Electric toaster personhood?
A New York Times editorial recently took the position that an inanimate human invention should have fewer rights than an actual living, breathing person. Alarmingly, the editorial observes:
This Supreme Court […] has been on a campaign to increase corporations’ legal rights — based on the conviction of some conservative justices that businesses are, at least legally, not much different than people.
Ever heard of electric toaster personhood? No? How about umbrella personhood? Not that, either? Seriously? Maybe file cabinet personhood? What? Not that either? Yet how strange that the U.S. Supreme Court could expand the rights of corporations under the doctrine of “corporate personhood!”
Like electric toasters and umbrellas and file cabinets, corporations are a human invention. They are a useful tool that does a thing well – namely, accumulating wealth and differentiating businesses from the people who run them. Corporations with particularly large amounts of wealth at their disposal have also found they can do another thing well: influence politics.
There is no need for a discussion of whether toasters and wheel barrows and doorknobs and other useful human inventions should influence politics one way or another because the useful things these tools do are not directly responsible for accumulating vast sums of money. Why should a money-making tool like a corporation be special among such objects?
Corporatons are not people. Allowing unlimited corporate money into politics would be absurd, but it is also quite possible. Want to do something about it? Sign the pledge to protest at www.DontGetRolled.org to stay in the loop on the fight against unlimited corporate money in politics.