Move Along, Nothing To See Here

I read the interview and the article below within minutes of each other.

(Full interview here.)

Michael Zezima: Monsanto has given the planet "gifts" like Agent Orange  and Roundup Ready crops, PCBs and GMOs, yet, for most humans, it has pretty much flown under the radar. To what would you attribute the fact that the vast majority of us rail mostly at governments, instead of the far more dangerous and powerfulmultinational corporations?

Marie-Monique Robin: The problem is that the corporations act behind the scene, manipulating information, studies, press and the experts of the regulatory agencies. To speak quite frankly, I had never imagined before that a company could resort to such procedures, to sell its harmful products, in complete impunity, during decades: concealing scientific data, lying, manipulating regulations, corruption, pressuring scientists and journalists, threats. The problem is also that governments do not take any legal action against companies which are repeatedly affecting the environment and the health of consumers. If Monsanto were a private person, it would be convicted as a great criminal, but current law protects the criminal companies, which are never held accountable for the damage they cause. (Emphasis mine.)

Oh, you mean like this?

SEC Split Over Goldman Deal

Republican Disputed Move to Impose Big Fine While Diluting Charge; 3-2 Vote

Thursday's settlement—in which Goldman agreed to pay a $550 million fine, but didn't have to admit it committed fraud—capped one of the most closely watched cases in the SEC's 76-year history. The agency had charged Goldman with intentionally duping clients by selling a mortgage-security product that secretly was designed by another Goldman client betting that the housing market would crash.

Paying a fine. Half a billion. That's just the cost of doing business. Chump change to Goldman. Move along, nothing to see here. No trial, no examination of Goldman's practices.

News of the SEC's lawsuit grabbed big headlines in April, but news of the settlement will be accompanied by crickets and tumbleweeds.

This is an obvious and noxious consequence of a legal system that cannot address criminal behavior by corporations, which I've written about here and here.

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On a related note, with my wife out of town I really went wild last night and watched a 4-hour BBC documentary, A Century of the Self. You can view it here, starting with the first of four parts. You'll learn about Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and progentior of the 20th century's darkest art, commercial propaganda, better known as "public relations." You'll get a good sense of how and why consumerism, corporatism devoured our quaint and old-timey notions of capitalism and democracy. And best of all you get to be the kind of insufferable twit who can claim to watch 4-hour BBC documentaries.

Finally, as a reminder, please keep reading Glenn Greenwald. The man's output nearly defies belief. His almost-daily posting on politically important issues is chock full of links to and about the people and issues he covers. I hesitate to throw labels at him, but lets just say he pisses off Republicans and "center-right" Democrats in equal measure and is scathing in his analysis of what passes for punditry and consensus in Washington. Put another way, this man is my hero.
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A Corporate Death Penalty?

[The above photo is of the crude oil flowing straight into the Gulf of Mexico as a result of BP's inability to shut if off. It's from a terrific set of photos that The Boston Globe has here. And when I say "terrific," I mean the  Merriam-Webster definition number 1: very bad: frightening.]

Corporate Death Penalty

That phrase just popped into my head as I thought about the BP oil spill.

If we assume that this spill is or will be the worst ever, and we assume that BP chose not to employ existing technology to outfit this oil platform with a remote or automatic shut-off--such technology exists and is in use in Norway, what should be the consequences for BP? (For the sake of this thought experiment, I'll ignore that federal regulation or oversight seems to have allowed a platform like this to exist without such a mechanism, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of dead, oil-choked fish.)

I mean, we know what the consequences will be: BP will spend a significant but not crippling amount of money paying for the cleanup, and their liability for damage caused to property, etc. is limited by statute (though I reserve the right to follow up on that statutory limitation, as the NYT article seems to have been written in haste). So they'll pay up and move on, and like Exxon with its Valdez spill before them, they will no doubt return to making the kick-ass mega-profits that come with being in the oil biz. Profits to the tune of $163 billion last decade, and $5.6 in the first quarter of 2010 already.

So yeah, the consequences will be business as usual. But I ask you to take a moment and think about what the consequences could be or should be.

Can anybody really disagree with the notion that "you fucked up so badly we will not allow you to engage in that activity ever again and, by terminating your shit, we hope this will serve as a warning to the rest of you knuckleheads that if you similarly fuck up we will terminate you, too"?

To me, the flip side of that is "you can screw up to an unimaginable degree (and we'll all agree it was 'unforeseeable') but if you can pay for some of the shit that goes wrong, you can keep on truckin'."

I can recall off the top of my head a commercial death penalty of sorts, but of course it happened to an individual: a client of the first law firm I worked for was banned by the Federal Trade Commission from telemarketing. Ostensibly because he was a reprehensible scumbag who didn't give a shit about who he hurt when he broke the law. Of course if he had been raking in billions, I'm sure the outcome would have been very different.

Let's face it, corporations get away with shit that a person never could. But it's not just because of the money--rich people get away with shit all the time. My point is that they are conceptually immune from the type of punishment we bestow on individuals, namely, imprisonment and death.

And on that cheery note, the good news is that BP has commandeered 1/3 of the world supply of chemicals used to disperse spilled oil and is unleashing that shit into the Gulf, too. If the thunder don't getcha then the lightning will.
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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.
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Bill Moyers Runs My Game on Bill Maher's HBO Show

Eminent progressive journalist, thinker and public television personality Bill Moyers was a guest on Bill Maher's HBO show this weekend (clips here, here and here).

I learned of this reading Glenn Greenwald's blog at Salon.com. Greenwald quotes Moyers at length; I'm going to quote only the portion that sparked the title of my post (emphasis mine):

Money in politics -- you’ve had in the last 30 years, money has flooded politics . .. the Supreme Court saying "money is free speech."  It goes back to the efforts in the 19th Century to give corporations the right of personhood -- so if you as a citizen have the right to donate to campaigns, then so do corporations.  Money has flowed in such a flood into both parties that the Democratic Party gets a lot of its support from the very interests that -- when the Republicans are in power -- financially support the Republicans.  

Yup. That's what I've been talking about.

(I haven't read the rest of Greenwald's post--I popped over here to make this post--so don't take me referencing Moyers' quote as an endorsement of any of the other stuff Greenwald quotes at length.  I'm not saying don't read it; I'm just saying I haven't yet.)


Ok. Take these thoughts about how thoroughly corporate influence is woven into our legal-political framework, combine them with the second half of Paul Krugman's latest NYT column, and you've got a rough picture of what it is I think we're up against.

No punchy send off. This shit scares me too much.
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I Just Don't Get It...Or Do I?

We all know Democrats pretty much got beat up for their lunch money every day for the 8 years of the Bush administration. Heck, even after they won back they House at mid-term in '06 they were so psychologically scarred they just gave it up to the bullies to spare the beating. They were able to roll this invigorating tide of momentum into a late-in-the-game, so-so victory over a surprisingly unaccomplished old coot and a daffy novice. Hope and Change incarnate, right?

They've certainly kept that train rolling, bending over backward with a quickness to make sure they fuck up their one shot to make lasting, positive change in one fell swoop on our economy and our standard of living--for currently insured and uninsured alike. But no, they stand there wide-eyed while their opponents weave their special brand of mendacious hypnotism and send it out over the airwaves (I call it "special brand of mendacious hypnotism", they call it "talking points"; they call it "talking points", I call it "man it must be hard not to laugh when you're lying so goddamned hard". Ah, semantics!).

I'm embarrassed to be a Democrat. Hell, I'm embarrassed to admit any party affiliation. As much I want to distance myself from any partisan identification, I just can't. The best part of my brain and spirit know that this creaking, cobbled-together, compromise-ridden, pork-laden, corruption-encouraging, thyroid-damaged-overgrown-colossus of an abomination of a federal government deserves nothing but my scorn.

But my scorn doesn't have the opportunity to provide health insurance to the 40+ million people who need it. My scorn doesn't have the power to put the screws to private insurers whose sole reason to exist is to make money first and provide health care second. I want to avert my gaze and tell myself this administration's bungling and capitulation shouldn't surprise me because it is their nature to bungle and capitulate. The Democrats are the frog and the Republicans the scorpion. The scorpion will fucking sting you in the middle of the fucking river so you both fucking drown. Every. Single. Time.

(While googling that link I saw that some Huffington Post blogger had a post from August 7 entitled "Frog and Scorpion Healthcare". Please note that my use of this fable 1) came to me without seeing that 2) speaks to the current relationship b/w Democrats and Republicans generally, but this health care battle specifically, and 3) makes sense and isn't stupid unlike that guy's.)

I hate to sound like some frazzled anarcho-hippie (not because I'm not--make no mistake, I am--I just try my best not to sound like one). But...

The creation and subsequent protection of--via common law--the concept of a corporation is the single most troubling occurrence in the history of mankind. When I say troubling, I don't mean bad, evil, or what have you. It's trickier than that. [NOTE: I'm well aware I've slid off the page from talking about simple two-party politics and the very current affair that is the push for better health care to cover more Americans...but the dots, man, the dots are connected. Don't you see?!? [slap!] ["shut up, hippie! focus!"] [slap!slap!] [deep breath]

It's tricky because it created the form, the type of entity, which enabled the most massive transformation of the planet we may ever see--and by that I mean almost every single positive and negative transformation of the past 200 years (and you could probably take it all the way back to the East India Trading Company). Yes, the corporation. The piece of paper (or papers) that gives legal power and protection to a mere collection of capital--a pile of money--collected for the sole purpose of engaging in any and all endeavors which further the amassing of yet more capital for its shareholders. That sounds dastardly but it really isn't, unless you're some crusty old Marxist (do those even exist anymore?). But it does have some real limitations. Such as what kind of expectations we should have regarding how a corporation will act.

So, these piles of money have protection under the law similar to those of an actual living, breathing human being. Now, on the plus side, that allowed all sorts of innovation and continent-spanning and globe-spanning derring-do (yes, it's derring, not daring...go ahead, look it up, fuzzball) which has embiggened the lives of billions of perfectly cromulent people. Basically, the legal existence of the corporate form allowed the modern world to take shape, and that shape includes all the awesome stuff you can think of.

But what about the minus side? (Didja ever notice people always say "on the plus side" but nobody ever says "on the minus side"? Didja ever notice nobody under the age of 60 gets [or makes] an Andy Rooney reference?) Well, on the minus side, corporations aren't human. They aren't endowed with an inherent morality, they don't have feelings, are more likely to marshal armies of lawyers to look for tax loopholes and to litigate do-gooders into the ground, they...they aren't fucking human, dig? But they are governed by laws that basically (trust me on this--I am/was/are? a lawyer) treat them as citizens.

Now that might be legally convenient and workable, and may have unleashed untold human potential, but it ignores the fact that a corporation's only concern, it's raison d'etre if I may, is to increase the amount of money it can make for its shareholders. No matter if it was created to build widgets that kill people or widgets that save people, it was first and foremost created to make money.

So you see my point, right? You've connected the dots? Followed the breadcrumbs o' logic?

Our health care "system"--except for the old, the poor, and those who have fought in our armed forces--is in the hands of corporations. For making TVs and cars and shit corporations are awesome--just ask the late, unlamented Soviet Union. For the welfare of fucking human beings, what do you think?

Oh, so you say without them we wouldn't have the latest MRI-nuclear-whatsit? Maybe. But we also wouldn't have 40+ million of our fellow citizens without any health coverage at all. We wouldn't have a system that pays doctors per procedure, the more procedures the merrier. We wouldn't have a system that denies coverage to a person with an ailment because doing so fucks up the bottom line. We wouldn't have a system that employs people to find any possible to way to deny coverage to a person after they do get sick or injured.

Think about it--we've already chosen to not foist this bullshit on the well-being of the old (they've got Medicare), the truly poor (they've got Medicaid) and the valorous (they've got the Veterans Administration). What's stopping us from freeing everybody else's well-being from the grips of something that exists solely to make money?

An extremely large, extremely powerful pile of money that likes things just the way they are and thinks that any degree of change will hurt its legally-granted right to make as much money as possible.

I'm not sure the Democrats have a shot up against something like that. But who knows? Maybe appearing to have no spine and no integrity is just the kind of reverse-psychology, counter-intuitive strategy that will work.



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