“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.
I mean, I'm not entirely on a different page from you, but we have a lot of work to do to prepare and we have precious little time to do so. Investing too much energy in a constitution that is going to prove itself insufficient soon enough anyway seems like wasting time. Right now we should be prioritizing building resilient face-to-face networks to mobilize resources and people. I'm less worried about mankind being eliminated, and more concerned about who is going to be left, and the prepared shall inherit the earth. Lessons from the past, union movements, the underground railroad, the logistic and institutional frameworks show us the way. An army fights on its stomach and wars are won by supply lines, not just spears or bullets.
They want you to believe it's hopeless. That we need them, that we can't survive without them, that they are "inevitable" and that's just not true. Theirs is the path to ruin but we need not follow. Same as it ever was, community is the path to tomorrow, and we need to remember that. The hands of the kings are the hands of the healers. Those who work to make themselves worthy to serve their communities when they are needed, by the sword in defence when necessary, but more importantly by the hand of care. They build tools to break the ties that held us together. They feed us lies to make us hate. We can do better. We can weave a web of humanity through the fetid corpse of a nation and build something better, something wiser (always foolish, but ever wiser), but first that starts by putting a welcoming hand out to try again, not cursing the hand that was burned before. We will have time to mourn past failures some day, and the host of whatever lies beyond will weep with us. Pray we do not forget to do so when we get there, for it has been our curse since time immemorial to forget.
The wise man sometimes plants trees, whose fruit he will not live to see. It's a big task, and I am weary already, but I will rise for we are called; by 4 billion years of ancestors, if not something more. I hear your plea, and I'm sorry I cannot bring rest, but if I can perhaps offer some hope, that will carry you for now. We are alive, and where there is life, there is hope, however faint it may seem.
I mean, that was kind of the original point of my comment to which you replied, and my first reply to you.