(Note: This piece of political satire, which I authored, was published on the editorial page of The Brookings Register today, April 19, 2012.)
Corporations are now being sought as candidates for elective office at all levels of government in South Dakota, as elsewhere in the United States. Interested corporations should immediately contact the local offices of the Republican and Democratic parties.
“Corporations shouldn’t hesitate,” says Phyllis Cole-Dai, a local member of the national “Elect a Corporation 2012” movement. “Murray Hill Inc. was the first corporation in U.S. history to run for Congress, back in 2010, and it performed quite well. It didn’t get elected–newcomers seldom win against incumbents–but it reached nearly 15,000 likes on Facebook.”
Corporations have maintained for years that they have been unfairly discriminated against and prevented from full participation in the electoral process, among other things. But the Supreme Court’s Citizens’ United ruling in 2010 finally rectified this. It pronounced once and for all that corporations are, in fact, persons. Now that they as persons have been granted the right of free speech (inviolable when expressed in dollars), corporations no longer need to be content with private influence-peddling and public campaign donations. They can run for and hold elective office. Someday one of them might even fulfill that traditional dream of so many American child-corporations and become President of the United States.
Murray Hill Inc. was the first corporation to take the first step toward that patriotic dream, running as a Republican in the 2010 primary race for Maryland’s 8th Congressional District. Since the end of its campaign, it has kept busy with a full slate of high-profile personal appearances and is rumored to have signed a lucrative book deal. Last August the company was happy to endorse Republican Mitt Romney for president. In a statement issued to the press, Murray Hill Inc. commended Romney for being “brave enough” as a bodied person to endorse the Citizens United ruling. The company lauded Romney for publicly agreeing “with corporate personhood and our right [as corporations] to give large, unchecked donations to the political process. When corporate civil rights history is written years from now, content providers will point to this moment as a significant turning point in U.S. politics.”
If you are a corporation with political ambitions, contact your local party office today, or get in touch with Elect a Corporation 2012. Bodied people routinely get in the way of politics. Corporate persons are the real future not only of politics but of democracy in America. “One thing’s for sure,” said Elect a Corporation’s national spokesperson Dona U. Gettit, “money’s no obstacle.”
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