In these trying economic times when money is scarce, jobs even scarcer, and rational behavior crushed and ground into deliciously nutty human tea bags, where o where will we find a presidential candidate fearless enough to stand up for the rights of the biggest victims of all, the poor, sad, helpless, mega-corporations?
Look no further than everyone’s favorite Mormon gaffe machine and master of the flip-flop (not the things gross poor people wear on their feet), Willard Mittens Romney, my friend! Finally, someone with the common sense and moral courage to stand up and proudly declare once and for all, “Corporations are people, my friend.”
Well, this didn’t go over so well with the rest of the 99 percent of the population not sitting on billions of dollars made by squeezing out productivity gains from the handful of workers they haven’t already laid off to maximize profits for small groups of shareholders, like Mittens ‘n Co.
Apparently, many of the human “people” in attendance at the Iowa State Fair don’t much appreciate being lectured about America’s need to “reform” Medicare and Social Security, while simultaneously showering mega-rich corporations with tax breaks, precious gems, poor people’s tears, and assorted other goodies.
ROMNEY: We have to make sure that the promises we make – and Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare – are promises we can keep. And there are various ways of doing that. One is, we could raise taxes on people.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Corporations!
ROMNEY: Corporations are people, my friend. We can raise taxes on –
AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, they’re not!
ROMNEY: Of course they are. Everything corporations earn also goes to people.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
ROMNEY: Where do you think it goes?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: It goes into their pockets!
ROMNEY: Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets! Human beings, my friend. So number one, you can raise taxes. That’s not the approach that I would take.
Of course that’s not the approach Mittens would take. Heavens forbid! After all, corporations are “people,” thanks to several decades of terrible court decisions granting them the same legal protections as dumb carbon-based, oxygen-breathing, tax-paying, real people, while at the same time freeing them from such nagging human restraints as “having a conscience.”
All Mittens is trying to do is innocently remind everyone about their common humanity with corporations, who are exactly like them, right down to their shiny steel facade, cold, empty interior, and endless supply of cold hard cash, thanks to the big bad gubmint’s refund-for-rich people programs.
Maybe the next time you people come across a giant skyscraper or sprawling corporate complex, you should try shaking its hand and asking how its day was like a normal person, instead of staring at its exposed bricks and beams like some sort of impolite, capitalist-hating maniac.
Why is it always up to Mittens to shout down the masses with free business lessons in capitalism run amok, like all the billion$ of reasons why corporations are people, but poors are not.
Guess that’s what great leaders are for. That, and standing up for the big guy because here in Romney’s America, the government of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation, shall not perish from the Earth.
That, my friend, is what poor people are for.