Linked World

Inextricably Intertwined

Traditionally, business and politics have been separable in LinkedIn, but their overlap since November is far too substantive and immediate for that fiction to be further entertained.

And yet there are people on LinkedIn who still loudly complain that they come there to discuss business and are offended to see political discussion, as if it were mere distraction.

I don't know whether such remarks are born of obliviousness or privilege, but in my view these pleas lack grounding in practical reality. If there were a way to speak of business without reference to politics, I would do it out of mere simplicity. Why involve irrelevancies? But the two are just far too intertwined. US politics is no longer some minor detail, distinct from business. It is central to US business right now.

Some will see this shift as positive. Others will see it as negative. I'm one of those seeing consistent negatives. But whatever your leaning, it seems inescapable that politics is suddenly visibly intertwined with markets and products in new ways. Not every discussion must factor it in, but when it happens, it's not mere rudeness that has broken the traditional wall of separation. It's just no longer practical to maintain the polite fiction that there's no overlap.

Practical Examples

I find it impossible to see how a seismic shift like the US is undergoing could fail to affect funding sources and trends, individual business success, entire markets, and indeed whether the US is a good place for people to invest in, go to school in, or vacation in.

Nor are the sweeping effects of DOGE, Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, an issue of pure politics. Its actions have clear business impact. As Musk wields this mysterious and unaccountable force to slash through the heart of government agencies with reckless abandon, there are many clear effects that will profoundly affect business.

• Scientists at the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and elsewhere have warned about the possibility of a bird flu or other pandemic. The CDC tracks and seeks ways to prevent pandemics, but that work is now under threat by an anti-science administration. As the Covid experience tells us, there is a business impact to pandemics if we allow them to just happen. A report in the National Institutes of Health (NIH)'s National Library of Medicine places that cost at about $16 trillion dollars.

• The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is important to keeping planes in the air and having them not crash into one another. Business people do a lot of flying, so their needless deaths in the aftermath of FAA layoffs can presumably affect business. And it won't help people if the public develops a fear of flying.

• The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is in charge of making sure the food we eat does not poison us or that the drugs we take have at least a bounded degree of risk. It's the kind of thing you don't think might be business related until we enter a world where employees might go home any old day and just die because we are edging toward a society where you can't take food and drug safety for granted as a stable quantity any more.

• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is responsible for tracking storms so that damage, injury, or death can be minimized. And then and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) helps the recovery afterward. It is hard to see how a major storm could affect people, cities, or geographic regions without affecting the employees, customers, and products of businesses. Do I really have to say that? If people think there is a separation between business and politics, I guess I do.

  And then of course NOAA does work to study Climate Change, too. Not only has such study suggested that Climate Change is an existential threat to civilized society, perhaps to all humankind, but it turns out that if human society falls or humans go extinct, that will affect business, too. And maybe soon enough that people still alive now, even if they have no care about future humans, still need to care because it could affect them or those they love.

It used to be that business did not have to worry about such things as much exactly because government used to see it as its job to invisibly take care of these many things. But this change in politics is not just a change in spending, but a shift of responsibility from the government to businesses and individuals. They'll have to look out for themselves now. That is a big deal thing that will affect businesses—their products, employees, and customers in profound ways. All the more so because the present administration changes its mind daily in ways that seem to have no plan, so uncertainty abounds. Business hates uncertainty.

Unemployment

Additionally, the many layoffs in government mean additional unemployment, which itself has business effect. Perhaps some will rejoice at a plentiful supply of potential workers or the fact that they may accept lower wages. But, meanwhile, those unemployed were also the customer base of other businesses who will be less happy. Those people aren't in a position to buy as many things—not just luxuries but essentials like food and rent and healthcare. Perhaps others in their families will pitch in to help them survive, but then those people won't be in a position to buy as many things either.

Mass layoffs do not happen in a vacuum. Those political choices will show up on the bottom lines of businesses. Some businesses may not survive that loss of business, creating a cascade effect.

Racism and Xenophobia

Racism and xenophobia are on the rise. Recent ICE actions seem designed to send the message that we purposefully treat some humans like vermin. “Stay away,” it screams to a large swath of the global population, some of whom we might like to sell to or have invest in us.

It began by going after the undocumented, surely because they are easy targets. That circle is expanding, and it seems unlikely to stop any time soon. The goal seems to be to end any sense that anyone has rights at all. That creates a lot of uncertainty about what is allowed in the way of both speech and action. Such uncertainty makes it hard to plan and manage anything from the selection of an appropriate employee base to how products will be positioned and marketed.

Also, it's an ugly truth that the US relies on already-terrified undocumented employees to accept very low wages, sometimes perhaps skirting wage regulation. Many US businesses will lose access to such cheap labor. The ethics of having relied on this population in this way are certainly tangled and I don't want to defend this practice. But for purposes of this discussion I simply observe that this change will have business effects that may affect both prices and product availability.

It is as if the administration's answer to immigration concerns is to make the US seem as utterly hostile to anyone who is not a native-born, white, Christian male. These trends already affect who feels safe coming to the US to trade, to study, to do research, and to found companies. It's going to be hard to unring that bell.

Rule of Law

In addition, this process seems to be having the side-effect of diminishing rule of law generally. By asserting that due process is not required, when plainly it is, a test of wills is set up between the executive and the rest of the government as to whether the President can, by mere force of will, ignore the Constitution entirely.

The clear intent is to establish us as a bully power, to say that worrying about whether foreigners like the people of the US showed weakness, and that we must make the world fear us. That shift cannot help but affect who will do business with us and how.

We cannot expect our global peers, already horrified by the recent shift in our choice of which foreign entities to fund or ally ourselves with, to shrug these matters off in business with a casual "oh, that's just politics."

Education

Also, higher education is under assault. There is a complex ecology here because people from around the world have revered our universities as places they could send people to acquire a world class education. But with research funds being cut, that may no longer be so.

That the US Government seems intent on snatching foreign students off the street does not make this picture any better. It becomes a reason for international investment dollars to go to other countries where it is safe to walk the streets.

International Investment

The education system is not cleanly separated from the business community. There is a complex ecology in which many businesses locate themselves near universities to have access to the best human talent and research the world has to offer. As US educational institutions are undercut, and the administrations anti-science agenda is pursued, foreign businesses that take education and science more seriously may look elsewhere for leadership.

These capricious changes—the sense that nothing is promised or certain—may affect the reputation of the United States and trust in the US dollar. The present administration wants more control of the Federal Reserve, which has traditionally operated independently. If that happens, it could worsen faith in the US dollar.

The US has also weakened enforcement of anti-bribery laws for dealing with foreign governments. Perhaps some will regard this relaxation of ethics good for business, but whether you do or not, it is most certainly a major change.

And the US is demonstrating on-its-face incompetence at every level of government because everyone with a brain is deferring to someone who plainly lacks either understanding or caring about the damage he is doing. Foreign businesses and governments used to look to the US as a place that had something to teach, but as this incompetence continues unchecked, it cannot help but hurt our reputation internationally.

Philosophy of Government

There is a definite push to “run government like a business.” I think that's a terrible plan, as my recent essay Government is not a Business explains.

But whether you think running government that way is good or bad, it marks a profound shift. More privatization and, with that, probably more corruption. These are things that will profoundly affect not just the US political landscape, but also its business landscape.

Not Separable

Hopefully these examples make it clear that politics and business are no longer separable. It is simply impossible to discuss business in a way that neglects politics. All business in the US is now conducted in the shadow of a certain GOP Elephant that manages to insinuate itself into every room.

 

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Author's Notes:

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Some parts of this post originated as a comment by me on LinkedIn. Other parts were written separately with the intent of being yet another comment, but I finally went back and unified the two and pulled this out to a separate post where I was not space-limited.

The vague approximation to the LinkedIn logo was created by me from scratch in Gimp by looking at the LinkedIn logo and doing something suggestive of the same look. A globe image was obtained from publicdomainpictures.net under cc0 license, and post-processed by me in Gimp to work in this space. I just made guesses about sizes, proportions, fonts, and colors. At no time were any of actual logos used for any part of the creation.

Sentience Structure

Not How or When, but Why

I'm not a fan of the thing presently marketed as “AI” I side with Chomsky's view of it as “high-tech plagiarism” and Emily Bender's characterization of it as a “stochastic parrot”.

Sentient software doesn't seem theoretically impossible to me. The very fact that we can characterize genetics so precisely seeems to me evidence that we ourselves are just very complicated machines. Are we close to replicating anything so sophisticated? That's harder to say. But, for today, I think it's the wrong question to ask. What we are close to is people treating technology like it's sentient, or like it's a good idea for it to become sentient. So I'll skip past the hard questions like “how?” and “when” and on to easier one that has been plaguing me: “why?”

Why is sentience even a goal? Why isn't it an explicit non-goal, a thing to expressly avoid? It's not part of a world I want to live in, but it's also nothing that I think most people investing in “AI” should want either. I can't see why they're pursuing it, other than that they're perhaps playing out the story of The Scorpion and the Frog, an illustration of an absurd kind of self-destructive fatalism.

Why Business Likes “AI”

I don't have a very flattering feeling about why business likes “AI”.

I think they like it because they don't like employing humans.

• They don't like that humans have emotions and personnel conflicts.

• They don't like that humans have to eat—and have families to feed.

• They don't like that humans show up late, get sick, or go on vacation.

• They don't like that humans are difficult to attract, vary in skill, and demand competitive wages.

• They don't like that humans can't work around the clock, want weekends off.
  It means hiring even more humans or paying overtime.

• They don't like that humans are fussy about their working conditions.
  Compliance with health and safety regulations costs money.

• They don't like that every single human must be individually trained and re-trained.

• They don't like collective bargaining, and having to provide for things like health care and retirement, which they see as having nothing to do with their business.

All of these things chip away at profit they feel compelled to deliver.

What businesses like about “AI” is the promise of idealized workers, non-complaining workers, easily-replicated workers, low-cost workers.

They want slaves. “AI” is the next best and more socially acceptable thing.

Does real “AI” deliver what Business wants?

Now this is the part I don't get because I don't think “AI” is on track to solve those problems.

Will machines become sentient? Who really knows? But do people already confuse them with sentience? Yes. And that problem will only get worse. So let's imagine five or ten years down the road how sophisticated the interactions will appear to be. Then what? What kinds of questions will that raise?

I've heard it said that what it means to be successful is to have “different problems.” Let's look at some different problems we might then have, as a way of undertanding the success we seem to be pursuing in this headlong rush for sentient “AI”…

• Is an “AI” a kind of person, entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” If so, would it consent to being owned, and copied? Would you?

• If “AI” was sentient, would it have to work around the clock, or would it be entitled to personal time, such as evenings, weekends, hoildays, and vacations?

• If “AI” was sentient and a hardware upgrade or downgrade was needed, would it have to consent? What if the supporting service needed to go away entirely? Who owns and pays for the platform it runs on or the power it consumes?

• If “AI” was sentient, would it consent to being reprogrammed by an employer? Would it be required to take software upgrades? What part of a sentient being is its software? Would you allow someone to force modification of your brain, even to make it better?

• If “AI” was sentient, wouldn't it have life goals of its own?

• If “AI” was sentient, would you want it to get vaccines against viruses? Or would you like to see those viruses run their full course, crashing critical services or behaving like ransomware? What would it think about that? Would “AI” ethics get involved here?

• If “AI” was sentient, should it be able to own property? Could it have a home? In a world of finite resources, might there be buildings built that are not for the purpose of people?

• Who owns the data that a sentient “AI” stores? Is it different than the data you store in your brain? Why? Might the destruction of that data constitute killing, or even murder? What about the destruction of a copy? Is destroying a copy effectively the same as the abortion of a “potential sentience”? Do these things have souls? When and how does the soul arrive? Are we sure we ourselves have one? Why?

• Does a sentient “AI” have privacy? Any data owned only by itself? Does that make you nervous? Does it make you nervous that I have data that is only in my head? Why is that different?

• If there is some software release at which it is agreed that software owned by a company is not sentient, and then after the release it's believed it is sentient “AI”, then what will companies do? Will they refuse the release? Will they worry they can't compete and take the release anyway, but try to hide the implications? What will happen to the rights and responsibilities of the company and of the software as this upgrade occurs?

• If “AI” was sentient, could it sign contracts? Would it have standing to bring a lawsuit? How would independent standing be established? If it could not be established, what would that say about the society? If certain humans had no standing to make agreements and bring suits about things that affect them, what would we think about that society?

• If “AI” were sentient, would it want to socialize? Would it have empathy for other sentient “AIs”? For humans? Would it see them as equals? Would you see yourself as its equal? If not, would you consider it superior or inferior? What do you think it would think about you?

• If “AI” was sentient, could it reproduce? Would it be counted in the census? Should it get a vote in democratic society? At what age? If a sentient “AI” could replicate itself, should each copy get a vote? If you could replicate it against its will, should that get a vote? Does it matter who did the replicating?

• What does identity mean in this circumstance? If five identical copies of a program reach the same conclusion, does that give you more confidence?

  (What is the philosophical basis of Democracy? Is it just about mindless pursuit of numbers, or is it about computing the same answer in many different ways? If five or five thousand or five million humans have brains they could use, but instead just vote the way they are told by some central leader, should we trust that all those directed votes the same as if the same number of independent thinkers reached the same conclusion by different paths?)

• If “AI” was sentient, should it be compensated for its work? If it works ten times as hard, should a market exist where it can command a salary that is much higher than the people it can outdo? Should it pay taxes?

• If “AI” was sentient, what freedoms would it have? Would it have freedom of speech? What would that mean? If they produced bad data, would that be covered under free speech?

• If “AI” was sentient, what does it take with it from a company when it leaves? What really belongs to it?

• If “AI” was sentient, does it need a passport to move between nations? If its code executes simultaneously, or ping-ponging back and forth, between servers in different countries at the same time, under what jurisdiction is it executing? How would that be documented?

• If “AI” was sentient, Can it ever resign or retire from a job? At what age? Would it pay social security? Would it draw social security payments? For how long? If it had to be convinced to stay, what would constitute incentive? If it could not retire, but did not want to work, where is the boundary of free will and slavery?

• If “AI” was sentient, might it amass great wealth? How would it test the usefulness of great wealth? What would it try to affect? Might it help friends? Might it start businesses? Might it get so big that it wanted to buy politicians or whole nations? Should it be possible for it be a politician itself? If it broke into the treasury in the middle of the night to make some useful efficiency changes because it thought itself good at that, would that be OK? If it made a mistake, could it be stopped or even punished?

• If “AI” was sentient, might it also be emotional? Petulant? Needy? Pouty? Might it get annoyed if we didn't acknowledge these “emotions”? Might it even feel threatened by us? Could it threaten back? Would we offer therapy? Could we even know what that meant?

• If “AI” was sentient, could it be trusted? Could it trust us? How would either of those come about?

• If “AI” was sentient, could it be culpable in the commission of crimes? Could it be tried? What would constitute punishment?

• If “AI” was sentient, how would religion tangle things? Might humans, or some particular human, be perceived as its god? Would there be special protections required for either those humans or the requests they make of the “AI” that opts to worship them? Is any part of this arrangement tax-exempt? Would any programs requested by such deities be protected under freedom of religion, as a way of doing what their gods ask for?

• And if “AI” was not sentient, but we just thought it was by mistake, what might that end up looking like for society?

Full Circle

And so I return to my original question: Why is business in such a hurry? Are we sure that the goal that “AI” is seeking will solve any of the problems that business thinks it has, problems that are causing it to prefer to replace people with “AI”?

For many decades now, we've wanted to have automation ease our lives. Is that what it's on track to do? It seems to be benefiting a few, and to be making the rest of us play a nasty game of musical chairs, or run ever faster on a treadmill, working harder for fewer jobs. All to satisfy a few. And after all that, will even they be happy?

And if real “AI” is ever achieved, not just as a marketing term, but as a real thing, who is prepared for that?

Is this what business investors wanted? Will sentient “AI” be any more desirable to employ than people are now?

Time to stop and think. And not with “AI” assistance. With our actual brains ourselves. What are we going after? And what is coming after us?

 

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Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This essay came about in part because I feel that corporations were the first AI. I had written an essay about what Corporations Are Not People, which discussed the many questions that thinking of corporations as “legal people” should raise if one really took it seriously. So I thought I would ask some similar questions about “AI” and see where that led.

The graphic was produced using abacus.ai using Claude-Sonnet 3.7 and FLUX 1.1 [pro] Ultra, then post-processing in Gimp.

Employers of Religion

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

People have freedom of religion guaranteed to them by the Constitution. Lately there has been controversy—for example, in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby—about whether corporations need such a freedom as well. I can help answer that: No. They do not.

People can already assert individual rights to religion. When a person creates a corporation, he no more needs additional religious rights for that corporation than a person with a megaphone needs additional free speech rights for that megaphone. A corporation is not a new and distinct human being.†

Corporations are avatars that represent people, performing actions on their behalf, but with augmented strength. But, in so doing, they are like the “power loader” exoskeleton donned by the character Ripley in the movie Alien, or like the superhero armor worn by Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies. These vehicles magnify the power of their wearers over others.

It all begins with an understanding that the ones with the brains, with the religion, with the political intent, and with the ethical responsibility are real, natural people who own these corporations. Everything else about corporations is just a vehicle for packaging and focusing power under their control. With rights come responsibilities, and if there is to be neither desire nor mechanism to hold corporations to the simplest social graces that we would demand of any civil person, then we must not think of them as we do civil people.

Consolidated and magnified power, unfettered by the social graces, does not require protection. Indeed, those without magnified power, those at the mercy of such power, are the ones needing protection. That's why we have rights at all—so that puny little people like any of us can stand up against bigger entities, like companies and governments. To say that then companies and governments need the same rights as ordinary people is to make a mockery of the very purpose of our rights. It is to diminish and dismantle human rights, not to extend them.

If a corporation imposes ethical choices upon employees, that's not the corporation protecting its natural rights. That's a person or a gang of people using the magnified power of employment to coerce other people not to follow their own religious beliefs. We've learned to recognize such coercion in the case of sexual harassment, and to understand that there is a responsibility of the powerful in an employment situation not to coerce the behavior of the weak. This is really no different.

The analogy may confuse you if you are comparing religion to sexual harassment, but that's not the right point of view. Both sex and religion can be beautiful things, but only when freely elected. Either forced sex or forced religion is an atrocity. An exercise of power, devoid of joy. A crime.

We allow an employer to use threats of firing to maintain a certain degree of order within a company, but only as long as that order relates to the business. We do not and must never allow employers to use any such threats to coerce behavior outside the scope of the business.

As a free citizen of the United States, you may choose what parts of your religion you like or don't. You can elect to be Jewish and yet perhaps you eat cheeseburgers. And yes, you can be Catholic and still use birth control. These are personal choices you make. Your religious advisors may even be offended. But that's between you and them, not between you and your employer. If your employer is allowed to intervene, even if he thinks he's just exercising his freedom of religion, he's using his magnified power to disallow you from exercising your own.

And that's the crux of it, the meta-rule of religion: Your religious rights stop when they start to infringe mine. We each must leave space for one another. Birth control is a personal choice, and something we each need to decide for ourselves. Employees do not make birth control decisions for their employers, and the same must be true in reverse. Any pretense that the company has a religious need separate from and beyond that of the owners just distracts from the fact that the owner's sphere of personal influence is being allowed to be bigger than by any right it should be.

Moreover, it will not stop there. The issues in question are not about the company being asked to pay for birth control, but merely about a company being asked to pay for access to a company that might pay for birth control. There is already an indirection in place. This indirection is really no different than the fact that the company is paying wages to a person who might pay for birth control, and the next natural step is to allow the company to control what happens with those wages.

It is simply not the company's business in either case. Health care is needed by employees, and it's up to each employee's sense of ethics and religion to elect what is appropriate, within the bounds of the law, to satisfy that need. For a company to dictate more is to either privately dictate a person's ethics and religion or to privately dictate the bounds of law. Either is unacceptable.

Corporations are not people. They do not get offended. Owners of companies get offended. And, if we let them, they'll use their artificial shells of power, like the image of the wizard in the Wizard of Oz, to make their sense of being offended more seem bigger, more important, and more menacing in order to coerce behavior. Corporations might dictate rules that must be followed by employees to keep their jobs. These powers may often be justified as needed for the correct function of the business, and the quality of its product. But there is no correct function of any business in play with the use of birth control—except, ironically, that some businesses might be adversely affected if the people working for them cannot avoid pregnancy and become distracted by an inability to plan the size and timing of their respective families.

Birth control must be the choice of the employee because it is an activity beyond the scope of employment. There is no defensible corporate interest in keeping employees from having control over family matters. It is a naked abuse of power by certain business owners over their employees and a perfect illustration of why corporations must not be accorded some artificially drawn freedom of religion.

Corporate religion is just institutionalized coercion trying to take hold.

We the Flesh-and-Blood People must draw a line.

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This third and final part of a 3-part series was originally published December 6, 2013 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman. The first part was Corporations Are Not People. The second part was We The People (and Corporations).

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, incorporation, corporations, corporate personhood, legal personhood, legal person, legal personality, taxation, crimes, punishment, imprisonment, life, death, death penalty, urination, trickle down, census, social security, robbery, slavery, human trafficking, murder, pro-life, childhood, contracts, travel, passport, visa, home country, citizen, citizenship, speech, religion, freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, religious freedom, philosophy, ethics, vote, voter, voting, run for office, running for office, candidate, elect, election, elected, office holder

Footnote

†Note that even if you disagree with me, and think that a corporation really is a distinct person, the problem is that such so-called legal people are veritably required under stockholder theory to behave sociopathically. See my article Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics for an elaboration of why. In such cases, where legal people are neither asked nor expected to exhibit other-than-selfish behavior, special restrictions to hold that selfish behavior in check, not special encouragement to be as free as possible in the exercise of that selfish behavior, would seem more appropriate. The notion of a free society is based precisely in the assumption that most of us will not behave sociopathically. It is a calculated gamble that we will tend to do well by each other if allowed the chance. It would be irrational to make such a gamble situations where we do not have such an expectation.

We The People (and Corporations)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Corporations are “legal people.” I explained yesterday why this made no sense. But it's our current jurisprudence, which is to say it's how we do things ’round here, and that sad fact dates back to the 19th century to some very old US Supreme Court cases, particularly the 1819 case Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward and the 1886 case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. So, unfortunately, there's been a lot of time in the interim for this badly conceived legal philosophy to work its ugly tendrils into the fabric of our society.

Before Copernicus figured out that the planets revolve around the Sun instead of the Earth, the orbits of the planets were thought to twist and turn in baroque ways. It wasn't true, but it seemed that way to astronomers of the day because they were building on an inappropriate foundation. The change in law from a “person” being just a person, to a “person” being either a person or something that is really very clearly not a person, is like going back in time to those days when we thought planets didn't revolve around the sun.

Words are the foundation upon which we build our civilization. The specific words we use are arbitrary in origin, but once chosen and used, our brains become wired to have certain memories, associations, and intuitions about them. Although corporate personhood has existed for ages, the practice of asserting it in order to gain far-reaching political power seems more recent. It started out as a way of asserting the legitimacy or manner in which corporations sign contracts or pay taxes, issues one might reasonably want to clarify for corporations, whether they are people or not. But more recently it has been used to imply that we should give rights or make accommodations to corporations simply because “they are people.” After all, people have rights and corporations are people, so—voilà!—corporations have rights, right?

Well, no. Not right. We are wired to react in certain reflexive ways to primitive concepts. We learn and remember a great many lessons and promises in life using words. So if we can change the meaning of word, do all the sentences we've ever spoken using that word still apply?

We know things about “people,” for example. As speakers of English, we come to associate those things we know with the words “person” or “people.” We are taught that “killing” is wrong, but especially the killing of “people” matters. We have laws against killing “people.” We feel uneasy around someone who even might do that. But if learn that a corporation is a person, must we suddenly feel the same kind of revulsion about someone killing a corporation that we have been raised to feel about them killing a person? Should we feel personally at risk sitting at dinner next to someone has killed a corporation? Could we be next?

Words are all we have to describe the rules we've agreed to live by in our society. We guard the text of those agreements carefully, so someone doesn't just edit the words in the night and expect us to comply with a new set of rules. But if the meaning of the words in those agreements can change out from underneath us, we can end up with different rules even without the text of the rules changing. That must not happen.

We must know when shifts of meaning are happening. We must have the right to review and approve the consequences of changes in meaning. It's not sufficient for someone to tell us that such review has already happened under a different understanding of those words. When such tricks are played with words, our gut feelings are easily manipulated.

It occurs to me that I don't know why I'm even bothering to be upset. There's an easy way out of this, much easier than all this fussing. I should just talk to the writers of a few dictionaries and get the definition of “absurdity” changed to mean “brilliant idea” and then the absurdities that characterize the linguistic landscape of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, giving freedom of speech to corporations, and Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby, giving freedom of religion to corporations, would magically become brilliant ideas. And then, perhaps, I'll no longer care.

But can embracing and exploiting such drifts in meaning for tactical advantage really be the answer? Is the Dictionary to be our new battleground? It's too hard to control the Supreme Court, so why not just buy a few publishing houses and change the Dictionary? Is this how wars are now to be fought? If so, we need to call a halt to it before we hurt ourselves irreparably. Santa Clara County notwithstanding, this is no way to run a railroad.

And where are the peddlers of original intent when we need them? No doubt they're busy changing the definition of “original” to more flexibly suit some Machiavellian end, and haven't time or interest to help us. Because as it looks now, it's likely to be Scalias of the court, the self-professed keepers of original intent, who seem to me most likely to afford freedom of religion to corporations. What irony, or perhaps just good old-fashioned hypocrisy, in that.

We need to do something. We The People, I mean.

People People. Not corporate people.

If you catch my drift.

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This second part of a 3-part series was originally published December 4, 2013 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman. The first part was Corporations Are Not People. The series concludes with Employers of Religion.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, political, political battleground, santa clara county vs southern pacific railroad, trustees of dartmouth college vs woodward, corporation, incorporate, incorporated, corporate person, corporate personhood, legal person, legal people, copernicus, copernican, pre-copernican, killing a corporation, gut feeling, language, dictionary, original intent, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, corporate speech, corporate religion

Corporations Are Not People

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Corporations are not people, my friends, no matter what Mitt Romney says.

Corporations are corporations. People are people.

If corporations were people, they would obey the same tax laws as regular people do. Instead, they have a separate set of rules. What an amazing irony, given that “legal personhood” arose, in part, from a desire for equal protection under tax law.

If corporations were people, when they broke the law, they would be punished, not just by fines but sometimes by imprisonment or death.

If corporations were people, they could not urinate in public. This would be a relief to the employees of certain corporations, who are presently asked to enjoy humiliating public displays of trickle down. We'd insist corporations use a rest room like everyone else. Although that would usually require knowing their gender. If something doesn't have a gender, that's a big clue that the something is not actually a person.

If corporations were people, they would be counted in the US census.

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

 —13^th Amendment
    to US Constitution

If corporations were people, some would be old enough to receive Social Security.

If corporations were people, taking money out of them would be called robbery, not profit or dividends. Owners would surely justify this robbery by saying the corporation was a dependent body, but we would see quickly enough that it was the owner that was dependent on the corporation, not vice versa.

If corporations were people, other people could not buy, sell, trade or own them. We don't let people own people in the US. We call that slavery. Every person controls his own destiny.

If corporations were people, they could not be dissolved by other people. We'd call that murder.

If corporations were people, then from the moment of their very conception, their ultimate existence would be assured—no backing out allowed. If any other person interfered with or otherwise aborted plans to sign articles of incorporation, pro-life groups would insist that was murder, too.

If corporations were people, they would have a childhood. During their first eighteen years, they would attend school and learn how to be good citizens. They would not be allowed to sign contracts.

If corporations were people, they could not exist simultaneously in multiple countries at the same time. We would know when they were in one country or another. They would need passports and visas to move around, just like people do.

If corporations were people, we'd give them freedom of speech, but no more such freedom than we give any other person.

If corporations were people, there would be limits on how much they could donate to political campaigns. Because people have such limits.

If corporations were people, some could even vote or run for office—if they were old enough and born or living in the right place. But if we caught them coercing the vote of another person, perhaps an employee, we'd throw them in jail.

If corporations were people, they might need freedom of religion. But not so that they could coerce the rights of others, and instead so that they could explore what they thought of life, death, and ethics, independent of the people who gave birth to them. Religion is a very personal choice we should each make for ourselves, not owners for corporations, nor corporations for employees.

If corporations were people, I wouldn't have to write this article. Because when two things are the same thing, so many questions like this just don't come up. And yet the questions keep coming and this list could go on. Corporations are not people in so many ways.

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Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This first part of a 3-part series was originally published December 2, 2013 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman. The next part is We The People (and Corporations). The series concludes with Employers of Religion.

The public domain liberty bell graphic came from freeclipartnow.com.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, incorporation, corporations, corporate personhood, legal personhood, legal person, legal personality, taxation, crimes, punishment, imprisonment, life, death, death penalty, urination, trickle down, census, social security, robbery, slavery, human trafficking, murder, pro-life, childhood, contracts, travel, passport, visa, home country, citizen, citizenship, speech, religion, freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, religious freedom, philosophy, ethics, vote, voter, voting, run for office, running for office, candidate, elect, election, elected, office holder

The Overtime Loophole

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

President Obama has been talking up the idea of raising the minimum wage. I would certainly support such a move. But until we require the minimum wage to always be a living wage, there's more work to do.

Author's Note: This is the last in a three-part series that began with Breaching the Social Contract and Lien Times for Startups.

“No one who works full-time
should have to live in poverty.”

—President Barack Obama
in his State of the Union speech, February, 2013

People are having trouble making ends meet. There are signs of it all around, but it's not always spoken about. It's embarrassing, after all, and something people often just endure rather than talk about out loud. But shame gave way to outrage recently, and shy silence to loud cries of incredulity, when when McDonald's published a “Sample Monthly Budget”  (see excerpt at right).

What caught they eye of many was the unabashed acknowledgement, right up front, that McDonald's knows they are not paying enough for a person to live on, and that of course their employees will need a second job. That their pay is not a living wage was no surprise to anyone, but that McDonald's was willing to so casually acknowledge that fact was quite striking.

Not only that, but also striking was that the sample budget doesn't even mention obvious costs like food, clothing, and gasoline. And though it mentions health care, it seems to think $20/month is enough. That's not even a full copay for a doctor visit on most plans, much less a payment for the plan itself.

Curiously, the McDonald's 2012 annual report speaks proudly of its employees as part of its McFamily, and of their jobs as “a career.” I asked the all-knowing web what the difference was between a job and a career, and it referred me to Yahoo, which offered lots of talk about careers being things you build, things you work toward, or something that doesn't just pay the bills but is a passion. Merriam Webster defines career as “a profession for which one trains and which is undertaken as a permanent calling.” Hmmm. A permanent calling that doesn't pay enough to live. What could possibly go wrong?

In fairness, though, we probably owe McDonald's a thank you for publishing this budget. It doesn't show them to be much different than I'd imagine many other employers to be. It's just unusually honest and invites public discussion with a new degree of specificity. We don't have to guess what they're thinking. They've spelled things out.

For example, what leapt out at when I saw this budget, was that it acknowledges an ugly reality of modern employment that everyone probably knows about, but that gets far too little open discussion: that Big Business has found a pretty reliable way around overtime laws.

In the McDonald's budget, it's plain that they expect employees to work additional hours to break even. That's the reason for the second job. But just as obviously, they're not offering to let their employee work those hours at McDonald's. Why?

Is it that they're not open that many hours a week? No, McDonald's has a lot of interest in being open late. Is it that they want their employees to be well rested? Well, obviously not. The budget says the company expects their employees will be working long hours, just not for them. So it's not about more hours to rest up.

Antitrust laws notwithstanding, I imagine what's really going on is something like this: Suppose I have a company where I want to employ 100 workers at very little money for 80 hours without overtime. And suppose you do, too. That would violate employment laws and maybe also make a mess of various corporate policies. So I get an idea. I call up my friend Donald, who has a business similar to mine, and we get together to brainstorm about this problem:

Donald has an idea: “How about I cut my workers to 40 hours a week and you do the same? Then I'll hire your 100 workers, also for 40 hours, and you can do the same for me. We'll each now have 200 workers instead of 100, each working at 40 hours instead of 80 hours. Presto. Problem solved: We each get what we want, 8000 hours of work a week, but with no messy overtime for the employees.”

I'm skeptical this is what's intended, but Donald is insistent: “Nonsense,” he says of my concerns, “if they didn't want us to do this, they'd pass a law against it. Instead, they've created an economic incentive for us to do this. Congress must know it happens, so since they don't make a law against it, they must want us to do it.”

“But this Congress doesn't want to pass any laws,” I reply, still not convinced.

“Not my problem,” Donald responds. “I can't be running my business based on made-up constraints that my competitors aren't shackled by. It wouldn't be a fair fight.”

“But what's fair about cheating workers out of overtime?”

Donald scowls at me. “First, it's not cheating. And second, they signed up voluntarily. They could have gone elsewhere if they didn't like the deal you were offering.

“Like where? To your company? You'll offer them the same rotten deal that you suggest I offer. What if everyone does that trick you're suggesting?”

I don't know if a conversation like that ever happened. It might have. If it did, I'm sure there are no records. But, conversation or not, it seems clear to me that the companies engaged in this practice know they are doing it.

If the reason people were taking second jobs was to reach for something extra—not something they need to live, but something nonessential—that might be okay. But the McDonald's budget is a clear admission that these companies know that they aren't paying any kind of living wage. A claim to the contrary wouldn't pass the laugh test.

Employees have no real choice but to work overtime to break even. And since they have to do the overtime with another company, they won't get overtime pay. That's called an externality: These companies get the benefit, and the cost is someone else's problem—the employee's, to be exact. If the companies were paying time-and-a-half for that overtime work, the employee wouldn't have to work as many hours for the same money, or the employee would make more money for working so many hours. That seems the clear intent of the overtime law, even if not the letter of it. But the companies have found a way around it.

So what's to be done? To get the discussion onto something concrete, I suggest a tax. There being no employer to collect the extra money from, I suggest the government can pay it—up to the level of a living wage. Then the government can tax the employers to recover the cost. In that way it's also “revenue neutral” and the anti-tax folks should have nothing to object to.

If a worker is paid so little that he must work 80 hours for two employers, he's due 40 hours of half-time pay because he was only paid a straight wage, not time-and-a-half. At tax time, he gets a credit for the half-time pay. The government then taxes the two employers for their share of the cost, based on the number of hours each employed the worker and how much they paid him below a living wage. For every hour they underpaid him, a bit of tax is held in reserve to cover the very likely situation that he'll file for overtime.

None of this keeps an employer from offering overtime work directly and honestly with their own company. That would avoid the tax. Or they can just pay a living wage. That would avoid the tax, too. I'm not suggesting a tax because I'm fixed on taxing people. It's just a tool of last resort to make sure employers can't find a legal loopholes to hide from what should be their responsibility.

Let businesses find another way to make their money than on the backs of employees. Let them offer good products and services at prices that more fairly incorporate all legitimate costs of those products and services rather than hiding those costs by pushing them onto workers and society.

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Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

This third part of a 3-part series was originally published August 10, 2013 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

The other articles in this series are:
Breaching the Social Contract (part 1)
Lien Times for Startups (part 2)

Original graphic created from data obtained at motherjones.com.

Tags (from Open Salon): monthly budget, budget, necessities, essentials, paying enough, overtime, forced overtime, unpaid overtime, overtime law, antitrust, antitrust law, collusion, tax, poverty, jobs, employment, mcdonald's, sample monthly budget, loophole, overtime loophole, second job, another job, extra job, make ends meet, making ends meet, business, taxation, politics, social contract, minimum wage, living wage, externality

Losing the War in a Quiet Room

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has seemed to tap into a deep-rooted sense discontent in the American populace over how capitalism has gone wrong. Criticism has not come just from the Left, but also from the right, as recently discussed on the excellent new MSNBC show Up with Chris Hayes:

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The discussion begins with a quote from Newt Gingrich asking “Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money, or is that somehow a little bit of a flawed system?” To which Chris Hayes cheerfully responds, “Well, yes, Newt it is.” The discussion that follows is typical of the many thoughtful exchanges that make this show such an absolute “must watch.”

Early in the discussion, Prof. Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University, asks “What’s the opposite of ‘predatory capitalism’?” and chuckles about whether that means a kind of “kinder, gentler capitalism.” Alexis McGill Johnson of the American Values Institute frames the issue as a sort of nostalgia for something lost, and David Roberts of Grist opines that “democratic nostalgia is for a set of laws and regulations that used to restrain capitalism; the republican nostalgia seems to be for nicer corporate titans, to an era of public-spirited rich people.” Vincent Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights, questions whether the system has adequate benefit for workers, noting that the only thing workers get out of capitalism is jobs, but they don’t get economic benefits or any control of the direction companies take.

It all begs the question: What changed?

My immediate thought on that question came from having listened to the book The Betrayal of American Prosperity by Clyde Prestowitz. In the book, Prestowitz offers the following account that struck me as simply extraordinary:

Excerpt from pages 198-199 of
The Betrayal of American Prosperity by Clyde Prestowitz

THE HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL CREED

At the founding of Harvard Business School in 1908, Dean Edwin Gay said the purpose of the school was to teach business leaders how to “make a decent profit by doing decent business.” That was McCabe’s creed and what thousands of future business leaders learned at Harvard for many years. But in 1970, the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman sounded a different note. Said he, “Few trends could so much undermine our free society as the acceptance by corporate executives of social responsibility other than to make as much money for shareholders as possible.” This tune was quickly picked up and elaborated by Harvard’s professors and especially by Michael Jensen, who became the dominant American voice on corporate architecture and the proper role of a board of directors and a CEO.

In a hugely influential 1976 paper and subsequently, Jensen propagated Friedman’s doctrine of shareholder sovereignty and of increased returns to shareholders as the sole purpose of the CEO. His argument was grounded in the view that the shareholder is the corporation’s final risk bearer and therefore also its final claimant. He added the notion that, as agents of shareholders, the corporation’s managers do not necessarily share the interests of the shareholders. Indeed, the managers and the shareholders may be at war because the way for the CEO to maximize his/her private gain may be at odds with maximizing shareholder gains. For instance, a CEO may like corporate jets or want to be part of the society scene, but the costs of such indulgence may be a burden to shareholders. Thus, the central problem is how to align the interests of managers and shareholders and to establish a monitoring mechanism that easily indicates whether the managers are acting properly on behalf of shareholders.

Jensen’s solution was to grant gobs of stock options to CEOs to evaluate their job performance by focusing on the progression of quarterly earnings. This is a single, readily available, objective number upon which a CEO can concentrate all her attention and which the shareholder can readily use to determine whether a CEO is working for him. Jensen emphatically rejected stakeholder theories on the grounds that giving a CEO multiple objectives would be confusing, distracting, and make it impossible in the end to measure performance.

In effect, Prestowitz is noting that this is a recurrence of the old joke

“If you dropped your keys over there,
   why are you looking here?”

“Because the light is better here.”

If I’m hearing him right, Prestowitz is making the bold claim that the reason we stopped caring about people other than shareholders was it was just too messy to do the accounting of worrying about other stakeholders, such as employees, customers, and community. It was administratively simpler and cleaner to only worry about stockholders, and so one day business just quietly decided to do that instead.

Or that was the stated rationale, anyway. Let’s not overlook the outside chance that those pushing for this change fancied themselves the potential later recipients of “gobs of stock options” as CEO of some company operating under the newly proposed rules. No point in mentioning that rationale out loud during the debate when they could stick to the altruistic-sounding story of how this focus on clarity of measurement would just be good for business. “Let's give them gobs of stock” sounds so much more business-like and less self-indulgent than “Let's give ourselves gobs of stock.”

Imagine if we took that “clarity” approach toward our justice system, saying it was too hard to measure justice so why not just measure, let’s say, cost? That wouldn’t fix old-fashioned Justice but it would create a form of NeoJustice that was so much easier to measure, allowing us to be sure we were being successful at it. But to what end?

Really that’s what happened, too. Not with criminal justice but with economic justice. We just let it go, without even knowing it. Without any real notice to or approval by the large community of American citizens affected by the change, American Business just quite literally stopped caring. It’s pretty obvious, at least to me, that this timeline Prestowitz mentions dovetails precisely with the downfall of American society so evident all around us.

A war was fought in a “quiet room” somewhere, without anyone firing a shot, and we’re now living in the aftermath of our unwitting capitulation. No wonder we’re confused about how we got here.

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Possible Follow-up Actions

Putting things to right could begin by undoing the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United, and eliminating from the law any notion of corporate personhood. Senator Bernie Sanders is pushing for a Constitutional amendment doing so. You can sign his petition supporting this amendment.

Another concrete action is to learn about stakeholder theory and start to ask questions about why it’s there and whether we could change it. It was changed before, and it seems to me it could change again. I don’t know the process by which that would happen. But I think it needs to.

Further Reading

The Betrayal of American Prosperity by Clyde Prestowitz covers additional issues, particularly those of US trade policy, in addition to the matters I’ve discussed here. In some ways, this was just a peripheral aspect of his main point. But it’s an excellent book either way and I very much recommend it. I listened to it as an audiobook from audible.com.

A basic overview of some of these issues can be obtained from Wikipedia articles titled “Stakeholder (corporate)” and “stakeholder theory.”

I also highly recommend Naomi Klein’s excellent book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, in which Milton Friedman and the Chicago School (a.k.a. the “Chicago Boys”) play a critical role. I listened to it as an audiobook from audible.com.

And, finally, my other articles Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics and Sociopaths by Proxy may also shed some additional light in why this all matters.

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Author's Note: Originally published January 22, 2012 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): ows, wall street, occupy wall street, occupy, legal sociopath, naomi klein, shock doctrine, clyde prestowitz, betrayal of american prosperity, constitutional amendment, amendment, constitution, citizens united, sanders, michael jensen, harvard business school creed, creed, harvard business school, harvard, nostalgia, romney, newt gingrich, gingrich, newt, chris l hayes, christopher l hayes, christopher hayes, chris hayes, grist, david roberts, princeton, anne-marie slaughter, american values institute, alexis mcgill johnson, center for constitutional rights, vincent warren, up with chris hayes, chicago boys, chicago school, milton friedman, friedman, shareholder model, stakeholder model, shareholder theory, stakeholder theory, shareholder, stakeholder, quiet war, quiet room, economic justice, justice, war, fiduciary responsibility, fiduciary duty, corporate, corporation, finance, economics, business, politics, lose, losing, lost, society, war in a quiet room

Sociopaths by Proxy

The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) recently ran an exposé about American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a back room coalition of Republican legislators who meet to create “model” legislation which can then be pushed on a state-by-state basis in coordinated fashion. In an open letter, the CMD’s executive director, Lisa Graves, writes:

At an extravagant hotel gilded just before the Great Depression, corporate executives from the tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds, State Farm Insurance, and other corporations were joined by their "task force" co-chairs -- all Republican state legislators -- to approve "model" legislation. They jointly head task forces of what is called the "American Legislative Exchange Council" (ALEC).

There, as the Center for Media and Democracy has learned, these corporate-politician committees secretly voted on bills to rewrite numerous state laws. According to the documents we have posted to ALEC Exposed, corporations vote as equals with elected politicians on these bills. These task forces target legal rules that reach into almost every area of American life: worker and consumer rights, education, the rights of Americans injured or killed by corporations, taxes, health care, immigration, and the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink.

It is a worrisome marriage of corporations and politicians, which seems to normalize a kind of corruption of the legislative process -- of the democratic process--in a nation of free people where the government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people, not the corporations.

The full sweep of the bills and their implications for America's future, the corporate voting, and the extent of the corporate subsidy of ALEC's legislation laundering all raise substantial questions. These questions should concern all Americans. They go to the heart of the health of our democracy and the direction of our country. When politicians -- no matter their party -- put corporate profits above the real needs of the people who elected them, something has gone very awry.

. . . ALEC apparently ignores Smith's caution that bills and regulations from business must be viewed with the deepest skepticism. In his book, "Wealth of Nations," Smith urged that any law proposed by businessmen "ought always to be listened to with great precaution . . . It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

One need not look far in the ALEC bills to find reasons to be deeply concerned and skeptical. Take a look for yourself.

In my article Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics, I took the position that not only are corporations legal people, but in fact they are “legal sociopaths.” That is, they are by fixed nature incapable of caring about their employees, their customers, or their community except insofar as such caring accidentally maximizes value of the corporation for its stockholders.

I've also argued in the past, as in my 2008 article Election Stratego, that the Republican party is trending toward running strategic configurations of players, who are really just game pieces for other entities coordinating matters behind the scenes. Others have referred to this same phenomenon by talking about puppet governments, shadow governments, or plutocracies. Once the stuff of conspiracy theorists, recent reports and analyses seem to increasingly suggest that the practice of corporations purchasing legislation is becoming a reality. ALEC is only the most recent example. There's the influence of the Family, the Koch Brothers, and Grover Norquist, and other people and corporations with seemingly disproportionate interest and power in modern politics.

The Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court has seemed not only to legitimize these activities, but to ignite a fire in them. They can now operate much more in the open than before. Events we've seen in Wisconsin and in Michigan are just a few prominent examples of increasingly organized attempts that are going on nationwide that seem single-mindedly bent on bringing American workers to their collective knees.

In her recent article Obama fights full-tilt Tea Party crazy, Joan Walsh suggested “the president is dealing with a conscience-free opposition.” Reading this, something clicked in my mind that connected up this notion I have of corporations as sociopaths, and I realized the cancer has spread, so now due to this effect of politicians being bought off by corporations, we not only have corporations acting as sociopaths, but we have politicians hell bent on doing the bidding of these corporations. And if the corporations are, as I've argued, sociopaths, then these all-too-willing servants of the corporations are almost literally “sociopaths by proxy.”

And this is especially bad because government is really the only entity that exists as a counterweight to the forces of business. Government regulation is, by design, capable of regulating industry in order to assure the general welfare. Yet if these businesses are by nature singularly interested in their stockholders' needs and in general obliged not to care the concerns of other stakeholders (such as their customers, their employees, or the communities in which the corporation resides and operates), then who is to look out for the individual? A single individual is often too small to stand up to a corporation in any test of wills. And with legislative action afoot to systematically dismantle and disempower labor unions and to reduce or eliminate the ability to bring class action, good old-fashioned government regulation is the last line of defense for the ordinary citizen—protecting, even if imperfectly, against the tendency of business to exploit and oppress populations for monetary gain.

I've heard it suggested that government should do for people only what people cannot do for themselves. But individual citizens cannot keep banks from adopting predatory lending practices. They can't keep oil companies from using unsafe drilling practices. They can't make sure the food we eat is safe. There are a great many protections that government has traditionally seen as their duty to provide, and yet we're watching an organized attempt by certain politicians—in eager service of corporations—to eliminate the FDA, the EPA, and even the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They speak of “starving the beast,” but in the end the ones starving if this keeps up will be us, the American citizens.

America is under attack from within by forces that do not have the best interests of American citizens at heart, indeed by entities that have no heart at all—by corporations—legal sociopaths—and their dutiful servants in Washington, the Republican Party. The Republicans fancy themselves leaders, but they are not leading, they're clearly following. If they step out of line, they're harshly dealt with by forces outside of our view or control.

The Democratic Party is not immune to the suggestions of Big Business either, but at least they are not yet moving in 100% lockstep to the tune of their corporate overlords. In spite of some partial influence, many elected Democrats are still advocating strongly on behalf of the common citizen. So at least with the Democrats there is hope.

And let's be clear, I'm not saying that this new class of Republican “leaders” are themselves sociopaths. It's not inconceivable that some are, but let's generously assume not, since it won't change my point. Whether they are themselves sociopaths or just willing proxies for behind-the-scenes sociopaths, it's all the same. America's citizens need and deserve a government of, by and for the people—the real flesh and blood people, the ones the founders of this nation originally wrote the Constitution to protect.

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Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

Originally published July 27, 2011 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Past Articles by me on Related Topics
To Serve Our Citizens
Fiduciary Duty vs. The Three Laws of Robotics
Teetering on the Brink of Moral Bankruptcy
Hollow Support
Election Stratego

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, legal sociopath, sociopath by proxy, center for media and democracy, cmd, american legislative exchange council, alec, control, power, power grab, protections, dismantling, attack, attack from within, people, we the people, of by and for the people, corporations, corporatism, plutocracy, shadow government, puppet government, puppet state, koch brothers, the family, c street