The corporate Pledge of Allegiance
Despite what the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney say, corporations aren鈥檛 people. (I鈥檒l believe they are when Georgia and Texas start executing them.)
The Court thinks corporations have First Amendment rights to spend as much as they want on politics, and Romney (and most of his fellow Regressives) think they need lower taxes and fewer regulations in order to be competitive.
These positions are absurd on their face. By flooding our democracy with their shareholders鈥� money, big corporations are violating their shareholders鈥� First Amendment rights because shareholders aren鈥檛 consulted. They鈥檙e simultaneously suppressing the First Amendment rights of the rest of us because, given how much money they鈥檙e throwing around, we don鈥檛 have enough money to be heard.
And they鈥檙e indirectly giving non-Americans (that is, all their foreign owners, investors, and executives) a say in how Americans are governed. Pardon me for being old-fashioned but I didn鈥檛 think foreign money was supposed to be funneled into American elections.
Romney鈥檚 belief big corporations need more money and lower costs in order to create jobs is equally baffling. Big corporations are now sitting on $2 trillion of cash and enjoying near-record profits. The ratio of profits to wages is higher than it鈥檚 been since before the Great Depression. And a larger and larger portion of those profits are going to聽top executives. (CEO pay was 40 times the typical worker in聽the 1980s; it鈥檚 now upwards of 300 times.)聽聽
But, hey, if the Supreme Court and regressive Republicans insist big corporations are people and want to treat them as American citizens, then why not demand big corporations take a pledge of allegiance to the United States?
And if they don鈥檛 take the pledge, we should boycott them. (Occupiers 鈥� are you listening?)
Here鈥檚 what a Corporate Pledge of Allegiance might look like:
The Corporate Pledge of Allegiance to the United States
The [fill in blank] company pledges allegiance to the United States of America. To that end:
We pledge to create more jobs in the United States than we create outside the United States, either directly or in our foreign subsidiaries and subcontractors.
If we have to lay off American workers, we will give them severance payments equal to their聽weekly wage times the number of weeks they鈥檝e work聽for us.
We further pledge that no more than 20 percent of our total labor costs will be outsourced abroad.
We pledge to keep a lid on executive pay so no executive is paid more than聽50 times the聽median pay of聽American workers. We define 鈥減ay鈥� to include salary, bonuses, health benefits, pension benefits, deferred salary, stock options, and every other form of compensation. 聽
We pledge to pay at least 30 percent of money earned in the United States in taxes to the United States. We won鈥檛 shift our money to offshore tax havens and won鈥檛 use accounting gimmicks to fake how much we earn.
We pledge not to use our money to influence elections.
Companies that make the pledge are free to use it in their ads over the Christmas shopping season.
