In reality, a corporation is a legal, chartered apparatus that allows a group of persons to organize a profit or not-for-profit business, outlining its products or services to be offered, its assets, and providing protection in times of loss to file for bankruptcy, making liabilities finite in relation to known corporate assets, and not the “personal” responsibility of corporate officials.
If corporations were indeed “persons,” given the wave of criminal actions committed in lending markets, investment banking, and the insurance business, and seeing the resultant consumer and investor pain caused by predatory lending, including investment bank fraud (caused by the use of unregulated derivatives along with insider trading), we would have seen by now a huge number of such “persons” going to or in jail, and not bailed out from their privatized risk turned to a socialized debt tab, i.e., picked up by the U.S. government.
Let that be written in the minds of the American people, that they have been set up for the kill of the United State Constitution and democracy itself and put on a deadly path that has already led directly to Corporate Fascism. Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini of WW-II Italy could not have asked for more himself, nor would Italy’s present day, prime minister and media baron, Silvio Berlusconi.
Are these the “persons” (these corporations) you want running your country, doing away with any regulations that protects you from the ill-effects of their law-breaking activities, whether it is financial as per Goldman, fuel regulation via Chevron, or insurance regulation via Aegon, a foreign-based insurance giant?