“Corporations are people, my friend,” Mitt Romney famously said in 2011 while running for president. The Supreme Court decided the previous year that corporations could give money to political campaigns, just like people, and in 2014, the high court gave corporations religious freedom to deny contraceptives to employees, thereby letting them behave just as badly as people. If you prick corporations, do they not bleed?
Actually no, they don’t. But as of now, they can get presidential pardons.
The notion that corporations are people did not originate with the Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision in 2010. Way back in 1886, the high court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Union Pacific Railroad that corporations were covered by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. To be more precise, this question was addressed not in the decision (which resolved a local taxation dispute) but rather in a headnote that said the court “does not wish to hear argument on the question” of whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to corporations because “we are all of the opinion that it does.“ Somehow this non sequitur became legal precedent. “Later cases,” wrote Stetson University law professor Clara Torres-Spelliscy in a 2014 analysis for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, “uncritically cited the headnote as if it had been part of the case.”
You know what isn’t declining? Pardons for corporations. Trump has granted nine. These were never a thing before Trump—not in the modern era, and possibly never. According to Bloomberg’s Ava Benny-Morrison, the nine pardons wiped out $200 million in financial penalties, “some of which were destined for victims of wrongdoing.” Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri, told Bloomberg: “In any previous era no president would touch this with a barge pole. Maybe individual cases with some compelling reason, but the systemic elimination of criminal liability of major financial crime would never have happened before, and it didn’t.”
Half of the $200 million in wiped-out fines can be attributed to a single crypto company, BitMEX. The three co-founders of the company, a pioneer in crypto derivatives, all pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires maintaining certain safeguards against money laundering. Each paid $10 million in fines. Then, in July 2024, BitMEX itself pleaded guilty to the same crime, and this past January the company was fined $100 million.
if corporations are people why can't we give them the death penalty when they commit mass murder?
Yes Nestlé, we are looking at you, you piece of shit.
If we're giving out the death penalty for corporate wrongs, Meta facilitated an ethnic cleansing in Myanmar that resulted in the mass rape and separately, death, of an estimated tens of thousands of peoplem. As seperate statistics. Both are in the tens of thousands. The number displaced is in the hundreds of thousands and the conflict is still ongoing today.
Experts pleaded with them to enact guard rails, and warned them of exactly this kind of outcome.
But think about all the innocent shareholders! Is it reasonable to punish them simply because something they directly funded and personally benefit from is doing heinously evil things? They laundered their responsibility fair and square through a board of directors.
Real people have unlimited liability. Corporations have limited liability.
So which are they? They shouldn't have the rights of real people but not face the same legal risks.
If you want a way to legislate it, or amend the constitution, that should be the criterion.
And as for precedent: Dred Scott was precedent too. The Supreme Court has a shameful history of reactionary legislating from the bench.
Also, Congress has the power, spelled out in the Constitution, to regulate the operations of the Supreme Court, which it can reasonably be assumed, means they can also regulate what is subject to judicial review and what is not. Congress has never exercised that power.
Note to self: Get investors to fund my gun collection so when I commit mass murder I can't be convicted because "think of the shareholders"!
You're a genius!
inb4 someone takes this seriously because reality has gone full retard and you didn't type /s at the end.
I kept second-guessing myself, "is this comment stupid enough yet that nobody will take it seriously? No? Better add some more stupid." I was pretty sure I'd get at least a few downvotes regardless, but for today at least my faith in humanity has been slightly boosted.
Always nice when the gauge ticks up a bit, that's so rare lately. Really worried what happens when it bottoms out completely. Is that when you need to move to a cabin in the woods and start researching fertilizer boom booms?
And now for my not-silly response. :)
The "corporate death penalty" is called "judicial dissolution" and (in the US at least) proceeds similar to chapter 7 bankruptcy. In the 18th and 19th centuries, state legislatures issued corporate charters with specific public mandates. If a corporation abused its power, the state revoked its charter. This is pretty rare these days, both because corporate charters are handled differently (they usually don't have specific mandates) and because of the awareness of collateral damage to actual innocents. Not shareholders, but employees getting laid off, pensions being destroyed, and so forth. So nowadays the preferred approach is to focus on punishments aimed at making the corporation change its future behaviour. Forced firing of executives responsible, massive fines to make illegal activities unprofitable, and so forth.
There are still judicial dissolutions but they're usually targeted fraudulent non-profits, shell corporations, and organized crime fronts. No "innocents" get hurt in those cases since they don't have many actual employees.
A few prominent cases where real corporations were judicially destroyed are Arthur Andersen, BCCI, and Purdue Pharma. Those ones weren't directly ordered dissolved, though, the court just revoked licenses or placed restrictions on them that made it impossible for them to continue operating and so they immediately went bankrupt.
If only they would apply this logic to individual criminals! But that would disrupt their slave trade.