Since corporations are considered to be people then…. / by kevin murray

For whatever reason or reasons, the Supreme Court in recent years, has decided to treat corporations in more and more situations as if they have the same Constitutional rights as human persons.  Whether this is good law or not, is very debatable; but what isn't debatable is that it is implicit that those that have rights, also correspondingly have obligations and duties to those rights, for the benefit of those rights so being granted.  This thus signifies that corporations when being treated as people should not be given a free ride and in particular, should definitely be held accountable for actions that would normally be seen as criminal for people.

 

That is to say, corporations have been subject to all sorts of penalties for bad actions, in which in most every case of significance, nobody within that corporation is ever criminally held responsible; even when the actions so taken would definitely be criminal if one person or a group of people were to do the very same thing.  In other words, when a person or a group of people deliberately or through their purposeful negligence pollute the water or air in a manner in which residents in the surrounding community thereby suffer ill health effects, including even death, then in the normal scheme of things, that person or group of people would be held criminally liable for their actions.  Yet, corporations are nothing more than a collective group of people, of which, that group of people, thereby known as a corporation, when they poison the environment in a manner in which residents suffer harm, should because of their personhood, be held criminally accountable for that crime.  So too, this would also hold for cases such as fraud, food and drug debasement, bribery and corruption, as well as worker deaths from unsafe working conditions, and so on and so forth.

 

Basically, when people or institutions are harmed, and thereby criminal laws have been violated, of which that violation is done by a corporate entity, then that corporate entity, as a legal personhood, should be held criminally responsible for those crimes, and hence should suffer the same fate that a person or group of people would so suffer.  Further to the point, those bad actors of those corporations that should then be held liable for those criminal actions, would be all those that are the activators or instigators of those bad actions, enablers of such, and aiders and abettors to such. 

 

If this thus became the law of the land, corporate crime, would for a certainty plummet, because when corporations can no longer buy their way out of trouble, but have instead actual human persons, serving time for their criminal wrongs, then they will surely make it a point to clean their acts up, thoroughly.  After all, the only possible conceivable way to keep corporations in line, in consideration that they currently exist in perpetuity, and therefore are not subject to a finite amount of time of existence, is to see that they are at a minimum subject to having to abide by the law of the land, including relevant criminal codes as specifically applied to persons of interest within those corporations; and those corporations that are not good citizens, should be subsequently liquidated or nationalized, with the perpetrators of those crimes, doing time.