Corporate Personhood

I've written about this topic before, but seeing this made me think about something that might make my objections to aspects of it seem less abstract.

I'm going to make this brief and general, so nitpicking will be beside the point: if a person gets convicted of fraud, that person is sent to prison. If a person gets convicted of murder, that person is sent to prison.

If a corporation gets convicted of fraud or of killing people as a direct results of its actions, what happens? Monetary fines and/or certain responsible people are scapegoated and sent to prison.

A person in prison? Think of how seriously a person's life is affected by prison (I'm not talking about white-collar, minimum security prison). Think about all the freedoms curtailed by being in prison. Can't work while in prison, of course, and even after getting out job prospects remain bleak for an ex-con. That is really an almost-mortal blow to one's financial well-being. And of course there is social stigma attached to being an convicted criminal.

But a corporation? It has the privilege of never having to stop working, and it can make money for its shareholders knowing that even the largest fines will be a small wound from which it can quickly recover. Even if we could "imprison" the company, imagine the consequences? How dare we think of depriving the shareholders opportunity to profit. How dare we penalize employees and their families. How dare we imperil the economy?  Just suggesting it sounds ludicrous, because it is ludicrous. (Now of course I understand the benefits from not doing those things, such as the freedom to take risks with capital that drives capitalism. I know it's intertwined with the very success of the modern Western world, at whose pinnacle the United States sits.)

A century of treating corporations this way has resulted in a legal and cultural blindness to the truly fundamental differences between corporations and humans. This blindness results in an ignorance of the problems that arise from treating corporations and people similarly under the law while the consequences for each are so very different when they run afoul of the law.

Perhaps in a future post I'll take up a description of what I believe those problems to be, but for the moment, a hearty Fuck You, Goldman Sachs will suffice.