Occupy New Hampshire Protester Takes Romney to Task for Declaring "Corporations Are People"

www.democracynow.org — Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney came under intense questioning at a campaign event in New Hampshire on Wednesday over his past comment that "corporations are people." Mark Provost, an audience member who identified himself as a member of Occupy Boston and Occupy New Hampshire, said to Romney: "In the last two years, corporate profits have surged to record highs directly at the expense of wages ... Now, it seems that the U.S. is a great place to be a corporation then, but increasingly a desperate place to live and work. So would you refine your earlier statement from 'corporations are people' to 'corporations are abusive people?'"

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[upsetDavid]

Did you notice he never mentioned that the profits could go toward higher wages for the workers

[nemy009]

Keyword here is "could".

Romney: "When a business has profit it COULD do good things."

The problem is they don't. As a matter of fact there are incentives for them to do bad things, to America that is. Like outsourcing manufacturing to other countries where they CAN pay the laborers slave wages, thus increasing their profits. Or, how about deliberately designing products to fail, so that you have to buy the same damn thing over and over again (i.e. planned obsolescence).

Romney = stooge

[demammoet]

He is SOO full of shit, a corporation is NOT made up of people working for the glory of the collective as he states.

A corporation is a legal entity OWNED by the shareholders, it may have people in it working.

But these are COMPLETELY disempowered people disconnected from any decision making forced to take orders in a tyrannical institution they have 0 control over.

So yes a corporation is not person, it is a rich man's plaything and the 401k is a horrible pension method made for the shareholder

[dominique62dw]

Ask yourself the question, If your company was owned by 1 of 2 people, Romney or Pres. Obama,& you would go on THEIR record dealing with companies,

"who would you trust to NOT SELL-OFF your firm, reap millions & lay-off ALL in your firm ONLY to get cash vs.FIXING & "EXPANDING" a firm & make money by SMART business decisions & tactics for SUCCESSFUL business?"

my guess, you'll agree, Pres. Obama is trustworthy, NOT FLIP-FLOPPER "Willard" ROMNEY who will say anything to be "a" President.

[dominique62dw]

I agree with much thats been said, including notes from upsetDavid & nemy009. Notice how Romney DODGES/loses original question by getting wrapped up in details?

He Never answers the question about corp's are not people, only says they're made up of people.He NEVER REALIZES corp's can PAY workers MORE or HIRE more people.he never hires,only downsizes,sells off &collapses corp's,reaping profits from sale, which has trickle effect,squashing OTHER Co's who rely on original firm he CLOSES!

[upsetDavid]

@Pteromandias So what determines their worth? The lowest amount you can pay someone to get them to do the job? So we should get rid of the minimum wage and all forms of social welfare so people will have to work just to keep from starving, and laborers can live like they do in Indonesia or in the US 100 years ago, so those with the wealth can horde even more of it.

[teabaggersblow]

Which Wall Street rat took the shit that republican politicians were blossomed from? Sounds like mumbo jumbo with a real need to offshore assets if you ever get rich enough to throw your money to some Swiss bankster. Time for all republican shitstains to go to the back of the line and stop rewriting history.

[Pteromandias]

It is impractical to apply the same rules of liability, debt, ownership, and other legalities to possibly millions of people separately. So a sort of shell, an umbrella concept emerges, the corporate personhood. This is a way for a large group of people who have pooled their resources to interact with other parts of a legal framework. There is nothing sinister about it. No one is taking clay and animating it. It's just a way of streamlining legal issues.

[Pteromandias]

So, let's say you're out driving, and a deliver truck from Ed's Bakery backs into you and damages your car. Well, Ed is the sole owner. He is liable. But what if it is a delivery truck for Sunshine? It has hundreds of thousands of owners, including people who have pensions and are not even aware that they are owners. And those people are constantly changing. Who is liable? Do you go after the shareholders? Which ones? Seconds after the accident, a bunch of shares may have changed hands.

[Pteromandias]

For one, legal personhood doesn't imbue something with life. No matter what, at the heart of it, there are still people. A corporation doesn't have a life of its own. So why do you need this concept? Because of what a corporation is. It is a form of organization where millions of people can participate in ownership, and where people can routinely and easily enter or exit that ownership. This makes a lot of legal issues much harder to deal with than if it were a sole proprietorship.

[Pteromandias]

What the vast majority of you are failing to grasp, and even Amy Goodman does this, is that Romney isn't talking about *corporate personhood*. You guys are all acting like he is. All he is doing is making the otherwise unremarkable point that only humans can engage in human activity, no matter what labels and abstractions we use.

But there's another matter too, and it's this bizarre paranoia about the legal personhood of corporations, and there seems to be a lot of misconceptions about it.

[Pteromandias]

@nemy009 Slave wages? I guess you didn't notice that nice little built-in contradiction there. You assclowns had your little "slave wage" morality play in Bangladesh and we saw how that played out. It was great for the pedophile industry, by the way.

The problem with you people is you assume that if not for those "slave wages" there would be a nice middle class job waiting for them.