#citizensunited

One of the great tricks of modern power is to call a thing by the name of its opposite. A bombing becomes a police action. Censorship becomes public safety. Bribery becomes access. And a corporation becomes a person.

This last fiction is among the most useful. A corporation has no body, no conscience, no grave, no childhood, no hunger, no fear of prison, no son to bury and no rent to pay. It is an arrangement of papers, offices, contracts, and bank accounts. It exists because the state allows it to exist. It can be dissolved by law, merged by agreement, renamed by committee, and resurrected under another shell. Yet the law, with a solemn face, announces that this artificial creature must be treated as though it were a citizen.

The result is not equality. It is the destruction of equality by means of legal grammar.

A person may speak. A corporation may spend. When the court pretends these are the same act, it does not enlarge freedom; it enlarges power. The poor man has a voice. The corporation has a public relations department, a legal department, lobbyists, donors, consultants, subsidiaries, political action committees, and enough money to make silence around it feel like consent. To say that both are merely exercising “speech” is to use language not to describe reality, but to cover it.

This is how a democratic society is hollowed out while its official vocabulary remains intact. The ballot box is left standing. The speeches continue. The courts speak of liberty. The newspapers speak of debate. The citizen is told he is free because no one has forbidden him to talk. Meanwhile, every institution around him has learned to hear money more clearly than words.

The corporation receives the rights of a person without the weaknesses of one. It may influence elections, shape laws, punish communities, poison rivers, destroy towns, and then retreat into abstraction. No one is guilty. The market demanded it. The board approved it. The shareholders expected it. The structure required it. Responsibility dissolves into procedure.

A man who steals bread is a criminal. A company that steals wages has made a payroll error. A man who lies under oath is punished. A company that deceives millions issues a statement. A man who poisons a neighbor may go to prison. A company that poisons a region pays a fine, raises prices, and calls the matter resolved.

This is not personhood. It is privilege disguised as principle.

The purpose of such language is not to clarify the law, but to make injustice sound technical. Once the corporation is called a person, its power appears natural. Its money becomes expression. Its domination becomes participation. Its demands become rights. The real person, the living citizen, must then compete against an immortal paper being that cannot feel pain, cannot be jailed in any meaningful sense, and cannot die unless it is no longer profitable to keep alive.

A society that confuses corporations with people will eventually confuse ownership with citizenship. It will ask not what a man needs to live, but what an institution needs to grow. It will defend the liberty of the largest machines and call this defense of the individual. It will permit wealth to speak through a thousand mouths while telling the solitary citizen that he, too, may speak.

And technically, he may.

open.substack.com/pub/chrishedges/p/the-dark-money-game-w-alex-gibney from Chris Hedges on Substack

Leonard Leo, Charles Koch and other right-wing extremist billionaires, organizations and corporate interests are attempting to halt litigation by various states against the destructive, corrupt fossil fuel companies.

It's outrageous these so-called 'conservative' elites and entities are standing in the way of holding fossil fuel industry accountable for their unsafe, destructive products by pressuring the Supreme Court to rule against the states filing litigation.