Years from now, when the fiction of campaigning for public office is dispensed with and political seats are simply bought, sold and traded on national and local exchanges resembling the stock market where other valuable commodities are negotiated to the highest bidders, we might ask ourselves how our political process came to look like a corporate version of one of those science fiction stories where humans lose control over the ever-sophisticated robots they have built and which end up taking over the earth. (Think, “I, Corporation,” or perhaps, “The Corporator.”)
For the corporations which the U.S. Supreme Court unleashed last month in its landmark campaign finance decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (NYLJ, Jan. 22) are just that; creatures of the states that beget them, legal fictions that exist only in the mind of the law as vehicles of commerce, protecting shareholders and management from personal liability for bad or unlucky business decisions. The corporate form is an artifice, a construct, for which special tax policies and other incentives are built in order to channel and promote economic growth. Corporations do not exist naturally, but are literally created by law, almost always the law of the particular state in which the corporation is incorporated, and with the powers and limitations that these corporate birthing statutes enumerate.
