Today's Must-Read: Corporations as Responsible Citizens

I'm not alone in thinking that Citizens United was one of the worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court, on a level with Dredd Scott and Bowers v. Hardwick.* Well, Elizabeth Warren is taking the first steps toward bringing some sort of accountability to corporate "persons". From Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts this week offered a game-changing plan for leveling the playing field for the little guys. As a senator in the minority, she may not have the leverage to bring corporate criminals to justice. But Warren has instead drafted a plan for rewriting the DNA of large corporations and bringing them to heel. That is long overdue. A former legislator I heard from called the plan transformational.

In a press release announcing her Accountable Capitalism Act, Warren makes her move against the system as it stands:

"There's a fundamental problem with our economy. For decades, American workers have helped create record corporate profits but have seen their wages hardly budge. To fix this problem we need to end the harmful corporate obsession with maximizing shareholder returns at all costs, which has sucked trillions of dollars away from workers and necessary long-term investments," said Senator Warren. "My bill will help the American economy return to the era when American companies and American workers did well together."

Sullivan goes into a lot of detail on this one. Read it.

* The idea that a legal fiction, which is what corporate "personhood" is, has all the rights of natural persons is ludicrous. What makes Citizens United (aside from its bastard offspring, such as Hobby Lobby) so egregious is that it granted all the privileges of personhood with none of the responsibilities.