By Irving Leemon, Contributing Columnist
Mitt Romney, a Republican, said that corporations are people. I guess he doesn’t know that corporations are only legal entities created by the government so that a group of people may operate a business on behalf of the entity. His mentality explains what has been happening in our country. Even the courts have decided that these entities have the same rights to “free speech” as people. In addition, they can execute contracts, be taxed and regulated as one entity.
They are SUPPOSED TO ACT ON BEHALF OF THEIR OWNERS, the STOCKHOLDERS. However, THIS IS SELDOM DONE when it involves corporate donations to political causes. De Facto, the corporations are used as funnels of large sums of money for political purposes at the behest of the corporate officers. People tend to believe what they hear if it is repeated enough times, and with the money that the large corporations have, their message is repeated loudly and often.
To me this gives corporate officers of big corporations a large political advantage. Another problem I have is with the “Tea Partiers” and their followers. They proclaim again and again that they are for smaller federal government and fewer, and smaller taxes, as this is the only way to bring down the national debt. They even want to drastically reduce or end of Social Security, Medicare, reduce the Food and Drug Administration, and end the agency that is responsible for the containment of radio active materials in foreign countries.
Next, are they going to say that the Department of Homeland Security should be abolished instead of fixed because it’s wasting federal money? Are they going to declare that the armed forces are also not needed even though a civil war is being conducted next to our Southern border? Those people and their supporters seem to feel that all this country needs is a much smaller federal government, and therefore fewer and lower taxes.
They don’t seem to care that in this world there has to be a strong central government in order to keep these United States united, and that the alternative is to become a group of independent, disorganized national states with no money and no power.
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