"Corporations Are People, My Friend."

You may have heard by now that at the Iowa State Fair today, my former Governor Mitt Romney, a man who makes vinyl seem organic, said to liberal hecklers that "Corporations are people, my friend." I've said it before and I'll say it again: If Romney ever gets elected president, it'll be the first inauguration done as a PowerPoint presentation and States of the Union would be faxed to Congress.



As far as political motivational speakers go, Romney is about as efficacious as Matt Foley, the poor sap who "lives in a van down by the river."



The sheer stupidity, disconnect and intellectual contortionism that goes through Romney's addled head is so...



OK, you know what? I'm not going there because such right wing nut jobbery is very likely communicable. Whenever I try to understand Romney's thought processes, my brain shuts down like a vapor-locked engine in the dead of winter. Any man that tries to present corporations as persons, latching on to a vandalized 1886 Supreme Court Ruling in order to make his point, is a dangerous person when many listen to him.



But then again, Romney is not merely conflating corporations with personhood but trying to artificially humanize a heartless and ruthless, self-absorbed, bottom line-driven, self-dealing corporate entity because, technically, it's made up of human beings, if by human beings you mean "carbon-based lifeforms that mimic human beings in a manner akin to John Carpenter's The Thing except insofar as psychological pathologies go then all fucking bets are off."



Ergo, in Romney's corporate cosmological view, corporations are people because the money that gets sucked out of Main St. and vacuumed into Wall St. wind up in the pockets of psychopaths/sociopaths who are generally accepted as part of the human race. You think I'm making this up? Watch the video below.







I quote:

"Everything corporations earn goes to people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? People's pockets. Human beings, my friend."

Fellow Republican Mormon Jon Huntsman scored a brownie point or two when his spokesman Tim Miller jabbed at him on Twitter, asking, "Was American Pad & Paper Company a person/friend?"



Romney's private equity corporate raider firm, Bain Capital, bought American Pad & Paper almost 20 years ago, threw nearly 400 people out of work and later bankrupted the company. But don't believe me: Here's what the Boston Globe wrote about the deal in much greater detail.



So, since corporations, to vinyl vampires like Romney, are people, this is what corporate people did to AmPad in conventional human terms:



Slaver buys slave for a pittance of his actual worth. Slave then is forced to sign slavery agreement whereby he agrees to pay his new owner out of his wages. Slaver then uses slave to go out to auctions for the express purpose of acquiring other slaves at rock-bottom prices. This is known as a "roll-up" strategy designed to maximize profits while cutting costs (i.e. pesky overhead expenses like jobs).



Slaver then extracts even larger "management" fees from the slave that includes but is not limited to draining his very blood. At the same time, slaver puts slave's services on the open market in an auction (IPO) and people enthusiastically throw money at the slaver, briefly elevating the slave's net worth.



Soon, the slave is made redundant and increasingly worthless in the face of cheaper slaves from overseas. Soon, the slave and each person dependent on his fortunes finds themselves out of work while the slaver continues bleeding him dry both literally and figuratively. The slave's overall value plummets from $26 to just fifteen cents in less than three years. Slave dies from blood loss. The slave's debt holders get less than half the debts owed to them because the poor slave master successfully cried poverty. After refusing to pay fair share of debts, slaver makes more than 20 times what it paid for the slave eight years before. Slaver pisses on slave's bones and walks away. The end.



In Romney's sociopathic worldview, this is what people do and are supposed to do to other people in the real world, a worldview that's absolutely indistinguishable from that of Gordon Gecko. Romney is a human being strictly in a biological sense of the concept of actual humanity and the sooner we realize that and drive that point home, the sooner we can laugh this plastic, Republican corporate fuckstick back into the obscurity he deserves.