People commit crimes, not companies.
[1] William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 464 (1765) (“A corporation cannot commit treason or felony or other crime in its corporate capacity though it’s members may in their distinct individual capacities.”)
I thought corporations are people, my friend.
> but just when they get into legal trouble, they are suddenly NOT a person, but a vague multi-layered blob, impossible to prosecute.
This is exactly why corporations are legally people. We can prosecute the whole blob instead of trying to assign blame to individuals.
To see how this works, take a look at People v Rochester Ry. Light co (NY 1909)[1]. A corporation killed someone through negligence, but nobody was ever punished because a corporation was not considered a legal person and it was impossible to reach into the vague blob and charge individuals.
Effectively, the last criminal prosecution of a corporate entity where actual people went to jail was Robert Mueller's team vs Enron.
After that, big money learned their lessons, plugged all the holes in their ships and now it's nearly impossible to do the same again.
If jail time is the only thing that satiates you, then you need to clearly show that an individual broke the law. Failing that, we have the ability to charge the whole corporation to make sure that they are still held liable.
Mountains of corporate money is flowing into the government, thanks to stuff like Citizens United (a nuclear bomb under American politics), and absolutely out of control lobbying, creating a castrated government that simply cannot or wants to do anything.
FWIW starting a conversation that way is going to put people in a defensive mindset and make them less likely to properly consider what you have to say.
Proper discussions are difficult though, but i learned that starting out with acknowledging positive things, and most certainly stick to facts, not attacking the people you’re talking with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St1wSWtm_BI
Romney's point was that corporations are made up of people and that corporate taxes are, in the end, taxes on people.
The fact that this was treated as some kind of gaffe at the time, and is still being repeated almost a decade later is just terribly disappointing.
Very famously the US supreme court ruled in 2010 that corporations have free speech and money is speech [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#Legislati...
[2] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122805...
2) No corporations are not people. That is, quite obviously, a non-sequitur. They do, however, have some (but not all!) of the rights that people do because of the fact that they are made up of people.
Not quite. They ruled that that corporations can spend unlimited money because money is is speech, which was an established precedent set by the much earlier Buckley v. Valeo:
>The majority ruled that the Freedom of the Press clause of the First Amendment protects associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers, and further that the First Amendment does not allow prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. Corporations, as associations of individuals, therefore have free speech rights under the First Amendment. Because spending money is essential to disseminating speech, as established in Buckley v. Valeo, limiting a corporation's ability to spend money is unconstitutional because it limits the ability of its members to associate effectively and to speak on political issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#Opinion...
Anti-intellectualism has been a staple of American politics since approximately the 60s.