- go back to school
- take a biology course
- take two semesters of philosophy
- take two semesters of symbolic logic and one INTRO to the "Philosophy of Logical Analysis".
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Mitt is Either WRONG or LYING; Corporations are NOT People and SCOTUS Cannot 'Create' Them People!
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
Mitt Romney seemed very precise: "Of course, corporations are people, my friend!" His argument is as follows: corporations are made up of people; ergo: they ARE persons themselves. That's not only fallacious (of course), a BAD RE-WRITE of Thomas Hobbes who described a Leviathan --a state comprised of the people in it. Not even Hobbes would have dared to say that the state IS a person! Being comprised of people is not the same thing as being a person. The philosophical literature with respect to class theory, symbolic logic, logical positivism, et al, et al is venerable. It consists of great and classical works from Plato to Russell, from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, Hobbes to Ayer. None of them confused a "class" with its members. None of them confused the passengers with the bus that carries them! As a person, I am made up of millions of cells, each of which replicate my DNA to some degree. But to say that EACH cell IS "ME" is absurd, if not insane! What if I should prick my finger and I lose some blood? Have several hundred thousand people died? Of course not!Romney defends his implications because money "...gets into people's pockets" by way of companies. So what? That does not make them people! But more importantly, his argument is the crude inverse of the "labor theory of value" which is espoused by most (if not all) legitimate economists. The issue is ultimately: who creates value? What about those people not employed by the corporations about which Romney spoke? Are they NOT people? In Romney's view, taken to its logical conclusions, one must work or indenture him/herself to a corporation in order to be a person! Absurd! If Romney's logic were valid, LABOR UNIONS would be people because "people" belong to it! Wager: Romney will make a convenient exception. He will deny that LABOR UNIONS are people though the case on behalf of labor unions is a much better than than Mitt's case for "corporations". [See: If Corporations are people, then, perhaps Labor Should Become a 'Person'] I know of no law that would prohibit any organization from "incorporating". I suggest that labor unions "incorporate". If that is done, then corporations would have no choice but to recognize the union. Let's consider Mitt's analogy in this way: if it were true that every cell in my body is a 'person', anyone cutting off my finger is not only guilty of assault and battery but the COLD BLOODED murder of millions of little, micropscopic 'ME's". Being a 'person' occurs by virtue of being born of two members of the species: homo sapien! That is not the case with a corporation, any corporation, a corporation of any type! Simply, real persons are, by definition, born of other 'persons'! By contrast, a corporation is, by definition, a charter, filed with a Secretary of State (most often Delaware); the charter outlines the corporate structure, lists the major officers and describes the 'type' of 'incorporation in legal terms. It is a NOT a person but simply a contract listing the major stockholders, summarizing the management and delegating various responsibilities. When a corporation is given birth to by a woman as a result of her doing what human beings (persons) have done for thousands of years, then I might concur that corporations are persons. That will happn when pigs fly. And pigs WILL fly when I vote for a moron like Mitt Romney. In the meantime, I suggest Mitt...
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11 comments:
Len--of course he's lying. He's one of those sort who feels that as one of our "betters", he can say or do whatever he determines is going to further his own agenda.
Thanks for commenting, unknown. You're probably right. Mitt must SURELY be smart enough to know that corporations are not people; ergo: he's lying.
fecking liar is what he is..I'd tell it to his face, but he has too many of them.
If corporations are people then people are corporations.
But really, money equals free speech? Isn't that like buying votes?
It's like buying your way into heaven. We live in bizzaro world.
But then, look at 911.
Anonymous said...
If corporations are people then people are corporations.
But really, money equals free speech?
Indeed! That's one of several 'reductio ad absurdum' fallacies in the GOP argument. IF the GOP/right wing position re: corporate personhood were correct, then ANY organization could claim to be a person simply because their 'membership' are people.
We would hear much less about corporations being people IF EVERY LABOR UNION in the U.S., likewise, CLAIMED the privileges of 'personhood' as have the likes of CROOKS like Shell, Exxon, BP, Halliburton (Cheney's pet 'person'), in fact, ANYONE who has the fifty to a hundred bucks to fill out and file a form with the Sec of State in Delaware. Voila! You TOO can be a 'person'.
The GOP is just stupid and absurd!
Thank you for taking the time to write on this topic.
The real question is do you equate 'people' with 'persons', as corporations are unquestionably legal persons in all 50 states and the federal jurisdiction. So, it would seem this non-argument will never rise above that level if the actual meaning of the terms forming the basis of it's premises are considered.
Anonymous said...
"The real question is do you equate 'people' with 'persons', as corporations are unquestionably legal persons in all 50 states and the federal jurisdiction."
Yeah, yeah! We know all about CITIZENS-UNITED! I've read it. It's about as 'brilliant' as was A. SCALIA'S IDIOTIC opinion in Bush v Gore!
The wearing of a black robe has NO EFFECT on intelligence.
BUSH V GORE was a transparent rationalization that had it not come from a fucking court would have been laughed off a high school debate team!
The Citizens United is even worse. It's a bad rewrite of Hobbes by people whose knowledge of Hobbes is the CLIFF NOTES version.
Get a fucking clue!
Hi, Len. Just staying in touch. I've got some stuff on Romney I'm sure you know but your readers might be interested in.
Mitt Romney has shown himself repeatedly to be a suit without a soul, an ethically and emotionally tone deaf idiot with nothing to offer the American people. His recent appearance before the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) was a case in point. He went there arguing against giving people 'free stuff,' ie welfare benefits. To a group of Americans who to this day are dogged by poor educational opportunities and income prospects this was an exercise in taselesness, a sound bite intended for his electoral base of rusted on white wing nutjobs.
Only one year of publicly available tax returns, offshore accounts, no taxes paid, Bain Capital vulture fund... The list goes on.
You want to know this man? Look at his past and present campaign finance directors, Mel Sembler and Robert Lichfield, and their links to the 'Straight A' program, a privately run drug rehabilitation business that was shut down by the State of Florida because of systemic abuses only to be reopened the same day as a new entity called 'SAFE' with the backing of Jeb Bush! Romney's guys were heavily into privately run juvenile prisons with an appalling track record of abuses.
Oh, and check out Romney's links to Jeb Bush and George Bush Snr. This is the white shoe brigade on steroids. (LINK)
Hope you're well, Len. Here's some further thoughts on Mitt Romney that might interest your readers...
Here's Mitt Romney on Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program: "The regime in Iran is five years closer to developing nuclear weapons capability. Preventing that outcome must be our highest national security priority."
Here's Romney adviser Dan Senor recently in Israel: "If Israel has to take action on its own in order to stop Iran from developing that capability, the governor would respect that decision." And: "No option would be excluded. Gov. Romney recognizes Israel’s right to defend itself and that it is right for America to stand with it."
All of this a green light for Israel to attack Iran. And notice, we are not even talking about actual nuclear weapons, just a 'capability' to possibly construct those weapons at some ill-defined future time.
Dan Senor himself is a practising Jew and in 1993 did an internship at AIPAC: "Whether I was learning the ins and outs of Washington with my fellow interns or attending briefings on Capitol Hill, my internship at AIPAC prepared me for my work in politics".
His sister, Wendy Senor Singer, heads AIPAC's office in Jerusalem. His brother-in-law, Saul Singer, is the very right-wing opinion editor of the Jerusalem Post. Senor is a director on the website of USIBEX, the US-Israel Business Exchange and a Senior Associate of the Carlyle Group.
So Senor represents Israeli interests through and through.
Romney's key foreign policy advisers, Eric Edelman, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor, are three of the four directors of Foreign Policy Initiative, a US think tank which has repeatedly called for US military attacks upon Iran. The FPI is the ideological successor to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which played a critical role in mobilizing support for regime change in Iraq in the late 1990s and subsequently spearheaded the public campaign to invade the country after the 9/11 attacks. Kagan was a co-founder of both PNAC and FPI and a critical advocate of invading Iraq, while Senor served in Iraq after the invasion as a top official in the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer. Edelman, who, as ambassador to Turkey at the time, lobbied its military to support the 2003 invasion, and went on to work as undersecretary of defence for policy under Don Rumsfeld.
Interestingly, a week or so ago Edelman, Kagan and Senor joined with a bunch of diehards from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) to publicly petition Obama to involve the US militarily in Syria. (LINK)
The FDD is a US Right wing think tank and lobby group made up hard line Israel supporters all of whom were active proponents for the invasion of Iraq, and now, for military attacks upon Iran. A glance at the development of the FDD shows up it's real allegiance and political agenda. In early 2001, the US hard Right conceived of a plan to win American sympathy for Israel’s response to the Palestinian intifada. Following 9/11 that organization rebranded itself as the FDD. While ostensibly against terrorism in general ("working to defend free nations against their enemies") it's political fault lines fall squarely in line with Israeli and hard Right US foreign policy. And so, they have been actively backing US involvement in Syria.
I believe the evidence is overwhelming that we are likely to see war against Iran under a Romney presidency, a war bigger than Iraq, a war that will rent East-West relations with China and Russia. That we are proceeding towards this type of horrendous confrontation in such a casual and uncritical fashion ought to disturb us all. And Mitt Romney is just tagging along for the ride.
damien said...
Mitt Romney has shown himself repeatedly to be a suit without a soul, an ethically and emotionally tone deaf idiot with nothing to offer the American people...Only one year of publicly available tax returns, offshore accounts, no taxes paid, Bain Capital vulture fund... The list goes on.
GREAT STUFF, Damien. Good to see ya' again.
You've got Mitt's number. He's a fraud. Mitt may have shot himself in the foot. It's pretty late in the game for the GOP to find another 'savior'.
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