Citizens United said that corporations have First Amendment rights. The bigger question is, are we in our right minds as corporations ourselves?
A corporation is a person. So ruled the Supreme Court in the much admired — and much reviled — Citizens United v. Federation Election Commission case. At issue was whether corporations could donate to election campaigns under the same conditions as people. Or, in legal speak, did corporations have First Amendment rights? The court said yes and ever since, corporations have been pouring proverbial “tons” of money into political campaigns, and liberals have objected that this distorts our politics.
It always did seem to us that since people run corporations and people make the decisions whether to support, or not support, a given political campaign, and if to support, by how much, it made sense to treat corporations as people. At the same time, we did not see the Republic rising or falling on the question. If the Supreme Court had decided that corporations were not people, we would have seen this as no great loss. We can live with Citizens United whether upheld or overturned.
But what really intrigues us about Citizens United was the human side of the issue. It always seemed to us that the far more pertinent question in today’s age was not, are corporations people?, but, are people corporations? Look at how complex and entangled almost all people’s lives have become, at least in these United States. We all seem to have become corporations ourselves.
One of nearly countless possible examples: taxes. We’re not talking about how many dollars they take from our pockets, or whether it’s all worth it. We’re certainly not talking about the recently passed tax reform bill, which, whatever its merits or demerits, we highly doubt will change our perspective here. Namely, how complicated taxes are. One need hardly be wealthy to face the seemingly endless categories of income, of deductions; the seemingly endless lines on the forms; the ins and outs that CPAs regard as natural as rainfall but which the rest of us see as a maze. Corporations may typically add a good number of zeroes to the sums they pay compared to what we pay, but the process makes us feel no less corporate than a corporation.
Other examples of the human person as the faceless corporation abound. Try weaving your way through traffic court in less than a couple of hours; try weaving your way through traffic in Denver in rush hour (or even, alas, not in rush hour); try getting in or out of a Broncos game in a few minutes; try getting waited on as you wish to check out a piece of clothing on sale in a popular store this season — why, one needs to be a veritable corporation to get it all done. These days, in the normal course of living, one needs to be the chief executive officer, the chief operating officer, the chief financial officer, not to mention the chief IT (information technology) officer.
All of our electronic devices, like the huge corporation incarnate, are busy saving us time, left and right. That’s right, busy saving us time. That is, occupying more and more of our time every day. And that’s when the devices work! Who today, as his own chief IT officer, is not intimately familiar with the phone store, with getting the newest app to work, with getting Skype hooked up right, and with retrieving the email that either mysteriously disappeared from the screen or that we ourselves accidentally deleted, only to find that it didn’t end up in the deleted folder, but somewhere else? Yes, if there is any high level position in the corporate world that infiltrates us as people, it is chief IT officer.
Oh, and did we forget the personnel officer who deals with health care? We won’t even go into detail here. Our status as corporate navigators has, perhaps, no better analogy than the frustrating, and frustrated, corporate health care officer.
We haven’t even touched on the contemporary family yet, what with all of its own corporate necessities, such as strategic planning, vacation scheduling, transportation finance, and career (i.e. child) advancement, which is tied into continuing education. Indeed, picking the right school or college for the child can at least as daunting as picking the right city and site for the corporate headquarters.
Alas, as corporations, we also need to have our own resident legal counsel: ourselves. Either we are being sued, or figuring out how to avoid being sued, or suing, or interviewing lawyers to figure out which of these and other options one can best assist us meet our needs that pop up wherever we turn. Are we buying a house, getting divorced, fighting the insurance company for a full settlement? Rare is the moment when we are not conscious of own own corporate status as chief legal counsel.
Yes, in these and in so many other steps and breaths we take, we have become corporations. We have many departments. Sometimes they work well together and sometimes they don’t, in which case we need to be the outside corporate consultant as well. Sometimes, as our own consultant, we become a psychologist, a management expert or just someone with more native expertise that we have as the CEO, COO, CFO, chief IT officer, medical officer and legal counsel of our own corporation.
Citizens United or no, the biggest corporate challenge facing us today is . . . us; all of us millions of endlessly complex human corporations running around trying to figure out life today.
Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News
