It’s evident today that corporations raise and spend huge amounts of money on the political campaigns of the presidents and congressmen. These corporations also spend huge amounts of money hiring former government officials to lobby congress to pass laws that mainly benefit their interest. If so, have we allowed other entities than people to monopolize government? The founding fathers were very concerned about the use of political power to benefit special interest groups, what they called factions – small segments of society that had their own selfish concerns that didn’t relate to the benefit of others. So they wanted as much as possible to restrain the ability of the general government to engage in that kind of behavior. The system of “interventionism” that we have today serves the interest of the lobbyists and they represent the international corporations, because they have influence. Some say that what we need is a lobbying reform to keep the lobbyists away from lobbying, but that is not the answer because lobbying is petitioning the government and we have the right to do that. There are two answers to that. One, if we had the right people in Washington, the right members of the Congress, who would not yield to the temptation of being influence by money, but that doesn’t seem to happen. The real solution is getting the government out of the business of being able to pass out favors, so there is no incentive for the businessman to come and lobby the member of Congress. Have we allowed corporate power to influence the creation of laws that fail to benefit the people? Lawyers will argue that indeed the corporations are people. They will argue that they’re even good corporate citizens. But is a corporation really a citizen or for that matter even a person? And what about a multinational corporation, is that even a citizen of any particular country?
