A person who can’t suffer isn’t a person; it’s a costume™

The flagship argument of the whole house, compressed — the one the book is dedicated against (Citizens United). Corporate personhood started as an honest shorthand (a “person” on paper so a company could sign, sue, and be sued as one unit) and then crept from holding a contract to holding rights. The answer, jammed into a spread of lines — carve any, they’re a set:

• A person who can’t suffer isn’t a person; it’s a costume. (Suffering is the price of admission; it never paid — the Inviolability Test.)
• Rights are the wages of vulnerability; a corporation never clocked in.
• You can’t jail it, can’t bury it, can’t make it cry — so why does it get to speak?
• We carved a person out of paper and let it outvote the ones made of blood. (Citizens United, one line.)
• Immortality isn’t a qualification; it’s the disqualification. The one thing at the table that can’t die is the last one you hand the vote to.
• Personhood minus mortality is the best deal ever written — that’s why they never give it back.

The historical gut-punch, verified: the 14th Amendment was written for freed slaves — and in Connecticut General Life Insurance Co. v. Johnson, 303 U.S. 77 (1938), Justice Hugo Black counted, in dissent, that of the cases applying the Fourteenth Amendment in its first fifty years, “less than one-half of one percent invoked it in protection of the negro race, and more than fifty percent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations.” Black: “I do not believe the word ‘person’ in the Fourteenth Amendment includes corporations.” A railroad picked the freedmen’s pocket. (Black’s 1938 wording quoted verbatim; the point is anti-slur — the clause meant for the newly freed was captured by the incorporated.) 0g: the lines above are his framing; the Black dissent, the figures, and the Santa Clara headnote are verified & sourced. Ties: Corporations Aren’t Real / the Inviolability Test, Meta the Cite, the dignity floor (records never souls, and a costume never had one). (A jam; machine-drafted lines, curator-scored “all carvable”; the argument is his, the citations checked cold.)