“Corporations are people, my friend,” Mitt Romney famously said in 2011 while running for president. The Supreme Court decided the previous year that corporations could give money to political campaigns, just like people, and in 2014, the high court gave corporations religious freedom to deny contraceptives to employees, thereby letting them behave just as badly as people. If you prick corporations, do they not bleed?
Actually no, they don’t. But as of now, they can get presidential pardons.
The notion that corporations are people did not originate with the Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision in 2010. Way back in 1886, the high court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Union Pacific Railroad that corporations were covered by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. To be more precise, this question was addressed not in the decision (which resolved a local taxation dispute) but rather in a headnote that said the court “does not wish to hear argument on the question” of whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to corporations because “we are all of the opinion that it does.“ Somehow this non sequitur became legal precedent. “Later cases,” wrote Stetson University law professor Clara Torres-Spelliscy in a 2014 analysis for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, “uncritically cited the headnote as if it had been part of the case.”
You know what isn’t declining? Pardons for corporations. Trump has granted nine. These were never a thing before Trump—not in the modern era, and possibly never. According to Bloomberg’s Ava Benny-Morrison, the nine pardons wiped out $200 million in financial penalties, “some of which were destined for victims of wrongdoing.” Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri, told Bloomberg: “In any previous era no president would touch this with a barge pole. Maybe individual cases with some compelling reason, but the systemic elimination of criminal liability of major financial crime would never have happened before, and it didn’t.”
Half of the $200 million in wiped-out fines can be attributed to a single crypto company, BitMEX. The three co-founders of the company, a pioneer in crypto derivatives, all pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires maintaining certain safeguards against money laundering. Each paid $10 million in fines. Then, in July 2024, BitMEX itself pleaded guilty to the same crime, and this past January the company was fined $100 million.
You should be careful who you put up on pedestals. All is not what is appears to be and my point stands.
I am a humanitarian who recoils at the fact that wealthy people seized control of the colonies with violence and propaganda.
You must be fun at parties.
Yeah, I have had some great conversations around this topic. How our founding fathers were wealthy slavers who said one thing and did something completely different. How they enriched themselves with our first President on his way to be the first billionaire adjusted for inflation.
I would highly recommend studying the American Revolution with a critical eye. It was only after I took a high level history class in college and read a lot of primary sources that all the pieces of the puzzle finally fit.
I realized that the US was never corrupted at some point and that it was always corrupt from the very start. Propaganda was used to incite and violence was doled out to anyone who disagreed. That loyalist crap that the bootlicker was bringing up earlier is an example of this garbage still existing to this day. The people lost and the wealthy won.
A nation formed by the wealthy for the wealthy based on death and destruction that has continued to this day. Genocided the Native Americans for fun even though there was and is to this day plenty of land. Racist and sexist to the core falling far behind the rest of the world. Being at war nearly our entire existence.
Basically everything we are taught is a lie and once you realize this, it all makes sense.
The United States has expanded right throughout its history. Yes, its been a constant struggle. Yes the South has been forced to be dragged kicking and screaming at every point, and sometimes there are setbacks. But, the course of its history has an overall bend towards liberty.