“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 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.
What part of committing genocide did you miss? What is far worse is the US had its hand in several other genocides as well. This isn't a struggle, it is continuous mass murder. The US has only been at peace for about 25 years since it's murderous inception.
Tell me how people who have died by US hands are experiencing liberty. How did the Cherokee experience liberty when even though they completely conformed to western instruction, were still driven from their land.
https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/cherokee-removal/
How did the blacks feel even after the fact that slavery ended, they were still forced to segregate. When they formed their own communities they were burned down. Almost every major city park was built over a poor minority neighborhood. When the US built its highway system it was of course routed through poor neighborhoods.
How do the Palestinians feel when the US is supplying Israel the money and weapons it needs to destroy them. How does the Middle East feel about having over 300,000 bombs dropped on them by US forces. This is not liberty, this has always been tyranny.
There is no nation that comes close to the amount of death and destruction the US has wrought in all of history. The US has toppled countless governments, destabilized entire continents, and committed the most prolific war crimes.
If I were to detail all the deaths that the US has caused I would literally die before I could explain them all and the entire time we would be committing more.
Be a good person and do the right thing, but don't believe in the mythology of America spreading liberty or democracy. The facts paint a very different picture.
Like I said, setbacks.
Tell me all about the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Tell me all about Loving v. Virginia, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
I never said it wasn't messy. I even explicitly said "sometimes there are setbacks". Or, did you miss that?
If you can hand wave multiple genocides including ongoing ones as a "setback" I am afraid I can't take you seriously.
I can tell you that the federal government was structured to prevent the poors from ever gaining any power. You have the senate representing wealth meant to check the power of the people. You have the executive branch representing wealth that is meant to check the power of the people. You have the judicial branch representing wealth that is meant to check the power of the people. Lastly you have Congress which is supposed to represent the people but is bought off by the wealthy.
This is extremely dismal at the Federal level although some states are absolutely awful as well. People definitely should get involved though if they want change. Local government (city/county/borough) is a great place to start.
You can talk to me about the US spreading liberty all you want but it is a fucking fantasy.
Yes its galling today, but ultimately its a setback that time will cause to fade. Ancient Egyptians and Romans were paramount record keepers who ruled to ancient world, and they were rife with horrendous crimes too. But, their stuff ultimately faded. Ours woll too. Frankly, humans are its civilizations don't matter that much.
Its worth mentioning that, in fact, the Romans and Egyptians actually reinforce my point: they were abysmal for the stuff you're on about. But, human civilization evoles. Where slavery was tolerated by the most powerful civilizations for thousands of years, today's powerful civilizations have outlawed slavery in their jurisdictions pretty quickly (only took the USA like 70-ish years). On a long enough timeline, the overall arc of history has bent towards liberty. For someone who "took a history class in college", you should be aware of that.
You really have to go back to ancient times to try and rationalize it. Yes, I did the same many years ago.
The US blew past the worst of the worst a long time ago. Not just to non-Americans either. A lot of people like to relish the idea of American imperialism turning on itself to which I gladly point out millions of minority families destroyed by the War on Drugs. The scale of the incarceration and human abuse is truly incredible.
We have lost more people to gun violence in the last thirty years than every service member death from every war we have ever fought. I know many people who have died from gun violence and overdoses.
Then we get to the environmental impact of the technology we proliferated. Hundreds of millions of people dead from lead poisoning with estimates as high as 5 million a year to this day mostly due to air pollution from burning gas. The entire Earth blanketed in lead so bad it is released in significant quantities when you burn wood now.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/15/wood-burning-for-heat-reintroducing-lead-pollution-into-the-air-us-scientists-find
Not to mention every single human on earth simultaneously poisoned by micro plastics and forever chemicals. I have personally estimated the loss of life due to pollution and environmental degredation to close to a billion people in the last fifty years. We haven't even got to global warming or the tons of other ongoing environmental calamities.
We have more slavery today than at any time in history. I am afraid you are not going to gaslight me about liberty and in fact, you remind me of myself decades ago before I learned so much more. I totally get where you are coming from.