Corporations: Rights With No Responsibilities

Corporations, over the past 100 years or so, have been granted many of the rights of individuals, without the corresponding responsibility. When a corporation knowingly breaks the law, individual corporate officers may be held accountable, but the corporation suffers so consequence. Today, corporations control our government, our media, our food supply, our entire lives. Is it too late for people to take back control of their lives. Probably. Are we being pessimistic? No, just realistic. The average person in this country could care less because they are unaware of the problem. Their ignorance is fostered by - you guessed it - the corporations. Jonathan, where are you?

Corporations are responsibility black holes. Not only are they not beholden to the common good, they are largely exempt from the accountability imposed by the criminal justice system. On rare occasions a corporate employee is criminally charged for malfeasance, but the corporation itself faces nothing more than fines for criminal wrongdoing. If I put a ticking time bomb on a busy street, I may not know who it is going to kill, but I know it will kill. When it does kill I will be convicted of murder and either lose my freedom or my life. Corporations do not bear the same risk.

The Ford Pinto case of the 1970s is a perfect example. Ford was aware of the likelihood that a rear-end collision could cause the Pinto's gas tank to explode. But it did a cost-benefit analysis in which it concluded that it was more expensive to spend a few dollars on each and every Pinto to fix the problem than it was to fight the inevitable lawsuits and pay judgments when they lost. More than 500 people suffered fiery deaths as a consequence of Ford's phenomenally cynical, profit-driven decision. Yet, the company faced no criminal sanctions.

In recent decades, corporations have fought hard to reduce even their civil accountability -- their obligation to compensate the victims of their wrongdoing. Through so-called tort reform efforts, corporations have managed to limit the kinds of wrongdoing for which they can be held responsible and the amounts they might have to pay when they are successfully sued. Most recently, they persuaded Congress to limit their liability to class action suits.