Corporations Are People, Sociopathic Ones

by Jim Washburn

The jazz band I play with was out taking in the evening sky a few nights ago, and the conversation turned to Boy’s Life magazine, the official publication of the Boy Scouts of America, which some of us read in our youths. The magazine is still around, and I can only imagine what the articles are like now—“Tie Six Escape-Proof Rope Knots, and their Heterosexual Uses”—but back then it was all space adventure and hunting, whittling and things.

Then there were the ads in the back that, in retrospect, were astonishing in their mendacity. Many of the same ads also appeared in comic books, where on one page you’d thrill to the sense of honor and good-citizenship of your heroes as they’d risk death under a collapsing building or somesuch, so that they might save others. Then on the next page, you’d have adults using every base and duplicitous trick they could think of to squeeze money out of children.

You’d have the 100 realistic toy soldiers in their own custom footlocker for only $1 plus shipping and handling. There were two sets: Civil War forces, and WW II armies, each shown in vivid detail in an illustration. A bugler in the foreground would be giving a valiant call to arms, while behind him dramatic battlefields of rolling hills were alive with contesting men, detailed down to the least bandolier.

So you’d mail in your coupon and cash, and two months later they’d “rush” you your package: a cheap green cardboard box, a.k.a. the “footlocker.” It looked big enough to hold maybe six regular toy soldiers. Surely there must be some mistake! Nope, inside were 100 nearly two-dimensional soldiers, stuck together in flat sheets, with oodles of extraneous plastic you’d have to spend hours trimming off with your Cub Scout knife just so the figures would look vaguely human.

You would have a better chance of getting toothpicks to stand at attention than you would these malnourished fellows, so all you could do was create grim battlefield scenarios where all the soldiers were already dead or so gravely wounded they could only lie on the ground looking like they’d been run over by a tank.

If you needed a tank, there were other advertisements for realistic tanks, submarines and flying saucers—big enough to actually climb inside—with drawings of delighted boys lording over their friends with their superior firepower. Ha, look who brought a cap gun to a submarine fight!

Our drummer, Bob, and his brother had sent for one of the flying saucers, and unlike most kids, did not give up when the box arrived with essentially a pile of wrapping paper and instructions on how to cut and glue it into a saucer-like shape. The manufacturer probably counted on kids’ innate sense of inadequacy making them feel it was their fault and not the company’s that this disheartening box of crap couldn’t be made to fly.

But Bob and his brother stuck with it, actually completing their UFO and filling it with enough fire-heated air to send it aloft and out of their lives. Score one for Team America.

The band’s other Bob, our singer, is enough older and more experienced than the rest of us that he warrants his own book, Black Bananas, his just-finished memoir. Bob grew up during the Depression, poor, black and malnourished. The title of his book comes from the rotten fruit he ate as a kid, retrieved from the dump near his house. He told us that when his family was doing a little better and was able to buy food at the grocery, he’d eat his breakfast with the Wheaties box by him on the table, with its athlete and “Breakfast of Champions” slogan. He recalled, “Man, I’d gaze at that box and with every bite I’d imagine Wheaties making me stronger.” And you know it was just ballast and roughage.

Those were the good old days everyone talks about, my point being that, if in America’s golden years it was a lot of companies’ daily business to exploit the dreams and culpability of children, what hope is there now for the nation, when corporate business has grown detached from any notion of the common good?

An article in the LA Times the other day told of American corporations locating their new plants overseas, not just because labor is cheaper and they get tax advantages, but because they’ve basically sucked Americans dry, so they’re moving to Brazil and other countries where there’s fresh meat to prey upon. That’s not exactly how the Times put it. They only quoted corporate spokesmen saying that’s where the action is now, and where their future market lies.

And America? It’s an over-mortgaged house they’re simply walking away from, which makes Americans the loyal family dogs they’re abandoning because we’ve grown old and inconvenient and they don’t want us on their new carpet.

There we’ll be, watching them through the picket fence as they drive away. Will they even look back at us? Yes, just the young Director of Communications! He’s looking our way through the rear window, snapping a picture on his iPhone to show hotties he meets on Facebook.

After a couple of days, we realize they’re not coming back, and the kibble and water they left in bowls for us is long gone. We run to the fence every time we hear a car, begging that it’s them coming back, but it isn’t and it gets dark and no one hears us whimpering and hungry. Finally, we start eating grass, but it dries up and dies in the 106-degree heat. We’re so thirsty!

After six days, the mailman makes his weekly visit—cutbacks, you know—and with our remaining strength, we run past his legs and into the wild.

Oh, the adventures we have, always heading south. Months pass. A little Mexican boy gives us hats, and we perform in circuses as Los Perros Sombreros; we eat some really good pupusas that someone dropped in the street; we fight off an ocelot in the jungle; and, finally, we wind up in Sao Paulo, and catch our corporate masters’ scent.

We finally reach their house, ready for the big Disney reconciliation scene—“The hardships these poor dogs went through, trekking thousands of miles to find us!”—but we find the house empty, a new set of dogs abandoned in the yard, ready to take off after their masters to Sri Lanka.

 “Corporations are people, my friend,” Mitt Romney declared this week, an endearment since echoed by fellow Republican candidates. It is only a more cuddly version of what the Supreme Court declared two years ago, when its conservative majority opened the electoral floodgates to unchecked, untraceable corporate donations. Corporation once had to be shy about donating to self-serving, society-shucking causes and candidates, because it risked alienating customers and harming the bottom line. Now they can pour enough money into campaigns to drown out the other voices.

Corporations are indeed made up of people: the managers, the workers, the shareholders—all people, but all subservient to the bottom line. Corporations are beholden to their shareholders, but not as individuals. Individual shareholders might want to keep production in the US, or not kill marine life with acid rain, but a corporation doesn’t hear them; it hears the aggregate cry of all shareholders, and all it ever says is “Feed me! Screw your dog story. Feed me money!”

That is the nature of a corporation. Unlike people, corporations do not love. Corporations do not empathize. “Can an oil company care about the wetlands of cute little baby birds?” the ads ask us. No, it can’t. It can care about hiring a PR company to make you think it cares while it lobbies to negate environmental laws, but that’s as far as it goes. Corporations are not people. Soylent Green is people, and it’ll be made by corporations.

Barry McGuire and Mitt Romney got together to write a song. You might know the refrain:

But I tell you, over and over and over again,
Corporations are people, my friend,
And you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction ...

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