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Corporations enjoy many of the same rights and protections as individual citizens, the Supreme Court ruled in 2010. Not only may a corporation claim the right of freedom of religion to, for example, refuse to cover birth control under employee insurance, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission found that the First Amendment grants it the right of free speech.
As every child knows and Spider-Man preaches, privileges come with responsibilities. The corporation, on the other hand, is antisocial nearly to the point of being psychotic. It exists primarily to protect its hidden puppet masters (its CEO, board of directors and other decision-makers) from being held legally or criminally responsible if something it does or makes causes harm. If and when victims succeed at securing a substantial verdict or judgment, often after overcoming daunting hurdles, the corporation can and often does declare bankruptcy, leaving its principals free to slither off to their next endeavor without ever being held accountable.
After a Left-led revolution, there would likely not be any place for the corporate structure, at least not one designed specifically for the purpose of avoiding responsibility. Until then, however, we are left with the problem of the corporation and how it should be modified in order to make it, if it must be considered a citizen under American law, a corporate “person” that (who?) doesn’t murder, poison and steal with impunity.
The Left should begin with the reasonable demand that if corporations enjoy personhood under the law, they ought to face analogous consequences when they do something wrong. When a corporation commits a serious crime, what for you and me would be a felony, it should face the corporate equivalent of what we would get slapped with: prison time, high fines, maybe even life imprisonment or capital punishment. The pain a criminal corporation faces, in other words, ought to be commensurate with what a convicted American individual would have to deal with if they were convicted of a legal offense.
Beginning in 2012 and for the next 10 years, Bank of America created fake credit card accounts under their customers’ names without asking or obtaining their consent, charging them millions of dollars in fraudulent fees and hurting their credit ratings. They charged customers double bounce fees — one for insufficient balance and another for returning the check — which is also illegal. This, by the way, was their second offense; federal regulators caught them doing the same thing in 2014 and fined them $727 million.
Clearly, those fines were like a cheap speeding ticket — not enough to disincentivize them from returning to their corrupt lifestyle. So what did the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren brainchild that was supposed to protect us from the worst excesses of scumbag capitalism, do this time? They fined them a third as much as the first time: $250 million.
To put that penalty into context, B of A’s market capitalization is more than $325 billion, and it has $3.2 trillion in assets. For acting like total degenerate maniacs year after year, leaving a trail of hundreds of thousands of mugging victims in their wake, they were dinged less than one one-thousandth of their net worth.
Let’s say your net worth, including your savings, 401(k) and house equity, is the national average: $1 million. A thousandth of $1 million is $1,000. A $1,000 fine sucks, to be sure. But you can afford it and quickly put it behind you. Basically, it’s an unexpected car repair.
What would you get from even the softest, most liberal, kindest judge around, if you stole tens of millions of dollars from tens of thousands of people? Whether you held them up at gunpoint or hacked it out of their bank accounts like B of A, you’d be lucky to get out of prison before 20 years. You’d be ordered to make your victims whole and pay some hefty, life-altering fines. And you’d come out with a prison record that would guarantee you would never find a good job — certainly not a finance job — again.
To punish B of A as a “corporate person,” then, you’d need to impose sanctions that looked something like this:
— Not allowed to do any business for at least 20 years.
— Fines amounting to at least half of market capitalization, in this case about $162 billion.
— Stripped of its banking license.
Effectively, B of A would be put out of business.
But, I hear you saying, under this system of ours, as those of us who lived through the 2008-09 subprime mortgage meltdown recall, giant banks like B of A are “too big to fail.” They are essential to the economy. If one goes under, it takes many of us with them.
Fair enough. If that’s true, there’s a solution that does not allow rogue institutions to escape responsibility for their crimes: nationalization. The corporation lives. But it becomes government property.
The government owns it, runs it, appoints its CEO and board of directors, and sets its policies. The bank officials who broke the law are kicked out. And the government collects the profits.
Nationalization is economic blasphemy in the United States. But governments can and do run banks elsewhere. The three biggest banks in Norway, the entire Mexican banking system, four Israeli banks, every Icelandic bank and a bunch of British banks are among those nationalized by their governments. Even in the U.S., there are de facto nationalizations, as when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took over the flailing insurance company American International Group, three-quarters of General Motors Acceptance Corporation (now Ally) and a third of Citigroup. Nothing says that the FDIC cannot or should not seize an institution like Bank of America — or any other corporation — if it abuses its corporate personhood to commit crimes.
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.
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Average net worth is a million bucks? Cheeziz K. Rist. In what plane of existence?
Do you know why corporation can’t be ex-communicated? Because they have no souls. Hence their puppets of Satan.
When corporations are charged with crimes, several things should happen (1) all officers and directors should be personally liable for the crime. If there is conviction they should forfeit all personal wealth and go to prison, (2) the 100 largest shareholders should be personally liable, if those shareholders are hedge fund or folks like Black Rock, the officers of those entities should go to jail, their entities also should forfeit all the money they have invested. (3) if any member of congress, appointed government official, or government employee owns shares in the criminal company, they must go to prison for at least 5 years.
Yeah, we all know how those work out, usually ending with long trenches filled with bodies covered in lime. Commissar Rall will be there, standing over the scene with a pistol in his hand and a smile on his face.
There are choices. Don’t like B of A? Use a credit union or one of more than a thousand banks in the country.
Me & Elon have a way higher average net worth than that
Agreed. For instance, the illegal
immigrantinvader thing could be solved if all employers who hired an illegal, or any landlord who rented a room to an illegal was sent to prison for a few years if caught.Another huge issue right now is the lack of cyber security in handling personal information. Not a week goes by that you don’t read of a major operation getting hacked, and consumer data stolen. I wonder about the general state of IT? Is it mostly outsourced to the lowest bidder? Are diversity hires running IT shops? Anyhow, if a company’s data is hacked due to poor IT infrastructure, send the CIO to jail, and fine the CEO heavily.
Rinse, repeat.
Of course if accountability is important, all of Congress would have to be jailed. But there is plenty of prison space available, and not many of them, so there’s no real problemo.
As a long-time reader of Rall, and reader or viewer of his comics, even bought some, don’t really think that he is such a bad person.
Naive at times and dedicated to a false world-view, sure.
Since he gets a little cash from Mr. Unz, who cares if his ultimate dream is to dive between the legs of H.C.?
Also, he has never to my knowledge spared even one word of reply here, so react accordingly, leave his posts comment-free. Sure, I oppose my own advice this once, but think that it is sound.
ZOC Corporations can only be liberated with bullets not ballots or bail outs.
In Jefferson Country, Alabama, we are buried under billions of dollars of debt created partly by a mismanaged sewer upgrade, but mostly by deceptive credit default swaps jammed down our throats by the big banks. These credit default swaps were made possible by bribes that the banks paid to government officials.
The government officials that took the bribes went to jail. Curiously, the bankers that gave the bribes were not even charged and nobody even mentions them. And the odious debt continues to strangle the county.
You don’t have to be a communist to find this utterly despicable.
Corporations acting amorally is a good thing. They should have no political, social or religious agenda. They should focus strictly on the business they were chartered to undertake within the limits of the law.
Corporations are not persons, no matter what the Supreme Court says. A group of actual persons may pool their money to buy political advertising. A for-profit business has no right to do so, and should not be treated under the same law.
Rall isn’t nearly radical enough. Fractional reserve banking has always been a scam and will always need bailing out. It needs to be abolished, not nationalized.
Perhaps the Republicans under Trump will do something about that. There’s no way the billionaires’ party, the Democrats, will. It seems that most Democrats want a US censorship system run by billionaires. In economic terms, that puts them to the right of Hitler.
Of course, any party can change with time. The Democrats were the party of slavery and the Ku Klux Klan before they weren’t. Democrats also once did a lot of good work on anti-trust policy. That’s something that always needs re-thinking as billionaires or their employees become better at avoidance. Are there any Yanks left who think the USA has an economic system as competitive as China’s? Not even for Portaloos. Chinese business men will always try to work the system to give themselves a monopolistic advantage. Unlike US politicians, Chinese politicians aren’t yet sufficiently bribed to ignore that. Perhaps in the future China will be more like the USA. It should be noted that Russia is now almost as extreme on the GINI co-efficient as the USA. Once, it was much more egalitarian. [email�protected]
The best place to start to rein in corporations would be getting rid of all limited liability laws. No more LLC’s. Corporations may not be people, but they are run by people and if there are crimes committed, the people who run the corporation ought to be hit hard–potentially down to the loss of everything they own.
Corporations do not make decisions, people do; people in charge of corporations. They are responsible for their decisions just like everyone else. That they are not is just a legal construct.
Rail was unwise to use average, rather than median net worth.
In 2022, US residents’ median net worth wasn’t even $190,000:
https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/what-is-the-average-american-net-worth-by-age
And some of that paltry median net worth is in home equity, for a home that they are not going to sell and, in many cases, cannot afford to sell and then buy a decent replacement.
A more ridiculous, and objectively wrong statement by Rail was that the entire mexican banking system is government-owned. That isn’t even remotely close to true and it’s easily disproven in a minute online — or by living part-time and banking in Mexico, as we do. We have accounts in two privately owned banks in Mexico. Rail is lazy making assertions without checking.
@xyzyx
Would it be ridiculous to believe that all hacks and datal leak postings are inside jobs ‘from the highest level’ ?
Secure, confidential data ‘cannot’ be released (eg: HIPPA data, financial data) but entities/subsidiaries may ‘need’ it – voila – inadvertent data dump or leak. Or, perhaps, a govt agency might ‘need’ such info; my, how convenient, and already organized and how accessible. Or, those affected are offered ‘free insurance against identity theft for a year’ – just give us all your info – thank you very much; sombody paid for this free insurance and identifing info.
There may be no legal ways around privacy laws, but how many hackers of real, important data are punished. Everyone is happy when such ‘individuals’ are punished – should they ever be found…
Does any one think these hacks weren’t in the corp or board’s ‘best financial interest’?