The Corporate Death Penalty

If corporations are people, they should not only have the rights of people, but also the responsibilities.  They should be able to suffer the same consequences individual people do for immoral and illegal actions, including, in particularly heinous crimes, the death penalty.

Now what I'm not going to say here is that corporations are not people.  It should be obvious that they are not, but the notion that they are has been a legal reality in the United States for over 100 years.  So as much as the Democratic Party was ostensibly up-in-arms over Mitt Romney's "Corporations are people" gaffe, they've been on the same bandwagon for over a century (since, in fact, the Democrats were the conservatives and the Republicans the liberals).

No, the point here is that, if corporate personhood is a legal and philosophical reality in the United States already, we ought to extend it to its logical limits.  As is, the corporation (capitalized?  I think maybe yes)...  Ahem, Mr. Corporation is protected by the constitutional rights of individuals.  That is, his individual rights are protected under the 1st and 14th amendments, among others.

Obviously, this has created all kinds of problems, not the least of which being the (increasingly less) recent Federal Election Commission vs. Citizen's United Supreme Court ruling that allows corporate entities to give unlimited sums of money to political causes.  The result was the meteoric rise in spending in the 2010 midterms, and the even more insane fundraising that has already occurred in the 2012 election cycle (Barack Obama is on pace to shatter George Bush's reelection fundraising totals, and not because of grassroots support).  Of course, corporate personhood has been around and caused trouble for a long time before FEC vs. CU, but this particular piece of legal interpretation has dire, self-perpetuating consequences in a way that few previous corporate personhood rulings and legislation have.

How do we get ourselves out of this mess?  Well the root of the problem is, in some sense, that we've endowed personhood on entities that have no conscience, no fundamental ethical code, and no accountability to anyone except for shareholders.  Because most shareholders are only distantly involved in the companies they are invested in, and because of the cultural maxim that all public companies must maximize profits at all costs,* there is little concern for little stuff like making sure people or the environment aren't harmed by defective (or even effective) products and services.  The result is a set of beings with human rights, but without human responsibilities.

* Indeed, they must not only maximize profits, they must actually make more profits than they were expected to make if they are to do well in the market.

 Getting rid of corporate personhood is well nigh impossible.  There's no political traction for it, no reason that either major party will challenge a nearly two-century old legal statute.  What I propose, then, is to force the corporate person to have a conscience by forcing him to be accountable for his actions.  There have been a great many well-known cases where corporations knowingly engaged in immoral behavior at the expense of consumers, the environment, or both.  While there are repercussions for such actions, they are usually slight and monetary.  While there are people held accountable for heinous corporate crimes, their prison sentences are lenient and their fines meaningless (and frequently uncollected).

Rather than approaching corporate responsibility quantitatively, let's approach is qualitatively.  When a corporation is convicted of a heinous crime - the intentional killing of a human being (or murder, as we call it in human-speak), for example - it should be subject to the same kinds of penalties an individual is subject to.  In particular, I believe we should sometimes put corporations to death.

What does that mean, exactly?  It means that the corporation is dissolved, it's assets liquefied and seized, and its board and CEO barred from serving with any other for-profit corporation in the future.  Is that too harsh?  Ironically, a great many people would say "yes," even though I'm talking about a corporation convicted of murder.  "Why," the argument goes, "should the people inside the company (and the shareholders) be legally responsible for the actions of the corporation?  The CEO is not the murderer."  Too which I respond, yes, but the corporation is being put to death, not the CEO.  The CEO and board, however, do share some responsibility for the corporation, and thus should not be allowed to serve with other for-profit corporations in the future.

What about the shareholders?  Well, they could conceivably cash out between indictment and conviction.  Otherwise, their investment would come to nothing.  What about the employees?  Well, unfortunately, they'd be out-of-work.  Now if that seems harsh and unfair to employees and shareholders (the "little people" in the equation), think about the other side of the equation.  If every single employee and every single shareholder of a corporation has that much stake in the corporation not committing heinous crimes, suddenly said company actually does have a conscience.  The CEO and board stand to lose plenty under this proposal, but the employees and the shareholders stand to lose even more, which makes them powerful advocates for the moral behavior of the corporation.

While the corporate death penalty - complete with severe professional ramifications for the board, as well as loss of employment for the employees and loss of investment for shareholders - would be a significant step towards ensuring a more ethical moral climate in the corporate world, it's far from a silver bullet.  Indeed, the hassle of prosecution, the potential economic ramification of a "too big to fail" company being put to death, and the difficulty of enforcement of the stipulations that would be necessary to stop the most corrupt of CEOs and boards from profiting even from the death of their companies (see Ken Lay at Enron) would prove significant hurdles to implementing such a proposal.  Hopefully, however, the very attempt would at least force us to recognize the absurdity of legal corporate personhood to begin with.

The biggest hurdle to the corporate death penalty, however, is that corporations would resist it, just as they resist rescinding corporate personhood in general.  Given their political influence, it would be nearly impossible to gain traction on a bill that allowed corporations to be put to death.  Given the Supreme Court's political leanings, it is also hard to believe they would uphold such a bill (though, in the process, they might at least be forced to declare the individual death penalty unconstitutional).  Nevertheless, I suggest that it might be an easier path to the end of corporate tyranny than any other we have before us.

Health Care and Fire Trucks

You may not know that fire departments used to be commercial, rather than government-run. Before the Civil War in America, independent fire brigades would rush to put out fires, competing with each other needlessly. What is more, each house was adorned with a badge indicating which insurance the owner had, and if the first brigade to arrive did not have a contract with that insurance company, they would simply let the house burn. Over time it became clear that this was an inefficient and immoral way to provide what is an essential service for the citizens of any city.

Today there would be general uproar if there was an attempt to privatize fire prevention. This basic human service simply cannot and should not be handled by private companies which are more concerned with profit than with saving lives.

The analogy should be obvious here. Health care is a basic human service, necessary for saving lives. And yet we live in a country - the only in the industrialized world - without single-payer, government run health care. I don't have time to cover all of the arguments for and against single-payer here, but it is worth mentioning that most of the arguments against come from the very insurance companies that stand to lose from the implementation of single-payer, whereas the arguments for are primarily moral, grassroots, and democratic.

Instead I want to point out the essential similarity between the state of fire prevention pre-Civil War, and the state of Health Care today. Ultimately, in the 1800s change was quick to come, thanks largely to the obvious injustice of the situation. Today, change is slow to come, and likely to be delayed substantially by the passage of the current health care reform. Why? Lobbying and corporate deregulation. The profits of the insurance industry are sacred today in a way that they were not 120 years ago. As a result, the lives and health of Americans are a mere piece of economics. Human capital.

Public education, public mail delivery, public crime and fire prevention. All of these things came about because people demanded that the government - for all its inefficiencies - provide basic human services to all of its citizens. Today, citizens are demanding no such thing. Why? That's a subject for another day. Needless to say, in the digital age there is faster communication and information gathering than every before, but also faster distribution of propaganda. And it's not always easy to tell those apart.

Disclaimer: I know this is far from a complete argument, and is unlikely to convince the unconvinced. I hope it is a different perspective, however, on an all-too-tired debate.

Health Care: It All Becomes Clearer

Only the most indoctrinated of Democrats and the most stubbornly hopeful of progressives can really celebrate the passage of the current Health Care Reform bill through the House.* Rhetoric comparing it to the Social Security bill during the Depression is, shall we say, a bit overblown. The bill - which is already being touted as too liberal for the Senate - is far from the populist, socialist mess that you may have heard it described as (if only it were).

* Much like passing a kidney stone, I think. Or passing gas.

Over at Counterpunch, Rose Ann DeMoro provides the most lucid discussion of the pros and cons of the bill that I have seen. There are many improvements in this bill over what we have now, and it is undeniable that insurance companies would have prefered that things remain the same. That said, the single most frustrating aspect of this bill is that it mandates that Americans buy insurance without actually making it any cheaper. This is a death-wish for an already shaky economy (what will people buy when all of their money goes towards health care?) already ravaged by the exploitative business practices of corporations in almost every sector. More importantly, it is socialism of the worst kind: government mandate without government regulation of the industry in question. It is as if all public schools were abolished, replaced with private schools, and parents were forced to send their children anyway (and don't look now, but that's the darker side of the charter school movement*).

* Ok, ok, I'll do a post on this later.

What has puzzled me throughout this debate, however, is the quiet non-involvement of businesses in other industries. Sure, giant health care companies have a lot to gain by mandated insurance, but small businesses and struggling corporations in other sectors are often devastated by the health care plans they provide for their employees. Why, I have wondered, doesn't General Motors back Universal Health Care? Why doesn't Goldman Sachs, or AIG, or Coke, or Viacom? These companies all have to pay insurance benefits for their employees. Imagine if they could shift that cost to the government in a single payer system.

Only recently did it hit me. Mandated insurance. Every American must buy health insurance. Most companies are required to provide insurance already, but surely they wouldn't...

They would. The silence from other industries comes from a simple fact: mandated health insurance, plus the elimination of the requirement to provide employee health benefits. There are nuances of course, but in the battle between big corporate lawyer and "little guy" lawyer, who do you think will win?

Yes. It's that bad.