Mitt Romney says corporations are people

reply to post by Janky Red


janky you can buy from whoever and whatever and pay whatever you want.

get real.

reply to post by Janky Red


thosee people didnt even know how social security works

so please.

Originally posted by ThirdEyeofHorus
reply to post by Janky Red

 

OK to be fair, I am not enjoying the power that corporations have as lobbyists at Washington, or that Monsanto is represented while ruining our food supply with GMO. That is the far end of corporatism. This does not however mean that all corporations are evil by nature just by being incorporated. You can have 25 employees and still be incorporated. Just like the mom and pop grocery store on the corner has a tiny monopoly on the several blocks of its territory. That is called competitive monopoly. Size is really relative. And that is why when people attribute arbitrary sizes to such things as income, it really is a skewed way of seeing things.

well then, I am glad to see that you are able to make this distinction

I think it is heartening... There are a lot of people who do not/ cannot see the difference between a ma and pa
and Monsanto. ALL the horrible regulations that create monopoly or finical crashes are done under the general guise that corporations are good, hands down. Thing will NEVER change if this perception remains un disturbed.

Politicians being initially funded and bought by private collectives is the basic distortion

Originally posted by neo96
reply to post by Janky Red

 

janky you can buy from whoever and whatever and pay whatever you want.

get real.

Is that right?

I can by a candidate, I have the time and money to call and pander that politician after I get them elected?

Your ideas are completely screwed by your other ideas, its not an opinion Neo

reply to post by Janky Red


dunno about you but i have better things to do with my cash than buy politicians.

republican or democrat.

yeah i like my ideals and my opinions cause he im me and im always right

corporations or unions

meh im trying to watch the debate here so i know who i dont want.

Originally posted by mishigas
reply to post by sonofliberty1776

 

That is the problem. The reason corporations act so evilly is that they CANNOT be held to the same standard as real people. Think about that.

Corporations do not intentionally act so "evilly" . Officers can spend the rest of their lives in prison if they are shown to intentionally cause great harm.

You have a sick and twisted view of life if you think that corporations form with the intent of harming society.

Admit it -- the reason you don't like to equate corps to real people is that it is much easier to HATE and condemn a faceless entity than a real person.

Here is a great paper on how corporate law inhibits social responsibility www.nancho.net... . The only cases I am aware of where executives have been locked up is due to financial fraud. If you know of any cases where an executive was locked up due to environmental, social or other crimes not directly involving money I would like to hear it.

We have cases like where car companies only do a recall only if it is financially viable, it does not matter that they know some people will burn to death, get maimed or crushed to death. We also have cases like Asbestos, around the 1950's America knew this stuff killed, so they moved production to Australia and continued killing for another 50 years or so, knowing the harm it done from day one but remained quite and tried to cover it up. Once our science community finally got on top of the problem the company just moved over seas and avoided a lot of the fall out and problems. No one has been locked up over these crimes.

There are many, many other cases like these. You just have to look around the world to see just how sick and twisted it is. The media has serious conflicts in interest in trying to address these problems www.fair.org... . The media can and does legally lie to you about it as well. The sick and twisted part all comes down to money and lack of personal liability. If the corporation was actually a person it is classified as a psychopath under its current legal framework.

All entities have a right to life, be that an atom, rock, person, cow, nation, planet, galaxy or a corporation. However they all have different capabilities, resources and interactions. Only a person is a person, to call it anything else is wrong and the political and legal system needs to pull its head out of its a$$ before it $hits on us all.

reply to post by kwakakev


Oh gee, so Australia sat around for 50 years letting asbestos factories go on? Interesting. Are you saying that America knew of the liabilities but Australia did not? If America ousted asbestos factories in 50's why did Australia take them in?

Originally posted by AMANNAMEDQUEST

Despite not being natural persons, corporations are recognized by the law to have rights and responsibilities like natural persons ("people"). Corporations can exercise human rights against real individuals and the state,[2] and they can themselves be responsible for human rights violations.[3] Corporations are conceptually immortal but they can "die" when they are "dissolved" either by statutory operation, order of court, or voluntary action on the part of shareholders. Insolvency may result in a form of corporate 'death', when creditors force the liquidation and dissolution of the corporation under court order,[4] but it most often results in a restructuring of corporate holdings. Corporations can even be convicted of criminal offenses, such as fraud and manslaughter.[5

Yes, corporations are "people." I'm not really sure what the issue is with him saying so.

If you pass a law that makes pi equal to three, it doesn't mean that pi equals three.

The rights and responsibilities of corporations are determined, or terminated, by legislative action---entirely unlike actual humans who have intrinsic natural rights by Enlightenment philosophy and Constitutional history.

And thus the rights of corporations are always intrinsically subordinate to the rights of humans as individuals.

Corporations make no decisions except by those of humans running them, and yet this this corporate "personhood" has been used to subvert responsibility.

In practice, corporations have manipulated the system to do things that actual humans cannot, and this is the problem.

Can I incorporate my soul in the Cayman Islands and avoid paying taxes---because the body which does the work is just a contractor for my offshore owner?

Originally posted by schuyler
Romney is technically correct. That's what the word "incorporation" means--to become corporal. The whole idea was to create a legal entity that had the status of a person in and of itself, as opposed to a sole proprietorship, for example, which is owned by a single person.

But that's not what Romney meant. He was responding to the idea that we ought to "tax corporations" because they are fould and evil and all that. What he maybe should have said was that corporations don't pay taxes; people pay taxes. Taxing a corporation simply means the corporation passes those taxes along in the price of its products.

No, that's not true, the prices are determined by the supply and demand in a competitive market.

The people involved with wealthy corporations want 'personhood' to gain rights and evade personal liability, and yet when arguing for tax policy they pretend as though they are see-through nothings and so ought to pay nothing.

If they buy a coporate widget for $100, 40% of that may represent taxes the corporation pays, but the consumer never knows that. Besides which, dividends paid by corporations to shareholders are fully taxable as are all the salaries the corporation pays to its employees.

Your numbers are quite a bit off---if you buy something for $100, the profit margin may be $10-$15 of which maybe 15-20% (or less) is paid as taxes, so lets say $2. Increasing this to $2.30 isn't a giant change to the end-user.

Next, the compensation to employees is tax-deductible. Lowering the tax rate to corporations reduces the value of the tax deduction for hiring employees.

I do agree that dividends paid by companies should be tax-deductible to the companies, if and only if they are fully taxable at normal income rates by the recipients.

So when people say, "Tax those rich corporations!" what they are really saying is, "Please tax corporations so that the tax is hidden and I can pretend it isn't there."

No, it means that other people---the ones who are already making lots and lots and lots of money will pay more of the tax.

In practice the fraction of US taxes paid by corporations is actually very low compared to say the 1950's. The category which has increased to compensate is payroll taxes---these of course hit the lowest paid the most (as they are regressive) and directly increase the cost of hiring, as opposed to a corporate income tax.

Unfortunately for some, facts have a well known liberal bias.

reply to post by mossme89


" I Will Not Raise Taxes " .Hmm.....Where have I heard that BEFORE..........?

reply to post by ThirdEyeofHorus

Oh gee, so Australia sat around for 50 years letting asbestos factories go on? Interesting. Are you saying that America knew of the liabilities but Australia did not? If America ousted asbestos factories in 50's why did Australia take them in?

The same reason why we currently ship all our old electronics over to India for 'recycling'. The governments environmental standards are not as high there as there are here. Recycling electronics is very dangerous and expensive if it is done right as it has a lot of toxic elements in it. In India it is cheep, put it all in a big pit and burn it. The slurry that is left goes of for further refining.

Corporations use a process know as legal shopping. The law is very diverse around the world and you can get some favourable laws in a certain locations depending on what you want to do. The legal system is also very adversarial and it can be difficult to get to the truth, especially when corporations have a lot of resources to distract, avoid, confuse and escape the processes of justice. With the multinational culture of large corporations, the international legal system is at a disadvantage in addressing it. Currently it is up to lots of local legal systems to try and sort out their parts of the problems and gets quite messy and ineffective at times.

reply to post by mbkennel


Corporations do pass along taxes to the consumer. That is a factor in price in addition to regular market prices. It is foolish to pretend that if you just tax the evil corporations then all the poor people will have justice because now corporations will pay for entitlements that poor people feel entitled to. It will be made up in the price of goods. It's just not that difficult a concept. But Democrats have skewed this concept and people believe their lies.

Look at Romney's history in the corporate world: Acquire a company, lay off hundreds of workers, pocket the profits from the the sale. Rinse. Repeat.
There's your 'corporation' giving money to the people. Romney and his buddies are people, right? Those workers at the plants aren't? They got nothing. Romney got tens of millions. His idea of capitalism is to make huge amounts of money while condemning hundreds to unemployment. If this is capitalism, I'm not sure I want any part of it. If this is "Christian" I'm so glad I'm not a Christian. Benefiting from the misery of others is just morally bankrupt.

Corporations are people. They lobbied for that to be true to allow for 'donations' to political campaigns. The SCOTUS are far from impartial. They allowed this to make lobbying easier.
The GOP - and the Democrats - are bought. Just as Dylan Ratigan noted. They were bought by corporate 'people.' The only way corporations should be 'people' is by making the CEO completely liable. It would be amazing how quickly loopholes would be found if CEOs started to go to prison for the bovine-excrement that corporations get up to - and get caught doing!

He wouldn't raise taxes (for the rich) because he and his cronies would then have to pay more. A vote for Romney is a vote FOR Romney. A vote for the rich. You'll never be one of their club. It's a lie they keep telling you. Your vote will benefit the top tier only. Not you. There's no unity in the UNITED state of America. There's just the top couple of percent, and the rest of us. They've proven over and over that they don't care about anyone else.

Corporations are NOT people but a group of people, and already have a one man, one woman vote available.
This is just ridiculous to even say otherwise.

As long as money is involved, the voting power exceeds that of the average American and is just flat WRONG and not a democracy,

Originally posted by neo96

meh.

and corporations are made up of people middle class people who work for a living go ahead keep demonizing them and putting all those "good little middle class folks" out of work.

edit on 11-8-2011 by neo96 because: bad typing day sue me

Just had an idea to tackle this problem.

The United Nations has compiled the "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights" www.un.org... . It is a pretty good document in the way all the member states have gotten together and sorted out the issues. While its implementation is still a bit hit and miss around the world it does give the governments of the world something to aim towards.

Now what if a "The Universal Declaration of Corporate Rights" was set in stone. This will give the legal systems of the world something to look at, be guided by and provide a better consistency when dealing with these transnational entities. I know a lot of people would start freaking out by NWO takeover as the story was spun in the media by those who like there lawlessness playground, but with the peer review and discussion of the international community I believe they could responsibly and realistically address a lot of these ongoing problems.

A corporation certainly does provide income and livelihood for many real people, it grows and dynamically adapts to changes in it's environment. It makes intelligent and strategical moves in order to expand it's domain of control and sphere of influence. It is easy to claim a corporation is indeed a person, but that isn't the truth.

If a corporation goes bankrupt no one actually dies. People will lose their jobs but they can always get other jobs. The death of a corporation simply isn't equal to the death of a person, corporations die out all the time, maybe because they weren't innovative enough or maybe because the competition was just better.

When we treat corporations as people we place too much importance in the life of corporations rather than the life of real people. Mega-corporations will cover-up technological break-through simply because it's bad for business. Free energy and a cure for cancer wont be released any time soon.

Corporations desperate to cut costs will take any steps necessary, including using their toxic waste as material for the flouride that goes in your water, or build unsafe nuclear reactors on fault lines near the ocean and ignore proper safety procedures regardless of the clear hazards.

The list goes on and on and on, but I am done ranting...

Originally posted by neo96
reply to post by buster2010

 

i am not having this conversation if you people want to act like a bunch of fascist communist socialists

feel free i will have no part of it.

Neo...

"fascist communist socialists"? Why not throw in "anarchist monarchist luddite antideestaliblismentarians" as well, since you're slapping together a string of political titles that make no sense when strung together?

ATS needs to have its standards upgraded, swear to god.