David B. Livingstone: Sotomayor immediately makes her mark

Sometimes, it really does take a wise Latina to cut through the mountain of bovine excrement that passes for jurisprudence in these Clueless States of America.

In one of her first questions posed as the newest member of the nation's highest Old Boys' Club — er, court — Sonia Sotomayor hit a home run the likes of which haven't been seen in more than a century. The mother of all home runs, as Saddam Hussein might have phrased it: Imagine a home run wherein a steroid-fuelled Sammy Sosa lapped the bases eleven times before the scoreboard had had a chance to change.

That's what Sotomayor did — and in so doing, this junior justice neatly outshone generations of justices before her when it came to good old common sense.

Sotomayor posed a simple question that would seem obvious to almost any elementary school student, but which has somehow escaped brilliant legal minds like Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Antonin Scalia. Namely, she asked whether the courts might have been wrong in affording corporations legal status as persons all these many long, stupid years.

An elementary school student can tell the difference: A person is an animal that walks on its hind legs, talks, and eats at McDonald's. A corporation is a faceless and monolithic bureaucracy which takes money, enslaves your parents, controls the Republican Party, and lies in television commercials. The differences would appear to be obvious — but evidently not so to the dozens of men and women who had preceded Sotomayor on the nation's highest bench.

Sotomayor asserted that judges had "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," and subsequently posited that "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with…[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics." Gee. Ya think?

One can imagine Scalia spluttering, Alito sneering, Roberts glaring, and Thomas staring blankly into space at such heresy. How dare the Obama-appointed interloper enter these sacred chambers, the guardian and steward of election thieves, war criminals and the Fortune 500, and utter such a blasphemy? What could she mean that corporations didn't have the same rights — nay, more rights — than old-fashioned flesh-and-blood people?

It is heresy. After all, modern America is built on the backs of such convenient myths and lies, just as it is built atop the bones of millions of murdered indigenous people: Corporations are people, global warming is a myth, abstinence education works, and Santa Claus comes every year to dole out bonuses to Goldman Sachs partners.

Like most lies, everyone who pretends to believe them does so because on some level, they work. Pretending that a corporation is a person allows for convenient suspension of disbelief, or at least avoidance of uncomfortable questioning, in so many areas. Of course the entity that signs my paycheck has the human right to despoil the air and water, sell unsafe products, manipulate the workings of government, lie to the public, and exploit workers, just like I have the "right" to dump my used motor oil in the backyard, fudge on my expense accounts, or withhold my child's allowance. Naturally. Making believe this is true allows us to avoid facing the fact that as individuals and communities, we have become powerless in the face of the economic behemoths that have grown to surround, control, and exploit us.

As our hypothetical elementary school child would understand, reality dictates that in fact a corporation isn't actually a person until you can strap it into an electric chair, where so many of them belong, and pump 28,000 volts through it. America and its bought-and-paid-for court system are a long ways from recognizing this reality, but at least Sonia Sotomayor had the integrity, intellectual honesty, and guts to start raising the issue.

David B. Livingstone is a columnist for The North Star National.