When Corporations Get the Vote

And why shouldn’t they? After all, corporations are people, too.

Currently considered to be people by five Supreme Court justices, corporations have many of the same rights (freedom of expression) and privileges (welfare) but not so many of the same responsibilities as we humans. They can’t be put in jail or executed, for example, even if they cheat or kill. At worst, they are fined, though never enough to endanger next year’s profits, never mind the viability of the corporation.

Now a corporation is running for office. It’s a living satire, an attempt to show either how stupid the law is or how corrupt those five Supreme Court justices are, but why not? Having corporate politicians gets around the pesky requirement that one must be born in the U.S. to be President. Incorporate Arnold and Demolition Man turns out to be prophecy.

Corporate suffrage

And if they have the rights of people, why can’t corporations vote? Suffrage is hardly universal unless it includes all persons, including corporate persons. Corporations have been allowed to vote in the past. It’s hardly fair that they are unrepresented now. (Ignoring political donations, of course, which any individual can also make. It’s not the corporations’ fault you can’t afford to donate the way they can, or provide cushy jobs upon completing a life of corporate political service for pet politicians.)

Imagine the rush to form a corporation once they can vote! Everyone would have one, and a few would have millions. One vote per human, many votes per corporate person.

It could be the next bubble. I imagine it would start out with everyone (which includes individual corporations, it should go without saying) forming their own Voting Corporation. But one person or corporation can have many corporations, and it wouldn’t be long before someone figured out that he with the most corporations by the date of the next election wins, and started creating Voting Corporations by the score. The Voter Incorporation Corporation.

In fact, everyone would figure out pretty quickly that under the new system of corporate voters and corporate representatives, you had better be aligned with a powerful corporation. Why? Because corporations have different morals than normal humans. A corporation’s only goal is money, the more the better, and has no morals whatsoever about how it is obtained. Amoral corporations use immoral means.

If you’re not protected by a powerful corporation/voter/representative, there will still be a place for you. The prison-industrial complex in the United States is one possible example that could expand greatly if they could only arrest more people. Many agribusinesses could take over all of farming if the laws would just change a bit in their favour to bankrupt the remaining independents, or make it impossible for them to get credit, for example. In fact, if corporate voters and representatives repeal all those nuisance regulations and laws holding them back, then the agribusiness corporation(s) can simply ask the banking corporation(s) to cut off the small farmers. So much more efficient.

Corporations take the predatory morality to a new level.

• Animal predator (including humans): Might makes right: If you can get away with it, you have the right to do so.
• Corporate predator: if the corporation can get away with it, it is legally obliged to do so; further, they must use any means to remove all obstacles to maximum predation.

Now, give these predators the vote. They will vote you into slavery in one election flat. Me? I’m planning on surfing the Voter Incorporation Corporation bubble all the way to the top. I’ll be the first foreign-born human, American-born corporation to be President.

And the last.