It's Alive! If Wal-Mart Is a Person, as the Supreme Court Contends, It's a Behemoth Terrorizing the Countryside-Yet Curiously Immune, the Company Argues, from Lawsuits

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What is Wal-Mart--in a strictly taxonomic sense, that is? Based on size alone, it would be easy to confuse it with a nation: In 2002, its annual revenue was equal to or exceeded that of all but 22 recognized nation-states. Or, if all its employees--1.4 million in the U.S. alone--were to gather in one place, you might think you were looking at a major city. But there is also the possibility that Wal-Mart and other planet-spanning, centibillion-dollar enterprises are not mere aggregations of people at all. They may be independent life-forms--a species of super-organisms.

This, anyway, seems to be the takeaway from the 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court, in a frenzy of anthropomorphism, ruled that corporations are actually …