Judd Gregg: Corporations are people too

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) says the most amazingly incoherent things.

Or should we just say she speaks in “Harvard talk”?

She builds her themes around political correctness on steroids, spiced up with limitless arrogance while stirring in a touch of ideological claptrap.

{mosads}Consider her views on corporations.

Corporations, according to her, are the epitome of evil.

“Giant multinational corporations…have no loyalty to America. They have no loyalty to American workers. They have no loyalty to American consumers. They have no loyalty to American communities. They are loyal only to their own bottom line,” she said at October’s Democratic debate in Ohio, captivated by the righteousness of her own pronouncement.

There are approximately 140 million people who have jobs in America.

This number is up by a few million from the number of people who had jobs at the end of the Obama administration.

It is the most people ever employed in our history, with the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years or so.

The vast majority of the people who work in the private sector work for corporations.

Some of these corporations are large. Amazon employs 647,000 people, almost all in America. Walmart employs more than 2 million people — again, mostly in America.

Of course, most Americans work for smaller corporations.

Almost half of all private sector employees work for businesses with fewer than 500 staff.

Most of these people have families or others who depend on them and their jobs.

This may come as a surprise to Warren and her college-age followers, but not only do all these Americans have jobs that pay them. Those jobs also often include benefits like healthcare, educational assistance and childcare.

Corporations are, simply put, a lot of people working together.

Of course, there are always government jobs.

Today, there are approximately 22 million people who work either for the federal, state or local government — not counting the military.

Warren has no problem with government employment of people. In fact, she wishes to expand that segment of America radically.

This is a touch ironic since the income of government employees depends on the taxes paid by people in America who work for corporations.

Clearly they need to pay more in taxes to support her plans.

As corporations spend more on taxes, they have less to spend on employing Americans, and supporting their benefits and wages.

An equally significant oversight in Warren’s diatribes is that, for the most part, American workers actually own the corporations she is attacking.

Who owns most of the stock in American corporations? American workers.

The bulk of stock in American corporations is owned by pension funds and private pension plans like 401ks and IRAs.

Blackrock, the single biggest manager of pension money in the country, looks after more than $6 trillion in all. A very large percentage of this money comes from some form of pension investment.

These Americans, too, constitute corporate America.

{mossecondads}They reflect the fact that stock ownership in American corporations is the backbone of almost all American pension plans.

Even public employees who are not subjected to Warren’s wrath are heavily invested in corporate America.

The California public employees’ pension fund, for example — the nation’s largest, with more than $350 billion in investments — is primarily invested in the ownership of American corporations.

It is an easy use of language to make “corporations” out to be the cause of all things evil, as Warren does.

But, as with so much of the pablum that she is promoting, her lines are not meant to be considered in any depth.

She assumes her audiences are so angry or so naive or so poorly informed they will not look beyond her words.

If they were to pull back the curtain and ask obvious questions, they would have to conclude that she is a demagogue’s demagogue.

In making “corporations” a political punching bag, she is assuming people will ignore what corporations are — a collection of Americans pulling together to accomplish many things, including a better life for themselves.

Her attacks can only be taken in two ways.

The first is that she does not trust or like Americans who get their jobs and benefits from corporations, or who invest in those corporations.

The second is that she believes she can sell her listeners a large container of snake oil wrapped in a paper bag of political fraud that depends for its viability on the gullibility of her followers.

Judd Gregg (R) is a former governor and three-term senator from New Hampshire who served as chairman and ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, and as ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Foreign Operations subcommittee.