the highest bidder. I wish this were an exaggeration. But it is simply the plain and honest truth. Congressman Alan Grayson has accurately summed up the results of this ruling.

By gutting the 100-year-old Tillman Act ban on corporate contributions, the U.S. Supreme Court has opened the door to political bribery and corruption on the largest scale imaginable. As Teddy Roosevelt said at the time, 'property belongs to man, and not man to property.' That's why we have federal election laws, and that's why we need them, both then and now . . .

George Orwell’s 1984 in which the government convinces everyone that the lie is the truth and that the obvious reality is the lie, has clearly come to pass. In deed our government has a pretty dismal history of figuring out what a “person” is. In 1857, the Supreme Court declared that Dred Scott had no authority to sue anyone because a slave was property and not a “person” under the U.S. Constitution. A mere twenty-nine years later (1886), and only eighteen years after the 14th Amendment (1868) guaranteed equal protection to every “person” in this country, the Supreme Court not only acknowledged the right of corporations to equal protection of the laws afforded to “persons” under the Constitution, but said so in a smug almost matter of fact fashion.

The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394

This insanity has culminated in our lifetime in the ridiculous argument that because corporations are “persons” whose right of free speech is protected under the Constitution, no law should restrict the amount of money a corporation may spend to drown out the voices of the actual people in this country who presumably also still have a right to “free” speech as long as they can afford it. This is a High Court and a government that cynically believes you and I are too stupid to tell the difference between “persons” and fictitious human-created entities – or between “speech” and money.

If you don’t think elections can be bought in this country, you must know something the politicians and PR agencies have missed. They already spend unbelievable amounts of money in their efforts to win elections. They have always done so. But in the past, the money had to come from identifiable human sources. If someone wanted to put up money in the name of his or her imaginary friend: those amounts were strictly limited. All of this came out of the archaic idea that in a democracy, the people (you know the old fashioned definition of people, human beings) have a right to know who is speaking and who is behind the candidate that is running for office.

No longer is it necessary to bribe candidates behind closed doors. We now live in a country that sanctions the right of wealthy conglomerates to openly bribe them and to use their power to remove them from office. This was beautifully summarized in an old episode of Giligan’s Island. Someone reminded the millionaire, Mr. Howell that “all men are created equal.” Mr. Howell responded, “created equal of course, but once a man comes into money . . .”.