MITT ROMNEY: There’s various ways of [preserving Social Security and Medicare’s solvency]. One is we could raise taxes on people. That’s not the way . . .
AUDIENCE: Corporations! Corporations!
ROMNEY: Corporations are people, my friend.
AUDIENCE: No they’re not.
ROMNEY: Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?
AUDIENCE: It goes into your pocket!
ROMNEY: Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets. Human beings, my friend.
It’s “We the people” in the preamble to the United States Constitution not we the corporations because back then the only powerful corporation on earth was the “East Indian Tea Company”. And they owned the tea that the “Boston Tea Party” threw into Boston Harbor. The Tea Party Republicans have it exactly backwards. It was brand new country with a "government of the people, by the people, for the people". Not a government of and for private property and corporate property.
The ideas to give full personhood rights to corporations came out of Milton Friedman’s University of Chicago School of Economics.
"Regulatory takings’ has become the cornerstone of the ‘Wise Use’ movement's legislative agenda as well as the ideology underlying the movement's ‘property rights’ wing. Under the regulatory takings banner, Wise Use leaders have rounded up a broad range of economic and political interests, including developers, small property owners, timber companies, and others into the so-called "property rights" movement. More accurately termed ‘property primacy’ for its subordination of the public good to private financial interests, this is the fastest growing wing of the Wise Use movement.”
FROM:
Regulatory Takings and Private Property Rights
By Tarso Ramos
