Company Town: Citizens United in the Flesh*

About 90 people live in the five and a half square miles of Vernon, CA, home to about 1,800 corporations.  The people live in about 25 “households,” on property owned by the City.  Most of them are City employees or officials.

  

Vernon is next door to Bell, CA, famous for the high income and indictments of its officials.  A lot of Bell’s 38,000 real people work for Vernon’s 1,800 companies.

I don’t have anything pithy to say about Vernon, I just find the idea of a bunch of companies getting together and importing people to be the “government” to be fascinating.

* Citizens United is the Supreme Court case that said that corporations are people for purposes of political contributions.