Corporations are people, you know, our highest court has affirmed this truth, as self-evident as the proposition that all men are created equal.   Corporations are just like you and me, endowed by their creators with certain unalienable rights, although skeptical Bill Moyers says he’ll believe corporations are people when the state of Texas puts one to death.  

I heard an excellent talk by a man named Yuval Noah Harari describing the ascent of one hominid species, homo sapiens, to dominate the planet.  Homo sapiens were not the top predators, far from it.  There were many animals who could easily kill and eat homo sapiens, there still are a few.  Homo sapiens were bound together by common terrors, and driven by fear and a large brain, came to dominate all the other species on earth, and wipe out many of them on our way to planetary domination.  

He compared us to sheep with a nuclear bomb.  A truly terrifying and profound comparison.  He pointed out that you don’t fear a lion with a nuclear bomb, not that he would ever try to create one, because a lion is not afraid, knows its power, can defend itself without a bomb, but a sheep with a bomb?   The top animal in a group of sheep will press the button in a heartbeat when a lion comes too close, the second he runs out of weaker sheep to shove into that lion’s jaws.   

Harari also pointed out how homo sapiens are driven by our abstract world view, march forward as societies united by belief in a common myth.   He underscored the fluidity of the self-created myths that humans live by.  We can turn on a dime, when it comes to the beliefs that drive us. Torture, for example, (although I don’t think he mentioned it), a practice universally reviled as barbaric, quickly becomes acceptable to many once it’s rebranded as something that moral freedom-lovers necessarily use against evil fredom-hating monsters.   Harari gave the humorous and horrible example of members of a divinely inspired religion based on peace and brotherhood who obey God by setting on fire those who deny the divinity of the awesome god who has commanded them to be merciful, to love their enemies.   We eventually get to an idea like the “Free Market”, another good one.

An empathetic person can see things from another person’s point of view.  So let me not be so judgmental about a freedom loving and prosperous people who consider the inadvertent downstream poisoning of impoverished babies in some faraway hellhole, or the wholesale destruction of life-sustaining jungles, “externalities”, the unfortunate but acceptable price of doing business in a “Free Market”. That millions were displaced by a war we started, hundreds of thousands maimed, killed and orphaned on orders from our leaders, who may have honestly believed they were doing the right thing?   Regrettable, of course.  

Jesus was very judgmental about the injustices of the status quo of his time, and the status quo wasn’t having it,  nailed him to a cross, made an example out of him.  Few are willing to be made such examples of.  I am certainly not hoping to be made such an example of, as I preach quietly to my distracted flock of three or four.  Let me, therefore, try to be more empathetic toward the powerful.

Seeing things from a corporate point of view, as our lawmakers are obliged to, things are not so black and white, Mr. Moyers.  Really the only thing corporations want is unlimited immunity from the justice-biasing of their profit vectors.  If fairness were the only yardstick by which we measured our actions in the world, few great things would ever be done.  How many great fortunes were made by people who passionately believed in across the board fairness?   Grow up, would you.  Life is unfair, get used to it, stop bellyaching about it, move on.

Allowing a justice-bias into the conversation about the Free Market just gums up the works, kills job creation, makes us all less wealthy.  Think about it.  You can’t spend time (which we all know is money, and therefore, also, free speech) considering every abstraction, after all.  And bias of any kind is wrong, as we are reminded constantly.  If a very profitable process for extracting a valuable commodity from the earth causes earthquakes, well, a lot of bad shit happens every day.  You cannot blame people for wanting a good life.   It’s certainly not smart to blame those people too shrilly if they have their finger on the trigger of a nuclear bomb.  

Corporations, like people, can be oversensitive too.   We all have a limit to what we can take.  For the sake of us all, and our prosperity and our freedom, and for the love of God, take a stand against the unfairness of those who would call for the justice-biasing of our profit vectors.  The Free Market cannot tolerate such meddling!