Sunday, May 6, 2012

Corporations Are Not People - They Have More Power

Most large corporations, like most people, follow the law.  The difference is that if large corporations don't like the law, they just have it changed.  You and I can't do that so easily.  The result - and the process - is unfair.

Picture a basketball league where one team has the only really tall player, so they get the league to change the rules to allow goaltending.  Or a football league where one team has the dominant running game but a weak passing game, so they get the league to allow pass interference.  Those teams would get a major advantage, and would start winning all the time.  They are not cheating - they are following the rules.  But the league has failed in its duty to keep the game fair and competitive.  The league is corrupt, even if the teams that got the rule change did not have to directly bribe anyone.

Congress and many state legislatures have been quite obliging to large corporations that want to change the law. The examples are numerous, but include things like making it harder for people to discharge credit card debt in bankruptcy, allowing financial institutions to buy and sell risky derivatives, hindering regulation of toxic subtances, allowing corporations to shift income to other countries to avoid paying US taxes, putting up barriers to workers unionizing, and providing taxpayer-funded safety nets for high-stakes corporate speculation.


(Oh, and corporations have also had the law changed so that if they do break the law, it is harder for people to sue them.  If a corporation steals $100 each from 800,000 people, those people will find that the law has been changed to make it harder for them to sue the corporation as a group by a class-action lawsuit. Instead, each person must sue individually to get back their $100. ) 


At first I thought it might be nice if Congress was so obliging to individuals, but then I realized that was a bad idea.  Just because I might want that nice house on the beach in La Jolla, or my local car thief might want my Mazda, neither of us should be able to call up our legislator to write a new law allowing us to just take them.  Allowing a corporation to steal the health of a community because it can make more money by emitting toxic pollutants is the same thing (except on a grander scale).  Legislators need to look out for all of their constituents - and even beyond that. They need to look out for all residents of their state and all Americans - for everyone.

If a law benefits just a few, the costs to the many need to be considered.  Unfortunately, Congress has not done that, and in fact has it backwards, killing laws that would benefit the many because of their costs to the (chosen) few. We should be passing laws that benefit the many, not just the (chosen) few.





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