Corporations: Different Than You and Me

[Doug Millison]

This is an issue that Pynchon deals with in M&D, in addition to the 
many pages he spends on corporations and cartels in GR.
-Doug


From: "Michael Albert" <sysop at zmag.org>
Subject: ZNet Commentary / Mokiber and Weissman / Corporations / MArch 6
Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2001 12:43:26 -0800


Corporations: Different Than You and Me
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Corporations are fundamentally different than you and me.

That's a simple truth that Big Business leaders desperately hope the public
will not perceive.

It helps companies immeasurably that the law in the United States and in
many other countries confers upon them the same rights as human beings.

In the United States, this personhood treatment, established most
importantly in a throwaway line in an 1886 Supreme Court decision, protects
the corporate right to advertise (including the tobacco companies' right to
market their deadly wares), corporations' ability to contribute monetarily
to political campaigns, and interferes with regulators' facility inspection
rights (via corporate rights against unreasonable search and seizure).

But even more important than the legal protections gained by faux personhood
status are the political, social and cultural benefits.

Companies aggressively portray themselves as part of the community (every
community), a friendly neighbor. If they succeed in that effort at
self-characterization, they know what follows: a dramatically diminished
likelihood of external constraints on their operations. If a corporation is
part of the community, then it is entitled to the same freedoms available to
others, and the same presumption of non-interference that society
appropriately affords real people.

Especially because corporations work so aggressively and intentionally to
obscure the point, it is crucial to draw attention to the corporation as an
institution with unique powers, motivations and attributes, and to point to
the basic differences between human beings and the socially constituted and
authorized institutions called corporations.

Here are 10 differences between corporations and real people:

1. Corporations have perpetual life.

2. Corporations can be in two or more places at the same time.

3. Corporations cannot be jailed.

4. Corporations have no conscience or sense of shame.

5. Corporations have no sense of altruism, nor willingness to adjust their
behavior to protect future generations.

6. Corporations pursue a single-minded goal, profit, and are typically
legally prohibited from seeking other ends.

7. There are no limits, natural or otherwise, to corporations' potential
size.

8. Because of their political power, they are able to define or at very
least substantially affect, the civil and criminal regulations that define
the boundaries of permissible behavior. Virtually no individual criminal has
such abilities.

9. Corporations can combine with each other, into bigger and more powerful
entities.

10. Corporations can divide themselves, shedding subsidiaries or affiliates
that are controversial, have brought them negative publicity or pose
liability threats.

These unique attributes give corporations extraordinary power, and makes the
challenge of checking their power all the more difficult. The institutions
are much more powerful than individuals, which makes all the more
frightening their single-minded profit maximizing efforts.

Corporations have no conscience, or has been famously said, no soul. As a
result, they exercise little self-restraint. Exacerbating the problem,
because they have no conscience, many of the sanctions we impose on
individuals - not just imprisonment, but the more important social norms of
shame and community disapproval - have limited relevance to or impact on
corporations.

The fact that corporations are not like us, their very unique
characteristics, makes crucially important the development of an array of
controls on corporations. These include: precise limits on corporate
behaviors (such as actively enforced environmental, consumer, worker safety
regulations); limits on corporate size and power (through vigorous antitrust
and pro-competition policy, including limits on the scope of intellectual
property protections); restrictions and prohibitions on corporate political
activity (including through comprehensive campaign finance reform);
carefully tailored civil and criminal sanctions responsive to the particular
traits of corporations including denying wrongdoing companies the ability to
bid for government contracts; equity fines - fines paid in stock, not
dollars; creative probation, with a court-appointed ombudsman given
authority to order specific changes in corporate activities; and
restrictions on corporations' ability to close or move facilities.

There is also the permanent challenge of building countervailing centers of
people power to balance concentrated corporate power: unions above all, plus
consumer, environmental, indigenous rights and other civic groups, organized
in conventional and novel formations.

And there is the imperative of directly confronting the corporate claim to
personhood and community neighbor status - both in the law and in the
broader culture.

This is the beginning of a sketch of an ambitious agenda, but there is no
alternative, if democracy is to be rescued from the corporate hijackers who
masquerade as everyday citizens.



Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt
for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage
Press, 1999).

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