Person to person

Earlier this week the lawsuit "Kasky vs. Nike" was settled out of court when Nike agreed to donate $1.5 million to Washington based Fair Labor Association that monitors employment conditions. You may have heard about this case before as Nike tried to block this suit from ever being heard on the grounds that its speech was protected under the first ammedment and hence it didn't matter if it was true or not. The attempt to block the suit went all the way to the Surpreme Court which decided to not hear it, allowing for the suit to proceed in the California courts, and this weeks important settlement in Kasky's favour.

Today David Lazarus of the San Francisco Chronicle, published a column on the settlement. He gives quite a significant amount of history on the subject of corporate personhood, and two opposing comments from Jeff Milchen, director of ReclaimDemocracy.org and one Ash Bhagwat, a constitutional law professor at San Francisco's Hastings College of Law who said "Corporations are a bunch of rich guys who have gotten together. They have a lot of money and they have a lot of influence. But why is that different from Bill Gates?".

Lazarus expects us to fall for this slight of hand argument by Bhagwat, which he obviously fell for (or never once doubted) and his concluding remark was: "Corporations are people too. Can't we all just get along?"

Well that incensed me enough to send the following letter to the editor of the Chronicle.

Dear Editor,

As a natural human person I find David Lazarus' concluding comment in "Nike: Just like you and me" an insult to my humanity. He invites us to welcome corporate persons as if they were some long lost siblings, while casually dismissing the crucial differences between us. Natural persons are living, breathing and eventually dying entities. Corporations are none of those and have none of the limitations that inspired the Bill of Rights to protect our frail and mortal souls.

Thanks to such attitudes and a long string of legal slight of hand tricks, we are now faced with corporations granted infinite longevity, protections from liability, imprisonment, taxes and so many numerous financial benefits they have now acquired wealth that rivals the majority of all the worlds nation states.

What rational human American could just throw away the rich history of this country’s struggle against the dominance of money over the freedom of the sovereign people of this country? Just how many more will roll over, as Lazarus has, and play ball with the enforced plutocracy of “a bunch of rich guys who have gotten together” before our American spirit will be entirely lost, trampled under foot in the race to riches?

I'll wager they don't print it. What do you think?