if corporations are people, Romney should be charged with manslaughter

From: Reanimation Library

"Responding to a question from an audience member as to why Social Security should be included in deficit talks when it doesn’t add to the deficit, Romney drifted into a defense of corporate rights.
'Corporations are people, my friend,' he said. 'Of course they are.'"
— Benjy Sarlin, TPM

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"Corporate personhood is the status conferred upon corporations under the law, which allows corporations to have rights and responsibilities similar to those of a natural person."
— Wikipedia
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"The Los Angeles Times recently surveyed the record of Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney ran from 1984 to 1999. As the report notes, Romney made a lot of money over those years, both for himself and for his investors. But he did so in ways that often hurt ordinary workers.
     Bain specialized in leveraged buyouts, buying control of companies with borrowed money, pledged against those companies' earnings or assets. The idea was to increase the acquired companies' profits, then resell them. [...]
     One recent analysis of 'private equity transactions' — the kind of buyouts and takeovers Bain specialized in — noted that business in general is always both creating and destroying jobs, and that this is also true of companies that were buyout or takeover targets.
     However, job creation at the target firms is no greater than in similar firms that aren't targets, while 'gross job destruction is substantially higher.'
     So Romney made his fortune in a business that is, on balance, about job destruction rather than job creation. And because job destruction hurts workers even as it increases profits and the incomes of top executives, leveraged buyout firms have contributed to the combination of stagnant wages and soaring incomes at the top that has characterized America since 1980.
     Now I've just said that the leveraged buyout industry as a whole has been a job destroyer, but what about Bain in particular?
     Well, by at least one criterion, Bain during the Romney years seems to have been especially hard on workers, since four of its top 10 targets by dollar value ended up going bankrupt. (Bain, nonetheless, made money on three of those deals.) That's a much higher rate of failure than is typical even of companies going through leveraged buyouts — and when the companies went under, many workers ended up losing their jobs, their pensions, or both."
— Paul Krugman, The Modesto Bee
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“'Mitt Romney as he runs for President has decided to make job creation a big piece of it,' [Randy] Johnson tells me. 'And if he’s going to make a big piece of it he has to be accountable for what he’s done.'
     He recounts his now familiar story: in 1992, Bain took over a company, Ampad, which in turn bought the Marion factory where Johnson worked. Under new management, he and his fellow workers returned from their July 4 holiday to find they had been fired en masse and had to reapply for their old jobs. Those who came back were greeted with lower wages and stingier health and pension benefits. As conditions worsened, workers rebelled against their treatment and went on strike. Johnson took their story public and Democrats used it to go after Romney in his 1994 Senate run.
     Johnson’s efforts may have helped stop Romney from defeating Ted Kennedy that year, but things only got worse after the campaign ended. Within months, the company shut down the factory entirely, leaving all of its employees out of a job, and Ampad eventually went bankrupt in 2000. But despite its disastrous arc, Bain made huge profits off the company — as much as $100 million — thanks to revenue from management fees and selling off shares of its stock, which they took public in 1996."—Benjy Sarlin, TPM
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