Some More News - SMN: Corporations Have More Rights Than People

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Hi. Today we're looking at the many ways in which corporations can do things that regular citizens definitely can't, and how executives are rarely held accountable even when they break the law. Go to https://ground.news/SMN to stay fully informed. Subscribe through our link for as little as $1 a month or get 40% off unlimited access this month only. Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19WfJJ-HP7-QP7d-ImeIw1e3dwncy-Z5nrV4HzFr4_kc/edit?usp=sharing Check out our MERCH STORE: https://shop.somemorenews.com   SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh   Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229   Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA   Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/ 

Okay, so the introductory video course, the pro level upgrade course, and the social media exploratory training video in your total hack the plan super savers business 101 package comes to $249.95. And this is what Wobble needs to be one of Forbes 30 under 30? Sure. Probably. It's the Woolworth Cooksy Guarantee! Hey! Hi! I'm here! What is all this? Oh! Hi Mr. Cody! What's going on?

Oh, nothing. I'm just literally sitting here five feet from you. Just right here next to you. Hey, who is Woolworth Cooksy? Woolworth Cooksy? A holding on Stolehouse Equity Group? That's the name of my company? Idiot? Okay, well, why is your pyramid scheme called Woolworth Cooksy?

It's not a pyramid scheme! It's a digital media corporation specializing in easily digestible training modules for the aspiring entrepreneur. And lesson one, all the best corporations have people names. Wormbow is naming his Philip. Not until he completes his cash app transfer he isn't. Okay, well, I get why you're doing this

because you know, your whole deal. But why do you want to start a business, Wormbow? You go to the bathroom in envelopes. Silly goat! Wormbow wants to start a business so Wormbow can be CEO and make lots and lots of Wormbow money! That's not really what I meant. I mean, what good or service are you looking to provide? Immunity from prosecution! What?! But just for Wormbow! from prosecution. What? My chest for Warmbo! Okay, well, sounds like you guys gotta smooch it out,

so I'm just gonna go spend 250 at the new axe storing range. Warmbo, you send me that money, okay? Bye. Man, okay, I guess this is the episode we're doing. I had this whole other thing about pigs in space, star bores, we were gonna call it. It was gonna be really fun with costumes

and it was gonna make you think. We had ham solo, O'Bacon Swine Oinky, but fine, okay? We're not gonna do that anymore. Warmbo, get comfortable. I guess I'll teach this sock about business. And so here's some more news. ["The Big Bang"] Corporations are people more than you.

I'm not speaking philosophically, never. Never have I done that. Corporations are literally people and not in the obvious sense that any corporation is just a big group of people. They are recognized as people by the American legal system and by Mitt Romney specifically. And look, it's okay if you get the two mixed up,

most people do. Mitt and the American legal system share many important similarities, like the fact that both are abstract concepts that only exist in the realm of written language to be brought forth by the fevered chanting of white people, like a necromantic curse or the cheesecake factory menu. Corporations are people, my friend.

Look at that thing. If you showed me a stack of papers and Mitt Romney, I wouldn't be able to tell them apart until Mitt spoke. And even then, I'd light a match to see if he flinched. Truly, who better to instruct us on the intricacies of personhood than the most milquetoast man in the universe who also shares his name with sporting equipment.

Anyway, he didn't become president twice, but thanks to this same mid headed thinking, corporations have all the same rights and protections as individual American citizens, which are shockingly few and restrictive. But wouldn't you know it, they also have a bunch of other rights and protections that they enjoy from being a

corporation, which are many and without meaningful limits. So yeah, corporations are people, but they're people playing doom with all the cheat codes on IDKFA, etc. and so forth. They get to say and do all of the things your average American citizen gets to say and do, plus an extra set of dodges and incentives they get to take advantage of. Just kind of because, there's a note here, oh yeah, because they represent the financial interests of the friends and relatives of American lawmakers, if not the lawmakers themselves.

Corporations are people and lawmakers are people, so corporations are lawmakers. That statement shouldn't be true, and yet it is. Corporations get to make laws without being elected. So it turns out that while the Senate has ethics rules that prohibit senators from quote, serving as officers or members of the board of any publicly held or publicly regulated corporation,

financial institution or business entity, the House of Representatives publicly held or publicly regulated corporation, financial institution, or business entity, the House of Representatives has no such rule. According to a 2021 report, about one quarter of House members hold outside positions, such as board members, partners, VPs, or presidents of for-profit corporations and businesses. And why shouldn't they? After all, if a corporation is a person,

then barring House members from serving on a corporate board is like forbidding them from having children. Although it is kind of weird that, unlike the House, the Senate felt this was a big enough conflict of interest to make it verboten for its members. If the two halves of America's lawmaking body can't agree on whether a corporation is a person or a vested financial interest,

it kind of seems like corporations aren't really people. Hmm, curious, ooh, my magnifying glass is a pen. It kind of seems like corporations are people whenever it is most convenient for them to be so. It's because laws aren't real, you see. We made them up, like money and warcraft. Then we elected people to make up new ones for us, and some of those people invented rules

to help their businesses. For example, Pennsylvania GOP representative Mike Kelly pushed bills reducing the tax burden on auto dealerships, and also allowing those auto dealerships to rent and sell cars with active recalls. Yes, recalls, as in cars that have been pulled from the market by their manufacturers to address a potentially dangerous malfunction or design flaw, like exploding airbags, faulty electronics and whatever jigsaw trap Teslas are currently springing on their drivers.

It's a pretty good one. and whatever jigsaw trap Teslas are currently springing on their drivers. It's a pretty good one. Ah, such bad cars. And gosh, wouldn't you know it? Pennsylvania GOP representative Mike, crazy low prices, Kelly, just so happens to own car dealerships in the state of Pennsylvania. We have Chevys, Hyundai's, Kias, Mitsubishis,

and even Toyotas. So many cars, five dealerships, dealerships that had for sale at least 17 vehicles with active recalls after the guy who owns them was pushing the laws that made it possible. On top of the tax relief he invented, what a guy. Unsurprisingly, Congressman Kelly, not to be confused with Senator Kelly,

the blobby X-Men one, has the full-throated support of the National Automobile Dealers Association, which contributes thousands of dollars to his campaign in exchange for all this favorable legislation. Guys, save your money! He owns a dealership! He's literally one of you! He's going to do this anyway! Meanwhile, Representative Jason Smith of Missouri received significant support from the agricultural and meat processing industries. It's not hard to see why. Smith repeatedly introduced a fair meatpacking act, which would amend the tax code

to provide financial incentives for meat packers and processors. Now I know what you're thinking. I bet that guy has some skin in that meat packing game. Well have a meat cigar you big stinky winner you because representative Jason Smith has ownership interest in Smithland and Cattle Company LLC. I mean his name is right there in the name of the company.

My goodness. There are many more examples of this kind of skull duggery going on in the house, but the point is, these people aren't trying that hard to hide their clear conflicts of interest. Because why should they? It's totally legal. For some reason.

To be clear, the Senate isn't any better on this issue just because it forbids its members from holding corporate positions. I mean, this is Congress, baby. We've got conflicts of interest up the wazoo for days that are also up the wazoo. Our wazoo is full. You dedicated show-dee-bow-dees probably remember

when we covered this topic before in more detail. But here are the code notes. Or we call Cliff's notes here. God, I hate it. While senators are forbidden from serving on the board of a corporation, they're still allowed to buy and sell all the stocks they want. Like trading your favorite CCG on the playground. Mine was Rage. The Werewolf game. Also the Star Wars one.

According to a New York Times investigation published in 2022, quote, 97 lawmakers or their family members bought or sold financial assets over a three year span in industries that could be affected by their legislative committee work. In other words, it's the same conflict of interest just wearing a slightly different costume. And these are the same freaks who decided corporations are people.

Corporate personhood wasn't an edict delivered to earth on a bolt of divine lightning. It exists because these meatballs said so. But it's more than a simple case of using their powerful positions to enrich themselves and their buddies by passing favorable legislation. Corporate personhood means these businesses get to do pretty much whatever they

want while shielding the individuals responsible from any legal consequences, as long as their misdeeds were in the pursuit of profit. You're going to see a lot of that specific justification coming up when we outline the many crimes corporations can do that the average American cannot. For example, corporations can commit fraud. Right. Cool. Thanks to all these lawmakers and their conflicts

of interest, the shielding that a corporation provides for its executives is nigh indestructible. Just over the last two decades, we've witnessed some truly heinous cases of corporate malpractice that led to dramatic and in some cases irreparable harm to the American people and the environment. In 2022, Wells Fargo was ordered to pay $3.7 billion

in refunds and penalties after the bank was caught defrauding its customers in fun and interesting ways, such as wrongfully foreclosing homes, abusing their loan payments, unlawfully repossessing vehicles, and incorrectly assessing fees and interest over a period of several years. Stealing.

Stealing is what that's called. Stealing. Stealing is what that's called. Stealing. This is after Wells Fargo was caught in 2016 literally creating fake accounts out of thin air in order to meet unrealistic sales goals, including opening accounts under customers' names without their knowledge. That is wild.

That's so crooked you delete it from your screenplay about sexy bank hackers for being unrealistic. Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, referred to Wells Fargo as a repeat offender and a corporate recidivist that may require further punitive action. So why is it still a bank, my dude?

If I got caught running a bar that sold beer to children, they probably would shut down that bar. Tick-a-dity-tots, I'd call it, hypothetically. Babies under six months, drink free. Kinderbarfen. Now, this Wells Fargo story actually pales in comparison to the Robocop 2 of corporate misconduct, Purdue Pharma. The pharmaceutical giant was headed by the Sackler family

from 1952 until its bankruptcy and pushed highly addictive opioids, particularly their brand name painkiller, OxyContin. Members of the Sackler family were directly responsible for pushing doctors to prescribe higher and higher doses of the pain medication and knowingly misled both doctors and the public about the dangers of their drug. The end result was billions of dollars in profits

for Purdue Pharma and an opioid epidemic that has killed 500,000 Americans since 1999. Incidentally, the ushers in Mike Flanagan's adaptation to follow the house of Usher are based on the Sacklers. I don't know, that just felt relevant for some reason. Purdue Pharma ultimately pled guilty to federal criminal charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States

and was ordered to pay over $8 billion in penalties, criminal forfeitures and settlements, and the company will be dissolved, a process that is ongoing at the time of this episode. But despite all this evidence of illegal activity and the piles and piles of smoking guns stacked on top of each other, like backstage props at an improv theater,

to this day, not one individual executive has been held personally accountable or faced any kind of criminal consequence in either example. Instead, Purdue and Wells Fargo settled for billions of dollars on behalf of their executives, money that came out of the pockets of shareholders rather than from the executives themselves,

AKA the people who actually engaged in illegal activity. Which seems weird, right? When a person has 15 beers and crashes into a mailbox in Billy Joel's neighborhood behind the wheel of Billy Joel's car, the car doesn't get the DUI. So why should Purdue Pharma? They did start the fire.

So corporations get to invent laws for themselves, commit all sorts of crimes in the pursuit of wealth, and shield their executives from the consequences of those crimes. Is there anything they can't do? Yes, please tell Wombo more. I don't love that you're taking so many notes. Yeah, well, Wombo doesn't love

that Mr. Cody's ears are always so wet. What? No, no, they're not. What do you mean? What do you even mean, man? What are you talking about, wet ears? Looking pretty shiny from over here. Shut up, fellas!

My ears are as dry as the next man's! Stupid fucking... You know what? Just, we're just gonna cut away to ads. We're just gonna go to ads. We're gonna go to ads. We're gonna go to ads! Knock, knock, who's there? Ha, ha Ha ha ha ha. I'm just like Patch Adams!

And now that I've emotionally disarmed you with my clowning styles, I want to tell you about Ground News, a sponsor that we specifically sought out to do ads on our show I hid in the CEO's trunk. They're very forgiving. No, really, we've actually met with their team and believe in their mission. That's because Ground News is an aggregate site that shows how the media around the world is covering any single story and compares and contrasts that coverage based on things like their political lean

and who owns the publication. So take this fairly recent news about corporation owner, Elon Musk, visiting Auschwitz. Ground News shows 140 articles about that. And you may notice that while the center and left leaning publications note that he did this after quote, anti-Semitic messages on X, formerly Twitter, over on the right leaning sites,

they seem to forget that part. At most they'll refer to it as anti-Semitic accusations. Hmm, interesting. Anyway, you can read that on Ground News, or rather ground.news slash SMN. They even have a brand new elections page that includes a blind spot section showing you which stories aren't being covered

by one particular side. It is time to hack the news, just like I hack up my enemies like the murderous Patch Adams. Never seen the film but I think I nailed it. So check them out at ground.news.smn. You can subscribe for 40% off unlimited access which is what we use through our link this month only and maybe another month later we'll see. What they're doing is more important today than ever, and I encourage you to check them out.

The link, the link is in the description of the video. Wet ears, I'll show you wet ears, flush you down the toilet, make your ears wet, so you have wet ears, it'll be you, you'll have wet toilet water ears. Fucking piece of shit. Hi, welcome back. I'm here.

I'm not mad. It's everyone else who's mad. Everyone else is mad. I'm ready to talk about more crimes that corporations can do, but we, the humble people, can't do. And hey, here's a question. What's our number one right as Americans?

Dewey knows. Yes, that is one of our most sacred rights. But what's the second most sacred right? Don't try to answer, it's unbecoming. I'll do that for you. Corporations can vote more than you. I mean, they can't literally vote, so that's good. One of the only things that is guaranteed

to an American citizen upon the moment of their birth is the right to eventually vote. I mean, there are challenges, depending on the color of your skin. And it's weird we don't throw food and water and housing into the mix as guaranteed rights, but anywho, it is from that right that all other rights stem. And while, as I said, corporations don't literally vote,

they instead get to do something better than voting. They get to lobby, at least way more effectively than an individual can. And unlike voting, where in most states, people lose their right to vote once they're convicted of a felony, corporations never lose their right to vote once they're convicted of a felony, corporations never lose their right to lobby Congress. No matter how many laws they've broken,

how much money they've paid in damages, or how many people they've literally killed, and their executives never lose their right to vote either. According to a 2015 Atlantic article, for every dollar spent on lobbying by labor unions or public interest groups, corporate lobbyists spend $34. Corporations began aggressively lobbying Washington starting in the 1970s as a response

to decades of heavy regulation. And it was a big success. Who knew that giving people lots of money would put them in your favor? Regulations were scaled back. The Labor Reform Act of 1977 was struck down. Corporate taxes were lowered, and public opinion began to be swayed

towards less government regulation in the private sector. Historically, Congress never misses an opportunity to sell out, like the sugar ray of legislative bodies. Take that sugar ray for some reason. I'll figure it out, sugar ray. Plain old corruption turned out to be such a big hit that corporations began to strategically shift their lobbying aims.

Rather than lobbying to thwart policies that would hurt their bottom line, lobbyists just skipped that and began working side by side with lawmakers to draft their own policies altogether. A great example is Medicare. Pharmaceutical companies spent years lobbying against the addition of a prescription drug benefit, arguing that the bulk purchasing of drugs through Medicare

would slash their profits, which is true, but you would hope the response of the people we elected to represent the rights and wellbeing of every American would be too bad. That's the point. But what happened instead is that pharmaceutical lobbyists worked hand in hand with lawmakers to come up with Medicare Part D,

a prescription drug benefit that specifically excluded bulk purchasing and guaranteed an estimated $205 billion profit boost to pharma companies over the following decade. I'm so, so glad they were able to work that out. Today, there are well over 12,000 corporate lobbyists in Washington spending between three and $4 billion each year to influence lawmakers.

No single person has that level of access and influence, but any corporation with money is more than welcome. Vote or die, circle two. So that sucks and blows and gurgles, which is both a suck and a blow kind of. Physics is fun. But even though corporations are legally people with a bigger political voice

than any other human being or entity, they're not really people, right? Walmart doesn't need to eat, does it? Does it? I mean, we know it never sleeps, so beds are out. The point is corporate personhood doesn't mean corporations need to exist like people. We don't need to worry about them

buying up all the housing, land, and water, right? Right? Lumpy hog shit! Corporations can steal your home. I should have known! It was written right here on these papers I'm holding, for all you know. These papers I read ahead of time, for all you know.

Okay, well, to be clear, they can't literally walk into your home and take it. If someone dressed as Ronald McDonald does that, you should call the cops, that is not allowed. And it probably isn't even V Ronald McDonald, unless he has an ID, check for ID. But they can buy and then kick you out of your home. Before 2010, institutional landlords,

meaning corporations that rent property, did not own and rent out residential properties. Cut to now, and there are around 30 of these companies buying up billions of dollars worth of homes. So what changed? The financial collapse of 2007 caused by the housing market. That's what, remember that?

Remember that they did a movie about it with Barbie and Ken, Ken didn't sing, but it was still a thing that happened. They were both there. Just another instance of corporate personhood exercising its right to tank the economy in pursuit of profits, as well as completely shield culpable executives from any form of consequence.

One of the biggest ironies from the subsequent 2008 bailouts is that it actually gave banks another opportunity to further fuck up the housing market. All those recently foreclosed properties were just sitting there, waiting to be scooped up by private equity firms looking for a starter home,

with a white picket fence where they can watch their franchises play with the family Petco. One of the big players in the subprime mortgage crisis was Freddie Mac, which is a publicly traded corporation with a congressional charter. In other words, it's a company with the support and protection of the federal government

that also gets to generate wealth for investors. Apparently that's legal too. Everything is so legal. Freddie Mac unloaded tens of thousands of foreclosed properties at low double feature DVD prices following the 2008 recession, inviting private equity into the market

like a swarm of Dracula's or like a swarm of double feature DVDs of Dracula 2000 and Dracula 3000. Of course, those films are unrelated somehow. How are they unrelated? That's not the point. Get to it then. The point is that of those apartment complex sales,

85% of them were purchased by large private equity firms. Meanwhile, corporations are steadily buying more and more single family homes and turning them into rental properties, with MetLife Investment Management predicting that they will own 40% of these properties by 2030. The Sunbelt region of the United States is experiencing particularly

heavy encroachment by corporate-controlled rental properties, and coincidentally, rent increases in that area have skyrocketed well beyond the national average. Between 2020 and the beginning of 2023, rent for a two-bedroom home went up 44% in Tampa, 43% in Phoenix, and 35% in Atlanta. Meanwhile, the nationwide increase during that same period was a less unreasonable 24%. To be clear, 25% increase in rent over three years is still unreasonable. But as corporations continue to buy up all the property and set rental prices, the increases are getting exponentially higher. This is making it near impossible

for first time home buyers to actually become home buyers. But also the resultant higher property taxes are effectively forcing people out of their homes. And guess who is only too happy to buy these long-term residents out? Corporations are people, my friend. So true, they are people. More specifically, they are shitty landlords.

Studies show that corporate landlords are more likely to raise the rent on tenants, evict tenants, and poorly maintain their properties. After all, what do they care? They don't actually live near or deal with these tenants and probably have building managers to do that. We're seeing this play out all across the country. For instance, Blackstone,

one of the biggest private equity firms in the world, and I think those guys trying to kill Jason Bourne, I think. Anyway, in 2021, they bought 66 rental properties in San Diego from a charitable organization called the Conrad Prevus Foundation, and then immediately began jacking up the rent. Rent for new tenants was anywhere from 29 to 100% higher

than the average renter in that area. Meanwhile, the rent increases for existing tenants went as high as 201%. Blackstone's transparent and completely legal strategy here is to increase rents to the maximum extent allowed by state law, eventually forcing renters out so they can raise the rent astronomically for the next tenant.

Come on, born, born, you gotta, you throw those dicks down some stairs already, choke them with a magazine or something. Born them, born them hard. Born, the born, bornacy. Meanwhile, other private equity groups are moving into the rental market and essentially working as corporate house flippers,

buying low cost properties, raising rents, and offloading operating costs like maintenance onto the tenants, and then finally selling the buildings at a higher price. In some cases, a property can change hands several times over the course of just a few years, leaving tenants to navigate a maze of bureaucracy and unfair treatment at the hands of corporate landlords,

who of course have no legal obligation to honor the terms of any lease signed before their ownership. By the way, most of these homes were in predominantly black neighborhoods, and over 93% of them were bought for under $300,000, at least as of a few years ago. The point is, it's much easier for corporations and private equity firms to buy a house

than it is for a private individual, because they can secure billions of dollars in loans from their corporate person friends like Freddie Mac. That guy is everyone's pal, except yours. So yeah, corporations are people. They're bad racist people with superpowers, like Homelander, if you were your landlord. Homeland Lord, obviously.

And if a private individual did all this, they would be labeled a slumlord and beaten with reeds. They would have likely picked up a few felony indictments for fraud and other unsafe and inequitable practices. But because these are institutional landlords, for some reason, it's all okay. After all, they have to be allowed to make a return on their investments.

It's an inalienable right enjoyed by all persons of corporate heritage. And these types of investments are currently expanding to include groundwater reservoirs. Oh good. Corporations can steal your water. Hey, we did a real bummer of an episode about this. Basically, while there are many state and federal laws

that regulate how groundwater is diverted, distributed, and used, there's also a growing market of well-financed companies looking to buy out water rights in order to sell or lease that, yes, you heard me correctly, water. You know, like what fucking assholes would do if you were a fucking asshole piece of shit

and you're like, what should I do? It'd be this, you do this. And while some experts believe that the threat of water speculation might be overblown, others are wary that the current system could have dire consequences. Honestly, it doesn't really matter to me if the consequences are dire or overblown.

It's a dick thing to do that's affecting communities. Like, people need that water, and corporations pretending to be people are taking it. Therefore, it's bad. For example, a fight over water distribution is currently playing out in Cebolla, Arizona, between a community that depends on water from the Colorado River and investment firm Greenstone Management Partners, who wants to siphon water from the river via their Cebolla properties and then sell it to a suburb in Phoenix,

200 miles away and for $27 million. The deal is currently being held up by a lawsuit because unilaterally stealing and selling natural resources from your community like Sea Montgomery burns apparently doesn't violate any criminal statutes. These companies often use different schemes to hide the extent of their ownership from local jurisdictions.

Like when Walt Disney tricked Florida into selling him most of Orlando. That's a real thing he did, and companies still do. For instance, Water Asset Management has been buying up property all over the southwest, but hiding behind multiple different shell companies that all curiously share the same mailing address as the firm's headquarters in New York City. So while there seems to be some trepidation over selling all our water to a single corporation, the United States government is perfectly comfortable

selling it to a bunch of corporations. It's a better investment. That holiest of holy rights granted to us by the Constitution. We the corporations, who are people. But at the end of the day, these companies are just profiting off of a drought, like a Bond villain or a regular villain.

The land is cheap because of the extreme conditions, allowing private companies to buy up massive amounts of real estate and its related water rights, then turn around and sell that water at a premium price at the highest bidder. And we just allow this. We treat it like natural law, like corporations are entities that exist in nature,

and we have no choice but to share the planet with them and abide by their whims. They're not shy elude, they're a Morton Joe. Oh, they're gonna do the crimes from time to time, but it's a small price to pay in exchange for... Something. Something, surely. Obviously, this burgeoning industry of water barons

can have huge consequences for the communities that will suffer from their water being siphoned off. You could potentially buy a house, a much more likely scenario if you happen to be a corporation, only to have the water source Daniel Plain viewed right out from under you by an impossibly well-financed company exploiting water and land resources to cash out on a finite resource.

And for the most part, it's perfectly legal. A regular person couldn't get away with that. Tom Selleck got in trouble for stealing water for his avocados and he's not a regular person, he's a super person. But only corporate persons are allowed to do this because America's laws safeguard profits and investment returns above maintaining

a ready supply of a vital natural resource for its citizens, which is a weird thing to do. This is weird. I hate it. But it was a good reminder to rewatch There Will Be Blood. Watch There Will Be Blood. Warmbo, don't, no, please, please don't watch There Will Be Blood, please, please, please don't,

don't, okay, so we please don't watch. There will be blood. Please, please, please don't do, don't, okay. So we're gonna cut to some ads, but when we come back, we will discuss some more dynamic and exciting ways that corporations can screw you over and see zero consequences. I wonder if they can take your teeth or something. Take teeth.

Okay. Go ads now, please. Hello, news perverts. Did you know that along with giving you the news, playing our show actually wards off race? That's true as far as you know, except darn, it has to be ad-free work, except wait, great news. We have a Patreon where for just $5,

you can get all these episodes plus even more news, totally ad free. Just go to patreon.com slash some more news and you can say goodbye to those pesky dark spirits who typically signify your impending death. You must fear the Wraiths. You also get the episodes early and oh there's more! If you want to kick in a little extra you can get your name in the credits as a producer

or even join an exclusive online hangout with me and the rest of the Some More News crew! See the nest where we dwell! It's made of old newspaper and bile! It is awesome! That's patreon.com slash Some More News. One more time you say. Say one more time. One more time. Okay, patreon.com slash some more news.

Go to it now. Oh wow, hello. We are back. If you're just joining us because you're randomly opening YouTube videos and clicking on the middle of the time code, we were exploring the idea that corporations are people. You know, this.

Corporations are people, my friend. Just good old regular people who happen to also have more rights than us, the people. In fact, the midster there used to be the dapper little tugboat at the head of Bain Capital, which, like many private equity groups, can often make a profit or see return on investment from bankrupting smaller companies,

otherwise known as destroying jobs for money. Corporations can purposefully destroy other companies. That's right, corporations can just destroy other companies for profit. Like Mario jumping on a Goomba for coins, that sick fuck. The name of the game is to acquire struggling companies and then cut costs and saddle the companies with enormous debt, essentially using the company

they've just purchased as collateral. The practice is both blatantly unfair and like everything else we've discussed today, totally legal. For instance, in the 1990s, Mitz Bain Capital acquired a steel manufacturer called GS Industries and proceeded to burden that company with $125 million in debt, at least part of which was used to pay a $33.9 million dividend to Bain. Again, totally legal if you're a corporate person. For a person person, this is called embezzlement or fraud.

You know, like in Goodfellas where they burned down the business. It's that, but with fancier matches. Bane was also part of the trio of equity firms that bought out Toys R Us in 2004 and proceeded to flay poor Jeffrey's humiliated corpse in the hot sun like the absolute worst Madagascar sequel.

That poor, poor Jeff. The leveraged buyout left the former retail giant suddenly crushed with billions of dollars of debt, forcing it into bankruptcy in 2017 and putting 33,000 people out of work. Meanwhile, Bane and friends got to write their investment off in taxes and reaped $200 million in fees over their ownership.

I can't stress enough what I just said. They killed Toys R Us. That thing we loved as kids, they killed it for no reason but to make money. Toys R Us, where a kid can be dismantled for profits. Because it doesn't matter if these acquisitions ultimately succeed or fail. Private equity firms like Bain Capital

will make money off the deal no matter what because they're legally guaranteed to. In the case of Toys R Us, they made $15 million, well worth destroying a beloved and trusted brand and setting 33,000 jobs on fire. If Bane and its cronies hadn't smelled blood in the water and swooped in, Toys R Us probably wouldn't be a booming business, but it would Bain Capital. You remember movies?

Ah. We don't have any laws that would deter equity groups from making these acquisitions. They've taken down Toys R Us, huge segments of the digital media landscape, local newspapers, and now our housing market. Mitt Bain and other like-minded capitalists would argue that these were all industries

that just weren't turning enough revenue to compete, thus becoming vulnerable and fair game for an acquisition. You could also argue that maybe the point of these industries isn't necessarily to make a shitload of money for private investors and might further argue that maybe corporations shouldn't be allowed to buy and destroy whatever they want.

Now there's not technically any law that forbids any private individual from buying whatever they want so long as they have the money to spend and a willing seller. You could argue Elon Musk did this exact same thing with Twitter, but in a dumber way. After buying that company, he also forced the debt of that purchase on the company itself,

something I feel like you shouldn't be able to do. That's like if I bought a house someone else was living in and then forced them to pay off the mortgage. Oh, that's called a landlord. Anyway, Brain Capital bought Toys R Us and used the store as collateral for their billion dollar loan. And the company failed because of that loan. Corporations are people, my friend.

They're not people, they're dark wizards. In fact, when you see a former Titan like Toys R Us close its doors or a trusted publication gets shuttered, private equity is often to blame. Either that or Elon Musk dared himself to buy a company as a meme or something. The world didn't move on from what these companies provided. We didn't stop buying toys or reading news or building things with steel. These companies were raided and stripped for parts.

It's totally legal for corporations to assimilate and dissolve each other, destroying thousands of jobs in the process because there are shareholders to consider. The corporation's right to profit is more protected than any employee. Weirdly, it seems much more difficult for the government to dissolve a company after they've broken the law.

Hmm, I'm curious. And while we're talking about ways the government bends over backwards to help these corporations, we of course have to discuss bailouts. The Big B! Christian Bail! Bail Organa! Christian Bail wasn't Batman thing.

Bane! All right, segment title. Corporations get better financial aid than people. Now you probably remember if you were of fireball age back in 2008, but the United States lost 8.6 million jobs during the Great Recession of 2008, which, as we mentioned, was caused by big banks gambling on subprime mortgages. Those same big banks were dealt $700 billion in bailout money.

Meanwhile, Congress doled out just $152 billion for the Economic Stimulus Act, giving most of the people who lost their jobs a $600 tax rebate and no other form of relief. That is quantifiable evidence of the government giving more aid to corporations than people. And of course, it's not the only evidence. Hey, hey, hey, hey.

Remember COVID? Sure you do. It's still going on. But back in 2020, when the pandemic first hit, the inevitable and necessary shutdown periods were putting many jobs and businesses at risk and tanking the economy in the process. Congress responded with the Paycheck Protection Program,

or PPP, which would issue interest-free loans to businesses in order to help them keep employees on the payroll. These loans totaled to around $800 billion for these companies, a lot of them already extremely well off. Turns out the pandemic was pretty fucking great for rich people who saw their stocks and assets appreciate astronomically.

And thank goodness for that, the billionaires deserved a win for once. I mean, come on. It's a good thing Congress had the courage to pass that bill and not Biden's student debt relief, which would have cost about half of that. It's funny how fast the congressional checkbook comes out when it's people with yacht garages asking for money.

Meanwhile, around 160 million individuals and families received a total of $814 billion in stimulus checks. That's about one fifth of the total pandemic aid. And yes, they also expanded unemployment insurance. And that $814 billion is more than the $800 billion in PPP loans, except those unemployment benefits were far harder to get than those corporate loans, many of which weren't really even loans

in that they didn't have to pay them back. Also, that 800 billion was divided between at least 5.2 million borrowers. Whereas as I noted, the 814 billion was divided by 160 million. What's 814 billion split 160 million ways? Am I gonna do my head? No, I'm just gonna get my, I'm just gonna get my,

I'm just gonna. Not that much. Like 5,000 for individuals versus 154,000 for corporations. And sure, to be fair, balanced, well, all that stuff, a lot of those PPP loans were granted specifically to pay employees, or rather 60% of the loan was supposed to go to paychecks. It's right there in the name, except here's the thing,

they kind of didn't do that. But according to a new study by a team of economists, 66 to 77% did not go to paychecks. Instead, most of the money ended up in the hands of business owners and shareholders. The study traced that money even further and found that 72% of the money flowed to the top fifth of household incomes,

meaning most of the money from PPP loans went to people with incomes well over $100,000. Nice work, everyone. I mean, technically it went to paychecks, just the paychecks of the wrong people. And speaking of yacht garages and the savage class divide, remember the Sacklers? Drug company executives like the Sackler family

never faced threats of jail time, even though their products sparked an opioid epidemic that killed over half a million people in the United States alone. Instead, because of the shielding provided by Purdue Pharma and corporate personhood, they get to hide behind bankruptcy laws. Even though Purdue was ordered to pay

over $8 billion in 2020, the Sackler family had already extracted so much money from the company and hidden it throughout various assets that Purdue didn't have the cash to pay the settlement. And that was fine. The company got to file for bankruptcy instead, shielding itself from future lawsuits

and shielding the Sacklers from any civil action related to their company's drugs. And once again, that was fine. Like the guy I job shadowed in high school once told me, this is all totally legal. It wasn't, that guy was, it wasn't. Meanwhile, 48% of the people in federal prisons are there for drug charges and quote,

half a million Americans are serving long sentences for non-violent drug offenses. Lawrence Dowd, CEO of Rochester Drug Cooperative was charged with conspiracy to distribute controlled narcotics and conspiracy to defraud the United States in 2019. After he knowingly sold narcotics like oxycodone and fentanyl to pharmacies that were supplying those drugs to addicts and dealers. Those are Tony Montana charges and normally a person would be facing life in

prison. Although the prosecution asked for 15 years, but Dowd used his innate wealth magic to reduce his sentence to a mere two years and three months. The judge noting that Doud was quote, motivated solely by profit. So not only is that less than 15 years, but it's less than the average federal drug sentence, which is between six and 15 years.

No idea why they gave him less time, but I guess the moral here is that corporations and their executives can do whatever they want as long as it is done for profit. Anything? Really bothers me that you're still taking notes, but yeah, pretty much anything. Even...

Lada? No, of course not. No, what? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Well, corporations can kill people more than you. Corporations can't legally kill people, but they don't face nearly the same consequences and punishment that a person would if they committed murder. And even when corporations enter guilty pleas

for heinous crimes, their punishment is usually a nominal fee and a slap on the wrist. For example, PG&E recently pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter after they were found to be responsible for a 2018 wildfire. But the energy company's sentence for negligence

that ended dozens of lives was a fine of 3.5 million, plus another 15 million to provide water for residents. And that's it. That's it. You can barely even make a charming indie film for $3.5 million. Or hey, let's take a look at whatever the hell is going on with Boeing.

The Boeing 737 MAX disaster of several years ago is particularly relevant now following the company's recent Benny Hill-esque string of dramatic in-flight equipment failures. They have brought down more planes than the villain in Passenger 57. But sure, I mean, they aren't literally killing anyone. Like for the record, Boeing isn't literally having people assassinated.

For example, this former quality manager turned whistleblower who definitely shot himself in his car outside his hotel while coincidentally being in the middle of testifying about safety issues with Boeing. Totally wasn't, he wasn't, he wasn't killed, wasn't killed by Boeing, despite him telling a friend that if he died, it wouldn't be suicide. Proves nothing, I'm saying out loud,

please don't kill me, Boeing. But back to that earlier scandal, Boeing purposely ignored engineering problems in the 737, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people. They entered a deferred prosecution paying a $2.5 billion penalty and avoided criminal charges altogether. That penalty sounds like a lot,

but that's only 4% of Boeing's 2021 revenue. Add that to Boeing's current woes, where it is currently being sued for excessive defects in its 737 model, which seems to keep coming apart mid-flight if social media posts are to be believed, which sometimes they're not, so be careful there. So, you know, it's just kind of weird that they're allowed to keep making airplanes.

It's just, just my opinion. Please don't go shooting me in the head about it, okay? But I do believe the ultimate test of your viability as an airplane manufacturer is whether or not your planes burst into festive aeronautical confetti enough times to trend on TikTok. And before Warmbo asked me to repeat it, deferred prosecution is basically when prosecutors agree

not to charge a company with a crime in exchange for the company promising to change its evil ways and usually paying a fine. It's a common way for companies to shield themselves from criminal prosecution. It's the, I'm sorry, I won't do it again of sweetheart deals. And many companies have made them over and over again.

Sorry, Wombo, won't do it again for all you know. The important stuff is sticking and that's all I can ask for. We've seen some pretty egregious examples of executives being let off the hook for some pretty heinous crimes over the last decade or so. Purdue Pharma was hit with an $8 billion fine,

but the government waived $1.775 billion of it. Meanwhile, three of its executives were allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanors with no prison time. General Motors pulled the deferred prosecution rip cord after the company hit a fault in over 30 million of its cars from regulators, resulting in at least 124 deaths. Not a single GM executive was prosecuted, despite the Department of Justice's claim

that they had known about the flaw for years beforehand. That's much like how no PG&E executives were prosecuted after those wildfire charges. It's weird, right? You can make decisions that kill dozens of people, but you get no jail time because it was through a corporation. And not just for dozens of people, but possibly millions.

Harvard researchers recently discovered that ExxonMobil knew exactly how bad the effects of human-driven climate change were based on internal studies conducted between the 1970s and the early 2000s. That's a long time, man. Despite actively misleading the public for decades about climate change,

nobody with a seat at Exxon's big long table has had to answer for putting countless lives at risk and contributing to a projected 250,000 deaths per year between 2030 and 2050. Like, we're talking about the death of the planet and no one is going to jail, but it doesn't have to be that abstract. Remember that Russell Crowe movie,

The Insider, about how the tobacco companies in America concealed the health risks of smoking for decades? No? It was directed by Michael Mann? Come on! Come on. Well, in 2006, a federal judge found that tobacco companies had conspired for decades

to deceive the public on the dangers of their product, violating civil racketeering laws. Despite this Russell Crowe in unhinged sized crime, the judge only demanded the companies change marketing tactics and stop using terms like low tar, light and mild, which are completely meaningless anyway, to trick consumers into believing

that this particular pack of smokes has less cancer in it. You know, when you do a crime, the judge will let you off so long as you promise not to do it again. And even that gentle kitten smooch of a judgment was appealed, of course, and it took another six years of litigation to reaffirm the ruling.

They got away with murder, and they still wanted to speak to the manager. Incidentally, more than eight million people die every year from tobacco use. I don't know, I just felt relevant for some reason. Meanwhile, the gun industry has convinced 60% of Americans that having a gun in the house makes them more safe, according to a 2014 poll.

Even as hunting and sports shooting are getting less popular, gun sales have never been higher. People are just hoarding them like baseball cards. At the same time, mass shootings and gun deaths are increasing year to year, largely due to suicides. So apart from the obvious reason that guns are a hot button issue, why hasn't there ever been any pushback year to year, largely due to suicides. So apart from the obvious reason

that guns are a hot button issue, why hasn't there ever been any pushback against gun manufacturers by the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission? Stop taking notes! But Wombo needs to know how to shield himself from criminal liability! Are you making guns?

That 3D printer was for D&D minis. It's for your imagination. You can pry it from Wombo's cold dead lips. Anyway, a big reason gun makers have never felt much meaningful backlash is the Protection of Law Commerce and Arms Act of 2005, which grants sweeping immunity to gun manufacturers and civil lawsuits.

You'll notice that law was passed after the 1999 Columbine massacre. I just felt relevant for some reason. The Biden administration is actively defending the law, so gun manufacturers will continue to get protection. And thank goodness, for a second, I was worried the government would forget to protect corporations at the expense

of actual human lives. In exchange, we get sweet dark Brandon needs. Look, these laws don't have to be written this way. Many of these rules aren't even that old. If corporations are people when it suits them, they should be required to be people when it doesn't suit them. Or better yet, corporations should be subject

to an entirely separate code of laws. You know, laws specifically for corporations, because that's what they are. They're not people. They're clearly not people. They're entities representing the financial interests of a group of investors, and they only exist on paper. So why do we accept some weird technicality

based on made-up legal mumbo jumbo claiming their people. Because here's some news. Laws are made up, remember? Like money and Warcraft and Warmbo's 3D printed guns, apparently. It's made up. So was the constitution. These things weren't handed down from on high

by a bunch of wizards in an awesome motorcycle gang. And because you ask, of course their motorcycles fly. It would be a stupid gang if they didn't. Real bad club. But no, these laws were all pitched, written, and voted into existence by people at work. Mostly old, mostly white, mostly male people doing a job they are being paid to do

from which they get to spend most of the year on vacation. When they popped their heads out like Punxsutawney Phil to tell us Walmart was legally a human being, we should have built a labyrinth on the moon and banished them there. Mitt shouldn't know peace. Corporations are people, my friend. Hi, Mitt.

And before you ask, of course the labyrinth has a minotaur. It's on the moon, it has a munotaur. It's a lunabyrinth. It seems like the only function of classifying a corporation as a person is to allow it to act as a patsy for its executives when they break the law in the name of doing business. A hypothetical fall guy, a stooge that exists solely

in the abstract until it's time to shield the actual human beings who make all the decisions from being prosecuted. We have a system that guarantees a corporation's right to exist as if it were a human being, and then defends that right with zealous intensity. A corporation's pursuit of wealth and growth is treated as inalienable as the basic rights afforded

to every American citizen. And that's pretty fucking weird. If a private citizen, let's say Robert Davy, starts trafficking a bunch of cocaine through Wayne Newton's televangelist church, that's a crime. For your punishment, James Bond will salt burn his way into your inner circle, dissolve your business,

and then kill you with a gasoline truck when you least expect it. But when executives at Purdue Pharma kill half a million people pushing a drug, they knew to be dangerous. They pay a settlement, which doesn't even come out of their own pockets. If a person kills half a million people,

we almost don't even know what to do with you. Like, wow, half a million. Like, jail doesn't seem like enough for that. And while we don't support the death penalty anyway, in this particular case, I'm not sure it would take. If a corporation kills half a million people, every person responsible for making the decisions that lead to those deaths

should be held criminally accountable, right? That seems like the bare minimum. And we can hold corporations and their executives accountable for crimes. We've done it before and surprisingly recently. Congress wants to know what caused the Enron meltdown, wants to know why employee retirement funds were wiped out, while at the same time top executives

were personally making millions. Remember Enron? The energy giant filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after whistleblowers at the company revealed fraudulent action and shady accounting practices. Such nostalgia for the good old days of 2001. Anyway, in a classic move, many of the top execs at the company paid themselves in deferred salaries

and bonuses just before the company went under, leaving thousands of low-level workers holding the saggy old bag. Incredibly, as if provoked by a child's wish, the DOJ under George W. Bush went after Enron's executives. A team of FBI agents and prosecutors led by future target of embarrassing liberal fanboying, Robert Mueller, pursued a slow and painstaking investigation

into the company, eventually landing convictions and prison sentences for all of the higher ups. That is awesome and great, but it shouldn't be, right? It shouldn't blow our minds when criminals who get caught doing serious crimes get punished accordingly. But what's wild is that this bare minimum of securing convictions against business ghouls was still seen as too harsh by some people in our government.

As journalist Jesse Isinger explains in his delightfully titled book, The Chicken Shit Club, why the Justice Department fails to prosecute executives, DOJ officials actually thought the Enron prosecution was overzealous. In other words, they found Enron's executives too guilty. Isinger argues that many of these officials

and executives are cut from the same cloth and it's difficult for higher up DOJ officials to see executives as serious criminals. In one email quoted in the book, a Securities and Exchange Commission regulator wrote, well, these Goldman Sachs bankers are good people who have made one bad mistake. Again, these people didn't get peer pressured

into egging the principal's house or stealing money to pay for the sandman's daughter's operation, they're just inflicting hardship, misery and death for a profit. So while it is possible to hold executives responsible for the crimes committed by their companies, there just doesn't seem to be much will or desire to do so.

Instead, the DOJ mainly focuses on large cash settlements, which effectively leaves the people responsible off the hook. We have all these laws to bail out corporations, but so little to support and protect actual individuals. The United States as a country cares infinitely more about the lives of companies than the lives of its people. A company's right to exist and thrive and grow is defended more zealously than any of the humans

they grind into paste. Congress doesn't move heaven and earth to make sure none of the American people go hungry, but will shield wealthy corporations and CEOs like that James Woods meme, even as they lay off thousands of people in the pursuit of success. And success doesn't even mean the same thing anymore. Success doesn't mean a successful company.

More often than not, it means you successfully dissolved a company to make the numbers in your investors' portfolios go up. Not to tombstone pile drive a dead horse, but corporations and private equity groups aren't ineffable cosmic entities drifting through our psychosphere. The rules governing their behavior

weren't written by Rumpelstiltskin. These are individuals committing crimes on behalf of their wealthy gangs. Corporations are people, my friend. The aging Pilgrim Village reenactor is right. Corporations are people, my friend. The aging Pilgrim Village reenactor is right. Corporations are people. They're a collection of people that the government has simply stopped holding accountable.

So maybe it's time to do that again. Enron was 20 years ago, but on the timeline of corporate recidivists, that's not long at all. That's just two recessions ago. Start treating CEOs who steal billions and kill scores of people the same way the courts would treat a regular person who did all of that.

By throwing them into Arkham Asylum because those are the crime stats of a Batman villain. Or, there's always my moon idea, lots of space on the moon. Or, there's always my moon idea. Lots of space on the moon. Okay, where's that little Joanne's Fabric freak? I'm gonna shit in his stupid dry ears! Whoa whoa whoa whoa! Slow down!

Explain yourself. He bought me. Warmbow bought Woolworth Cooksy! How did you let that happen? I thought I was buying tasteful nudes, but he snuck in an addendum to the contract and the nudes aren't even that tasteful. Ugh, look.

Oh, yeah, woof. Those are not tasteful at all. Wow, so the teacher has become the student. Cody, you clearly do not understand. Woolworth Cooksy is the controlling entity of Cody Piss Incorporated, which owns News Slop Group, which is the parent company of Some More News. Did you say Cody Piss Incorporated?

Warmbow owns the show now. Oh. That's probably bad. Yeah, Oh. That's probably bad. Yeah, yeah, that's probably bad, Cody! All employees, please report to Wombo's office for mandatory tickle fight! Fuck. I was never here.

Forget my name, Beardy. Tickle, tickle, Mr. Cody! Beardy. Tickle, tickle, Mr. Cody. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Do you think he'll give me special treatment because he's technically my common law wife? Hey everybody, thanks so much for watching. What a fun development that we love here.

We are all in support of the new management. It's awesome. Make sure to like and subscribe, please. It really helps us out. We've also got a patreon.com slash some more news. We've got a podcast called Even More News. You can listen to this show some more news as a podcast if you'd like go look it up and so on. We've got merch

with our CEOs face on it I guess their boss whatever the we got merch and we've also got exciting things ahead so so stay tuned and thanks again for watching. Like and subscribe.