GOP, Corporations, and the Average Person

In Corporations, People, and Truth, Gary Gutting presents a great argument over what corporations really are and what they stand for. This commentary by Gutting is a response to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s response to hecklers in which he stated that “Corporations are people.” He breaks down this statement to figure out if corporations really are people. If one is technically speaking, as Gutting mentions, “corporations are people because they are made up of people; but corporations do not feel, hurt, or love, so in reality they are not people.”  He goes on to question whether corporations are pro consumer (fundamental human value) or pro shareholder (profit making). In the end the corporations will decide and lean toward the profit making side of business. He ends with a good quote from Michael Foucault that states, “Of all power structures, it’s not that corporations are bad but that they are dangerous.”

                When looking at this topic and comparing it to what is happening in our nation and world today, one can really get emotional over the statement that Mitt Romney said. When one is comparing a corporation, which is intended to make a lot of money  and  a whole lot more to a certain few,  to a person who in today’s world is struggling to make ends meet, that person will get a lot of push back. These types of statements really make the GOP look and sound insensitive to the average person. I understand that people need corporations to make jobs but at the same time corporations need people to work in them and to trust in them so that they do not falter. Neither side is more important than the other and Romney’s statement makes it seem and sound like the corporation is more important than the individual. In order to have a healthy economy both sides need to trust each other. It is like Foucault says that corporations are not bad; as a matter of fact they are needed for our economy to grow and prosper. The thing is that if the corporation is just in the lookout for the few and bends the whole; that can become dangerous very quickly