Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor who won a US Senate seat in Massachusetts, is an expert on bankruptcy. Responding to Governor Romney’s statement that ‘Corporations are people’, she replied:
No…corporations are not people. People have hearts. They have kids. They get jobs. They get sick. They thrive. They dance. They live. They love. And they die. And that matters… because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.
The quote is everywhere; it even made it into a Doonesbury cartoon here.
Doonesbury cartoon, 7 November 2012
Meanwhile the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, worked as a derivatives trader for corporations – Elf Aquitaine and Enterprise Oil – before he changed course and decided to join the ministry in 1989. His dissertation at theological college was on the topic ‘Can companies sin?’ – to which he answered Yes. He recently told the Guardian:
Historians are Past Caring 