Corporations: As people, you suck

Casting corporations as people, and their money as speech, lends them legitimacy in government they do not merit and is rational only if one assumes government should be run on a corporate model. Because, y'know, business and financial types never fuck anything up. It was the folks who believed they could afford those mortgages who brought the economy to the brink, right? Even though they were lied to (the back room term in the business is "liar's loans"), they should've known it was too good to be true. Then the banks committed "control fraud" by colluding with property estimators and securities rating companies to bundle and re-sell these worthless pieces of paper as AAA-rated instruments before they defaulted. When the bottom fell out of the whole thing, our corporate citizens were bailed out by flesh-and-blood taxpayers, and nobody went to jail. Back to record-breaking earnings, privatized profits and socialized losses.

Here's one problem: governments and corporations have differing and mutually exclusive motives. Where the motive of government on our constitutional model is to provide for its citizens, the motive of government on the corporate model is to make money off the provisions, or rig the game so our corporate citizens can.

Here's another problem: When 20% of Americans control 93% of the country's financial wealth and 85% of its total net worth, 80% of us are going to be without a voice because we don't have the money to buy into the game of government. Screwed. And expecting the federal legislature to act on our behalf? 47% of Congress, as opposed to 1% of the general population of the U.S., are millionaires.

And yet another: Voter suppression ID laws springing up like pecker-shaped mushrooms in states across the country. This is blatant, arrogant disenfranchisement of targeted groups, anti-democratic, and un-American. It is also a direct by-product of corporatist take-over.

The insulting roster of potential Republican candidates for President in 2012: really? How many people even in the Tea Party base are that fucking stupid? It doesn't matter, though, how much of a tool they put into the office, as long as it one of their tools. Because "tool" is precisely the right word.


To paraphrase:

'A man without a corporation is like a fish without a bicycle.'

Like they say, I'd rather be a stationary haddock.