Every week, this column dives into the evolving, often absurd ways corporate personhood, government policy, and public accountability collide. But this week’s discussion feels less like a metaphor and more like a blunt-force reminder of how far American institutions—public and private—will stretch the idea of “responsibility” when it serves them, and how quickly they abandon it the moment actual human lives are involved.
Because if corporations are “people,” as the legal fiction insists, then we should expect morals, empathy, restraint, or at least some vague approximation of humanity from the institutions operating under that umbrella. Yet what we’re watching unfold on open water—the U.S. military firing missiles at drug-running speedboats, allegedly killing survivors in follow-on strikes—reminds us that this government-as-business model applies corporate status selectively. Corporations (and the government entities treated as such) get all the rights of “personhood” when it benefits them, and none of the moral obligations when humans end up on the wrong end of a drone strike.
And suddenly, we’re all supposed to call this “policy.”
A War Nobody Declared, Based on Laws Nobody Saw
Everyone remembers Pete Hegseth’s ever-shifting account of the now-viral incident: first he claimed he saw the entire strike unfold, then later insisted he left before the second blast. These aren’t minor discrepancies—they represent the fog of spin surrounding modern military operations. Today’s Capitol Hill narrative seems to be that the two surviving passengers from the initial blast were still “attempting to deliver contraband,” and therefore justified targets in the second strike.
We’re expected to accept that as a reasonable explanation. As if the middle of the ocean is a courtroom, as if two wounded people in a sinking hull pose some existential threat to the United States.
And leaving them drifting in the sea—injured, stranded, doomed—would somehow have been the gentler option. That alone says everything.
This is where the selective morality kicks in. Corporations are people, my friend—until those “people” would have to treat other actual people with anything resembling dignity.
I suppose this is also the part where I tell everyone involved to get their story straight and stick to one version. This ‘I saw it, I didn’t see it, I was there, I wasn’t there, it’s a war but we just don’t know what war yet’ routine sounds ridiculous.
The War on Drugs—Or a New War Entirely?
At the core of this is the unanswered question: Are we just continuing the decades-old War on Drugs, or has the U.S. quietly launched a new undeclared conflict?
If this is the War on Drugs, it’s a strange evolution: no longer interdiction, arrest, prosecution, intelligence work, or dismantling trafficking networks. We’ve skipped all the way to blowing up boats at sea. That’s the leap from law enforcement to war.
And if it’s a new war, what country are we fighting? The place where the boats departed? Or the stateless cartels operating across borders? Or is this, once again, the U.S. stretching legal interpretations until the Constitution barely recognizes its own face in the mirror?
Add the Trump-era absurdity: the infamous pardon of a former Honduran leader who facilitated massive drug pipelines into the U.S. That guy, apparently, was acceptable. But low-level couriers in leaky speedboats? Vaporize them. That’s the hypocrisy baked right into U.S. drug policy: powerful players get a pass, and powerless ones get the missile.
A War That Still Doesn’t Address Today’s Real Crisis
Let’s strip away the theatrics: cocaine shipments on boats are no longer the central drug threat in America. Not even close. The overdose epidemic is driven primarily by fentanyl—synthetic opioids manufactured in chemical labs and shipped in ways no missile strike can meaningfully stop.
So what exactly is the strategic value of destroying small boats loaded with kilos of cocaine in 2025? It certainly isn’t addressing the root problem. It’s spectacle. The kind of spectacle that gives talking heads something to point at while nothing actually changes.
It’s performative security—big explosions on open water, zero progress on addiction at home.
If the U.S. truly wanted to end cocaine trafficking, it could. Demand reduction, treatment access, economic reforms, and coordinated international investigations would shrink the market far more effectively than airstrikes. But as with homelessness and hunger, the myth that these problems can’t be solved is easier than confronting the truth: we simply choose not to solve them.
The documentary American Drug War: The Last White Hope spelled out by all of us involved and about this failure in brutal detail 15 years ago. Nothing’s changed except the methods. Instead of arresting couriers, we’re killing them.
The Administration’s Legal Logic: A Conflict Redefined
To justify these escalations, the administration now argues that the United States is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with so-called narco-terrorist organizations like Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua.
That designation does a lot of work. Once a group is labeled a “foreign terrorist organization,” the rules change. Suddenly, this is no longer a law-enforcement issue governed by human rights norms. It becomes a battlefield. The Pentagon plays by the laws of war. And killing suspected traffickers becomes a “legitimate military action,” even without congressional authorization.
A classified Office of Legal Counsel memo reportedly claims that drug trafficking itself constitutes an “imminent threat” to Americans—and therefore justifies lethal force as national self-defense.
That’s how we get from coast guard operations to precision-guided strikes.
This interpretation also produced one particularly strange justification: officials briefed lawmakers that the second strike on the now-sinking vessel was needed to “eliminate a navigation hazard.” As if U.S. military doctrine now includes the Coast Guard’s equivalent of “cleaning up debris”—except in this case, the debris was human beings.
The Legal Backlash: “Murder on the High Seas”
International law experts, human rights attorneys, former Pentagon lawyers—they’re all sounding the alarm. To them, there is no armed conflict here. Drug cartels are criminal syndicates, not political or military combatants. Drug smuggling, even at scale, is not an “armed attack” that authorizes self-defense under the UN Charter.
Meaning: this isn’t war. This is law enforcement. And in law enforcement, lethal force is permitted only when lives are imminently threatened.
None of that happened here.
Former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane said it plainly: if you intentionally kill people outside an armed conflict, it meets the legal definition of murder under U.S. law and military law. That’s why congressional committees are now opening investigations, and UN human-rights officials are warning that these strikes may constitute unlawful killings.
Even in real war, firing on shipwrecked survivors is explicitly forbidden. But we did it anyway—and then attempted to justify it with a bureaucratic shrug.
Who Decides When America Goes to War? Not Who You’d Expect
This entire episode exposes a much deeper constitutional fracture. The U.S. essentially launched offensive military strikes without the public being told we were in a war, without Congress debating it, and without any formal authorization.
The Constitution divides war powers deliberately: Congress declares war, the President commands the military. It’s a balance meant to prevent exactly this— unilateral, unchecked armed conflict.
But modern practice has eroded that balance beyond recognition. No formal war declaration has been issued since World War II. Instead, we use flexible, endlessly stretched Authorizations for Use of Military Force, or the President’s claimed authority to “repel sudden attacks.”
And the War Powers Resolution—intended to constrain presidents after Vietnam—has been ignored, sidestepped, or reinterpreted for decades. Presidents consult Congress “when possible,” send reports that satisfy the letter but not the spirit of the law, and continue military operations far past the 60-day limit without consequences.
Which leaves us with a hard truth: America’s executive branch has effectively reclaimed unilateral power to make war. And this latest operation might be the most glaring example yet.
This is precisely why coverage like ours—and yes, political analysis via platforms like Explore New Jersey’s politics section (https://explorenewjersey.org/politics/)—matters right now.
Corporate Personhood and Government Immunity: The Final Loop Back
So how does this all connect to “corporations are people, my friend”?
Simple. The U.S. government selectively invokes the rights of personhood when it comes to financial power, campaign contributions, and corporate liberties—but abandons every moral expectation attached to being a “person” the moment accountability enters the picture.
Corporations get constitutional rights but not conscience.
The government gets wartime authority but not wartime responsibility.
And everyday people—especially the poor, the vulnerable, or the ones in the wrong boat at the wrong time—are treated as collateral damage in a conflict they never agreed to be part of.
If corporations and the government can legally operate as “individuals,” then where’s the humanity? Where’s the empathy? Where are the values? When an individual kills someone on the high seas, we call that murder. When a corporate-styled government entity does it, we get legal memos, talking points, and a quiet shrug that the sea “allowed us to do what we want.”
That’s not policy. That’s moral outsourcing. And it’s exactly why this column exists.
