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"The Damned are taken to Hell and received by Demons" by Luca Signorelli and his school (1499-1504); San Brizio Chapel, Cathedral of Orvieto, Italy (photo: Georges Jansoone)
It wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, people saw corporations as instruments of great power, and very dangerous to the rest of us. Here is Senator John Sherman, author of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, speaking in 1890:
These corporations do not care about your criminal statutes aimed at their servants. They could give up at once one or two or three of their servants to bear this penalty for them. But when you strike at their powers, at their franchises, at their corporate existence, when you deal with them directly, then they begin to feel the power of the Government.
That quote heads up an article by Harry First, an NYU law professor. Branch Office Of The Prosecutor: The New Role Of The Corporation In Business Crime Prosecutions, 89 N.C.L. Rev. 23 (2010) The article describes the destruction of Senator Sherman’s theory.
According to First, criminal prosecution for corporations is fraught with problems, such as the possibility that the corporation might be put out of business, harming the innocent, which apparently include employees not directly involved with the crime, and shareholders.
The great example, of course, is Arthur Andersen. The accounting firm destroyed documents related to its work for the thoroughly fraudulent Enron Corporation, both before and after the SEC started investigating. The criminal conviction of Arthur Andersen led to its dissolution. The Supreme Court was astonished that prosecutors asserted that a bunch of rich people were accused of knowingly corrupt behavior. It unanimously reversed the criminal conviction, saying that if these very smart and important people had any reason to believe that their conduct wasn’t corrupt then it wasn’t.
The Enron disaster, which caused enormous harm to thousands of innocent shareholders, to use Professor First’s term, and actually innocent people screwed over by the company, saw a couple of prosecutions, but the Supreme Court couldn’t find any criminals there either.
Congress was disturbed by Enron, and passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was intended to make it easier to prosecute at least the human part of the Corporate Person Borg. That was too much also. In 2006, we got an Interim Report from The Committee On Capital Markets Regulation, a group of very serious people from all walks of life. Well, not really all walks of life, a bunch of rich people and their tools. People like the head the chief legal officer of Lehman Brothers (bankrupt, not to mention Repo 105), and the president of CIT Corporation (bankrupt, lost $2.3 billion of bailout money). These luminaries thought it was unfair to prosecute corporations:
The Committee recommends that the Justice Department revise its prosecutorial guidelines so that firms are only prosecuted in exceptional circumstances of pervasive culpability throughout all offices and ranks.
Just ignore that conflict of interest. But wait, it’s even more complicated. As Professor First tells us, the Corporate Person and the Human Person may not have the same interests in criminal cases. The Corporate Person doesn’t want to pay a fine, so it wants to rat out the Human Person. Human Persons don’t want to go to jail, so they want to rat out the Corporate Person. The Corporate Person has some good leverage, though. It can refuse to pay for lawyers to defend the Human Person. That would be a problem for the Human Person, because a good defense might cost a million dollars, and the Human Person might not have stolen that much.
In U.S. v. Stein, 440 F.Supp. 315 (S.D.N.Y. 2006) Judge Lewis Kaplan says that the employer can’t coerce its employees into confessing their crimes by threatening to refuse to pay for expensive lawyers. In other words, if you commit a crime while working for a corporation, you get a really great lawyer at the expense of your employer, which was an innocent bystander, no doubt. You aren’t stuck with some overworked pro bono lawyer like those murder defendants in Texas. I’m just sure there is some difference here, but Judge Kaplan forgot to mention it.
So, it turns out that prosecuting Corporate Persons is really unfair, and it’s fair to make them pay to defend their criminal employees. The Human Person gets not just some firm that advertises on late night TV, but the best lawyers money can buy to prove just how innocent they are, in front of courts inclined to believe them, even when juries convict.
Professor First thinks all this is just great. He is apparently from the true believer school of law and economics, since his first and only concern is economic efficiency. He lauds the idea that prosecutors rely on corporations to police themselves, because it makes everything so very easy for everyone. He doesn’t seem troubled by the plain fact that his preferred outcome results in innocence for everyone.
In that he is joined by George Bush and his administration, Attorney General Eric Holder and President Obama, and the likes of Preet Bharara and Jenny Durkan, US Attorneys for New York and Seattle.
Next time we do one of these committees, can we put some tough on crime progressives on it?
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Hey, lighten up, Mas. Corporations are persons just like us. Except that they can’t shit. http://my.firedoglake.com/realitychecker/2011/08/20/fleshies/
The people who actually run this country are the banksters and corporations. There is no such thing as an “American” corporation anymore.
The social contract has been ripped up, eviscerated, set aflame, ground to dust and the Earth salted over it.
The criminals in charge will not punish themselves. They will instead, simply make the illegal, legal. This is the way of all Banana Republics.
The pic embiggens if you click. You get to imagine the damned on their way to eternal torture. I hope it helps, cause it doesn’t look like they’ll see earthly justice.
Maybe we could get a UN resolution that would allow the US, under the guise of NATO, to conduct a “humanitarian campaign” against the corporate loyalists to provide cover for those not directly involved in the corruption. We could target those administrators responsible and drive them into the desert of the financial industry by indiscriminately bombing their headquarters and any other perceived stronghold. Any innocents that suffer from these actions will be considered collateral damage.
Twenty Things You Should Know About Corporate Crime
21 Corporate Crime Reporter 25, June 12, 2007
http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/twenty061207.htm
Arthur Andersen is a great example. The executives making the decisions should have been held personally responsible. Instead, the corporation was held responsible, and the assholes who were making the criminal decisions were let off.
Dunno if you should put this out on the internets, M, somebody might see it. Somebody might decide to travel way over to wall street, maybe sit there and refuse to move on, maybe get arrested. maybe get in the papers,teevee. Maybe the corpobama wouldn’t like that.
So, in a hostage situation which is real and not imagined, the criminals win if they might do bad things to the economy. Oh, strike that last part – they already are.
Don’t we sequester the funds of national governments we don’t like and dole them out to the newcomers? Why can’t we sequester the funds of the corporate criminals and dole those out to their innocent workpersons? Silly questions, I know. Just count them in the optimistically depressed rhetorical vein in which I asked them. No response needed.
“The Supreme Court was astonished that prosecutors asserted that a bunch of rich people were accused of knowingly corrupt behavior. It unanimously reversed the criminal conviction, saying that if these very smart and important people had any reason to believe that their conduct wasn’t corrupt then it wasn’t.”
The important factor in all of this, and it does need to be emphasized, is that with that prosecution, the Supremes had to go on record, on THE record of history.
Make them do it, again and again. Expose them, and put us on the record as opposing what they do by bringing the case in the first place. Otherwise, history will not know that we did.
Good idea. Makes “progressives” look like loonies. The “average American” doesn’t like loonies, because they don’t have their best interests at heart, only the satiation of their anger. Average American Political Equation #4:
Progressive = Loony
Progressive = Democrat
Democrat = Loony
Q.E.D.
Got it. Who are the loonies victimizing? Corporations/Wall Street/PTB(whatever that is.) Superb political tactics! Make victims out of your enemies garnering support for them, by default, from the “average American.” I love it. Keep it up.
Where did I put the TV remote? Are there any nachos left?
Great analysis.
Anyone watch Fareed Zacharia’s GPS this weekend? It brought vomit to my mouth. I have respected him somewhat but now he has obviously become a bought and paid for shill for the elites. The interview with GE’s Immelt (sp?) is particularly revealing………. not that we don’t already know what these folks are like.
I got that progressives look like Canadian coins, can’t decipher the rest.
Is “quisling” your family name?
Obama sounds like 2008 campaign all over. OOPs, does he now want the PROFESSIONAL LEFT to help him get re-elected again?
67% wanted a Public Option, 80% wanted shared sacrifice,
Wisconsin railed against Repugs labor attack.
Why didn’t Obama support the people and not the Corporations? His silence was deafening. How many Banksters have been sent to jail for crashing and destroying our country? Oh I forgot they were invited to State dinners at the White House.
So let me get this straight, he was going to tax the wealthy when he had both branches of Congress and now he is going to tax the wealthy with Repugs in control of the House?
Where was Obama the Campaigner, when we needed his support during the past 3 years.
He disdains the PROFESSIONAL LEFT during govrning, but loves us to get re-elected.
Don’t they?
Toxic Assets
Sludge
Emissions
Waste Stream
Industry PACs
etc.
I can come up with other differences, if you insist. Like, they can’t be put in a cage, and they live forever. Fleshies unite!!
People seem to forget (especially teabaggers) that the Boston Tea Party was also a protest against the East India Company, the great great grandmother of our current vampire squids.
The Tea Act essentially gave the East India Company a monopoly in the tea trade with America and many colonists feared that this would be extended in the future to other goods.
“Except that they can’t shit.” Oh yea, tell BP and the Corps. that own Fukishima that one. We could only hope that all they did was excrete feces on us and into our collective nest. Instead, these super – inhuman entities shit massive amounts of highly toxic crap into our living space, or what’s left of it these days. In the end at the rate they’re doing this globally all that will be left is a massively radioactive and chemical toxic mix of sludge. The Pacific and Atlantic plastic gyres are also part of ever widening chemical shit stain of these Corps. and they’re human accomplishes ( all of us.)
Liberals complaining Obama hasn’t done enough should consider that Dems have tried to repeal the exemption on foreign profits and Republicans opposed the repeal. It’s corporations sitting on cash and not hiring and I know of little the Dems or Obama can do to force them to hire. We can charge banks fees to park their reserves at the Fed or invest in new energy companies, but how can we force CEOs to decide they’re no longer so uncertain? How can we push enough money into the hands of the public consumers to push the economy into motion? Republicans opposed longer Unemployment Insurance benefits, not Obama.
If you want higher wages you have to negotiate with management and a lot of people aren’t joining unions or striking. What can Obama do to force them to strike?
No, we live in a free country and the president doesn’t have that power, in part because we don’t want Republican presidents to have that kind of power to destroy the country.
The other pre-squid that the Tea Partiers acted on behalf of were those who had monopolized the trade in smuggled tea. They were among early American oligarchs who made a killing in avoiding loosely policed import restrictions. A majority of tea consumed came in via smuggling, and these oligarchs controlled the vast majority of tea smuggling.
The tea partiers did not act solely in response to a threatened extension of the East India Co.’s monopolies. They acted after the English govt. dramatically lowered the value of that monopoly as it applied to the Americans. It substantially lowered the duty on imported tea. That, in turn, promised to decimate the smuggling oligarchs cash flow and profits. Consider as an analogy, the re-legalization of alcohol imports in 1933, which made lucrative “rum running” much less profitable.
Protecting American smuggling oligarchs was a primary motivator in the tea partiers’ destruction of a large supply of legally imported tea. It was sold as “grass roots resistance” to “colonial oppressors”. Given the criminal acts involved, the absoluteness with which the law protected (and protects) property (at least those who have a lot of it), and the very high value of the destroyed tea, the tea partiers and the smuggling oligarchs knew they were engaging in capital crimes. To that extent, plus ca change.
Good point to repeat. It wasn’t simply the legal entity “Arthur Andersen” (or one of its many corporate or partnership entities) committing criminal acts. It was specific senior executives, with a vested interest in the outcome – keeping the Enron account, contributing to keeping Enron viable as a going concern, etc. – who acted criminally.
Corporate criminal behavior is so hard to prove, in part, because corporations control much of the evidence of their criminality. That’s one thing that makes the government’s refusal to investigate mortgage fraud by the TBTF banksters so corrupting. Same again with its addiction to corporate “self-policing” of “reforms” instead of fining corporations serious amounts (that doesn’t “harm” shareholders, it puts them on notice of the high risk behavior of the businesses they have or might invest in), and its refusal to send top executives to prison. That government response to corporate criminal conduct perpetuates the harm because it hides it and because it refuses to impose sanctions on bad actors that would punish the wrong and influence others not to repeat it. Instead, the government chooses to hound the lives and careers of whistleblowers attempting to expose serious corporate and governmental wrongs.
I used to think Russian oligarchs and, by extension, its mafias, made for corrupt government. Same again with Switzerland putting the disclosure of corporate secrets on par with treason to the state. Here, now, the American government considers those excesses to be like a posted speed limit: the minimum acceptable behavior. The maximum is anyone’s guess.
Surely you jest.
Same could be said about the free passes given to Nixon, the Bush war criminals, and the banks and telecoms. When bad guys are known to have committed criminal acts and don’t get punished effectively, it sends exactly the wrong message to everybody else.
Liberals say they will run a contender. I say we elect whoever it is. Hurry up, we want our voice heard. Obama can kiss my @$$.
See: Chris Hedges, “Civil Disobedience is all we have left.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/09/chris-hedges-occupy-wall-street-is-where-the-hope-of-america-lies/