In the 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the US Supreme Court determined that corporations were recognized as persons for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, which in effect clarifies the definition of citizenship and the protections thereof.
It is claimed that this was an intentional misrepresentation of the case inserted into the Court record by reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis, who had previously served as president of Newburgh and New York Railway Co.
Subsequent legislation and judicial decisions have further bolstered this lie and blurred the legal distinction between actual people and corporations, including the National Labor Relations Act and the superseding Taft-Hartley Act, passed by Congress in 1947, which marked a reversal of the pro-labor policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Fast-forward to the 2010 Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which expanded the protections of corporations to the free speech protections of the First Amendment, and abolished limits of corporate political campaign contributions.
Why does this matter? How does it affect our lives? Beyond the enormous inequity created by the unhindered ability of foreign and multi-national corporations to greatly influence the outcome of elections and policy decisions in this country compared with a single vote of an individual among millions of voters, there are other clear distinctions between people and corporations. Corporations cannot vote, but more importantly, and especially in the wake of the recent BP Oil Spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and more notably the San Bruno gas main explosion, both which have killed people and have had devastating impacts on the lives of many others, corporations cannot be jailed.
If an individual is found to be criminally responsible for the death of another, a prison sentence is inevitable. If PG&E is found to be criminally responsible for the deaths resulting from the San Bruno disaster due to the diversion of funds collected for the purpose of pipeline safety, or the allowance of higher than designated safe pressure levels for the pipeline, PG&E cannot be sentenced to serve time in prison.
A corporation is an organized collection of individuals, some of whom may already be US citizens, intended for unified purpose. The United States of America is a nation of laws intended for the purpose of protecting, promoting and balancing the rights of and among citizens of that nation. So, by conferring citizenship upon "the collective", not only have we effectively granted the protected rights of citizenship to those who we otherwise might not, but we have doubly protected those rights for members of the collective who already enjoy those protected rights - and therefore have destroyed the balance.
Corporations are not citizens in and among themselves, and should not be protected as such, nor allowed to trump or trample our constitutionally guaranteed rights to life, liberty nor the pursuit of happiness.
End the lie. A corporation is not a person. When a person gives you their word, you have a choice to believe that person. When a corporation tells you something is safe or that they want your money to address the dangers, don't just take their word for it.