“Corporations are not people; there is no moral imperative, virtually no social constraints on these ‘virtual people.’ Corporations are corporations … bureaucracies to create profit, plain and simple.” So sayeth Garret Vreeland.
So now we repeat my rant that when the Supreme Court ruled back in the end of the 19th Century that corporations were the legal equivalent of people, they made perhaps the single biggest mistake in their entire corpus. And that includes such whoppers as Dread Scott before the Civil War and the ‘separate but equal’ ruling a few years after this one.
So now we see behavior such as that of Darl McBride and the SCO Gang, with their latest idiocy (because you know they’ll find a way to top themselves by next week at the most) reported by Dan Gillmor, where executives can take nearly any action they like but can hide from the consequences behind the corporate veil and a big directors and officers liability insurance policy.
So now we read many stories in the media about, for instance, the many Wall Street scandals and that the firms involved have paid big fines–huge even–but do the executives involved go to jail? Other than a troubled prosecution in Oklahoma will Ken Lay, clearly responsible for hurting thousands of people and destroying and stealing billions of dollars in the Enron disaster, even be charged with a crime much less sentenced to prison time? And yet less privileged people, convicted of stealing items of much less value, a car for instance, are sent to prison for several years. Which is not to say that these lesser thieves don’t deserve jail time, not hardly.
So now we smell with our own noses the pollution that is spewed by power plants all over the country, generators that we thought were dealt with in Clean Air legislation. But, putting corporate profit above personal good–after all, the executives breath the same air we all do–energy companies lobbied and donated their way to postponement and reduction and finally, in essence, repeal of these rules. Emerging economies, these executives and their mouthpieces shout, don’t have such cumbersome and costly restraints, so why should we?
So now we learn that agricultural and pharmaceutical companies, sometimes using their hired hands in academia, want to grow bioengineered crops in the open air. Bioengineered to produce powerful drugs more easily and more cheaply than current lab chemistry-based processes and, for food plants, to resist pests without pesticides and survive colder temperatures. With minimal protection from an open space ‘moat’, there is little chance that these inventions will not commingle with natural crops and windup somewhere in the human food chain.
So now we understand that people, generally good and intelligent, can be blinded far too easily by power and profit. Most of these men and women graduated from good schools and give generously to charity and community. They can, however, hide their eyes from the truth because executive authority is divorced from personal responsibility for corporate actions. All because of a 120 year old court decision. A precedent that ought to be–no, must be changed.
BillSaysThis 