Corporations aren’t people, which is why corporate speech needs to be regulated, which is why Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United are so grotesque.
As NPR noted, this statement was a “gift to political foes.” An easily condensed, easily dunked-upon sound bite, Romney’s gaffe revealed him to be a tool of the corporate class he had enriched as a vulture capitalist at Bain. I was 29 when Mitt Romney proclaimed, during the primary in the 2012 presidential campaign, that “corporations are people, my friend.” So: old enough to know exactly how this sort of statement would play with a press corps enamored of the Republican front-runner’s Democratic opponent. I’m so disoriented that I don’t know if left and right have switched positions, or if no one really has a position anymore. But I confess I’m a little shocked by the abrupt about-face on the issue of corporate speech and government efforts to restrain-or encourage-it. Hypocrisy is the only modern sin and a bit overplayed, a term deployed to justify one’s own power grabs and political-professional faults.
