He said
“Corporations are people too.”
And he was not kidding.
Humorously nor technically.

Legally nor practically.

A corporation is “a person”
made up
by a group of people.

And then imagine
trying to convince a classroom
full of teenagers in heat
that this idea…
of a person made by a gang of people
in an otherwise “bored” room
is anything “butt” an orgy
at best.

Whatever happened to Home Ec?
Some might call it “The Business”
but incorporation is not how babies are made.

What about the birds and the bees?
What if global warming is nothing but the globe warning
us about another big freeze?
Ice Age 2 a brew, right here
at the center of our anatomy & physiology.

What happened?
When did the perpetual pursuit of profit turn our souls
into amputees?
How did it turn our hearts so cold,

then green,
then Grinches?

When did we stop making meteorology “our business”?
Whether too much sun means famine.
Whether too much rain means flood.
Whether too much is too much
and whether enough is enough.

When did we stop teaching each other to listen to the weather
in our veins?
If you listen close enough,
you can hear nuclear winter coming.

But when the science points towards people
instead of money
all of the sudden we don’t believe in it anymore.

Staring at the cold hard nanotechnology in our palms
that feeds us stories about how the nano scientists got it all wrong.

How are people so obsessed with wealth
so bad at math?

All about carrying the one
and throwing the remainders in the trash.

Never wanna show our work
or our workers.
Steady counting on fingers
Underneath tables
instead of fair wages
until unpaid labor’s forced to erect an above ground railroad

with barely enough fingers left to make a fist.

Where family leave equals a handful of kids.
Where the opposite of addition isn’t extraction.
Where “profit” is not π
and eat it too.

Where profit is so much more than
total revenue minus total cost.

When there is nothing greater than
The cost of doing
nothing.

When the cost of business as usual
is a total loss.

And loss is very, very expensive.
In fact
it’s priceless.

When did making a living off of a degree in English become a joke?
When did the definition of “wealthy” become
“majoring in business is your only hope.”

When did words become cheap?
While the magnitude of tuition increased by at least an order of three.
When did language become currency?
And if so, wouldn’t the richest country be the one where the most people read?
When we finally put our money where our mouth is,
Will that be the day we realize that we can’t eat money?

Will “wealth” go back to meaning worth?
Will “fortune” go back to meaning future?
Will the definition of business cease to be “Winners
& Losers”
The day we lose interest in interest and
our impact is too fat to fit in our pockets.
Because entrepreneurship has always been social,
long before we made them transactional

relationships were a commodity.
A trade-off
of mutual funds and best interests.

When will we revisit our charters?
Re-envisioned by artists,
revised by authors

in a world where public good is great
and public benefit

is not for martyrs.

There is no such thing as micro,
only macro economics,

Where profit it interconnected, not Newtonian.
Where a dollar earned by one,
doesn’t have to be at the expense of another.
Where our grandchildren are our whole entire world
and we don’t want to leave our planet left holding the bag,

An inheritance of emptiness
A miscarraige of character.

Where shareholder actually means share
and company culture is the bottomline.

Where “you can’t take it with you”
is more than just an insensitive thing rich people
say to other rich people…
instead of “whose gonna clean this mess we’ve left behind.”

We are plenty financially literate in this country.
Fluent in scorched earth capitalism and personal debt.
Instead, let’s beef up on courses in the Humanities
come up with a Theory of Prosperity that’s a bit more relative.

If we’ve learned nothing from Wolf of Wall Street
it’s that the difference between predator and prey
is not some industrial evolution...

...it is a Revolution of the Heart.

An innately human superpower,
seen by some as a mortal flaw.

And as we’ve tried over the ages to
reverse-engineer it out of our offspring.
Some by lab class
and others by lab coat.

We are reminded, in short, that Mitt Romney
was wrong.
Corporations are not people,
they are zombies.

Frankensteins of our doing,
False gods gestated in our own image.
A couple hundred pages of paperwork and ink

no pigment.

A manifestation of our most primal instincts.
A flipped coin wish
Heads or tails
‘tween our worst nightmares
and our wildest dreams.

Our very own lil’ monsters,

but they don’t have to be.




*The image pictured is an actual home economics handbook for junior high schoolers from 1966 https://archive.org/details/jhshomeechandboo66edmo/page/6/mode/2up