"Corporations are people, my friends"-- NO!!

It sounded reasonable, coming from the Romney's mouth. They're made of people, they create jobs, etc. But there are a few very important differences between corporations and people.

Corporations have only one motive: to make money. People have many complex motives: to survive and take care of our families; to learn and explore our surroundings; to establish good relations with our neighbors; to leave something good behind to the next generation; to do good and avoid evildoing so that we can respect ourselves in the morning; etc. None of these things make any difference to corporations, or, if they do, they're window dressing. The only thing that makes any difference to a corporation is making money.

We can be satisfied, but corporations are never satisfied. We know, or most of us know, that there's only so much food we can eat, only so much space that we can occupy, only so many clothes that we can wear. A degree, a car, a roof over our heads, a good set of tools, a positive bank balance, a hot meal and a comfortable bed at the end of the day, all of these things can give us a sense of satisfaction that we've done enough, we've taken enough, now we can relax a bit and even think about giving something back. But corporations are never satisfied. There is always more money to be made.

We exist in complex life networks with other humans and other living things. We develop very complex moral codes for the purpose of protecting these relations. Although many moral codes have a religious veneer, some don't; and if you examine them closely they have a lot in common across cultures and they all exist for the purpose of protecting relations. We don't approve of things like murder, lying, stealing, oath-breaking, destruction of public property, etc, because these things threaten the networks we all depend on for survival. We don't even have to think about it; we just know that certain things are wrong because they're woven into our consciousness as social beings. And we know that if we do wrong, the consequences can be social ostracism, jail, or even death.

But corporations are bound by none of these considerations. If we lie or break a promise, no one wants anything to do with us any more, and we hate ourselves in the morning. If we kill someone or destroy public property, we go to jail. But corporations can do these things with impunity. In fact they do it daily, on a much larger scale than any human ever could. The worst that can happen is they get hit with a fine, maybe some bad publicity, which they can always gloss over with a good PR campaign. They don't have to worry about getting along with the neighbors or taking no more than their share; all they worry about is making more money. They don't have to worry about going to jail or worse if they do wrong. They're amoral and immortal.

Corporations exist for one purpose, to make money. And where does that money come from? From us! Money does not exist until we create it through our labor. Gold as ore in the ground has no value; it takes human labor to dig it up and refine it. When raw materials are processed into commodity goods, the price of these goods doubles at each step along the way, and value extracted from each transaction and transferred into the corporations' bottom line. This is why, as the saying goes, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

If you believe that one of the legitimate purposes of government is to protect the commons, and you recognize that corporations take freely from the commons yet are bound to give nothing back, it seems reasonable that corporations should be taxed to offset this imbalance. But now their Republican / Tea Party mouthpieces are saying that corporations should pay No Taxes! WHAT?!?! How come they get a free ride? Why do they get to use common resources like air, water, roads, communications networks, forests, land, and don't have to put anything back into the public treasury to maintain these resources?

So where are all our jobs going? Overseas. Why? We're told, because the tax burden here in the US is too high. But is that so? Or is it because they can get away with even more abuse of the people and the natural resources overseas? Here in the US we have laws to protect the workers, as well as laws to protect the commons such as our air, water, wildlife, and public lands. In some other countries, there are no such laws. Since corporations have no innate need to protect their networks of life, they have no sense of morality beyond the imperative to make money. We many cringe at deplorable working conditions or destruction of natural resources but corporations have no such sensibilities. So they go where there are no pesky laws making them behave decently, and they can make more money. That's all that matters to them.

So corporations aren't people. They don't have to worry about right and wrong, they don't have to worry about getting along with the neighbors or going to jail, they don't have to worry about anything but making money. They're never satisfied, and they never die. Now they're trying to claim all the privileges of citizenship and none of the responsibilities. Let's call them on their lies.