Amidst the turmoil of Wisconsin politics, an interesting new battle is brewing. Wisconsinites are on the forefront of a debate that could change our country. The debate being taken up is whether or not Wisconsin will continue to recognize corporate personhood.
Corporations are legally individuals and even supposedly entitled to free speech. The problem that arises with this personhood is corporations are not human beings. Corporations do not possess any emotions. And, by becoming incorporated, a business has the mandate to turn a profit. In publicly traded corporations owned by shareholders, the mandate to profit is even more heightened. Although corporate public relations departments like to project the image of the company as caring and sincere, the only reason this happens is to ensure further profitability by crafting an appealing image to consumers.
In corporations, ethics lose in competition with profits. First, let’s take our friends over at BP. Within the space of five years, BP had one of the deadliest industrial accidents in recent United States history at its Texas City refinery that killed 15 and injured 170 in 2005 and the infamous Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which caused the loss of 11 lives and untold ecological damage to the Gulf Coast.
The best way I’ve heard industrial incidents explained to me is an environment of lax safety, ethics or responsibility lines up like a keyhole for a single accident to trip the lock. Accidents are just that — accidents. However, corporations are responsible for cultures that allow drunken sea captains to slalom oil tankers through Prince William sound, safety measures to be overlooked in the name of profits and shoddy procedures enacted to ensure projects are brought in on time and under budget.
The saddest thing about all of these tragedies is who is at fault  — a person who exists solely on paper — one that cannot be imprisoned or held culpable in any other way than being fined. Sure, a CEO can be a scapegoat and a charade made of his or her or other manager’s trial or imprisonment. A chemical leak at a Union Carbide plant killed over 3,000 people in Bhopal, India in 1984 and caused more than a half million injuries. Seven people were sent to jail for two years and were fined $2,000 each for their roles in the disaster. However, the common denominator in all of these disasters was the subordination of ethics (of which safety is a part of) to profits. Corners were cut in the name of profit and many people died.
Sure, the convenient legal notion of insulating a business owner from liability is good for business. Typically, it is not small-town businesses committing mass atrocities in the name of profits. Now, global corporations can skip around the planet for the best tax breaks and friendliest (read least regulated) business climates. How can individuals expect corporations to act in a forthright and ethical manner when essentially no real person can ever be held liable?
Many corporations we see, know and love all have a dark side. The Nestle company is still under boycott for marketing infant formula in developing countries. Nestle would give away the formula for free to new mothers long enough for their own natural milk production to stop, then force the mothers to have to purchase its formula.
Also, in developing countries where access to clean water is not always guaranteed, telling poor, uneducated mothers that formula (which must be mixed with water) is superior to breast milk is underhanded and borders on evil, that kind of makes Nesquick seem not so appetizing. Still, the company does business.
What Wisconsinites are proposing is radical, but in our modern times seemingly more necessary. Although capitalism and democracy can happily coexist, unrestrained corporatism is a dire threat to democracy.
Currently, best estimates say U.S. corporations are sitting on about $2 trillion in cash reserves. Companies are not hiring, still squeezing the last trickles of productivity from their downsized workforces. It’s almost as if companies want people desperate for jobs, meaning they’ll sell their labor cheaper and be glad for it. Woodie Guthrie stood with the Dust Bowl fruit pickers in California for the same reason. The farm owners did not care if people were going hungry as long as their fruit got picked for the most bare-boned wage. But the refugees organized unions and demanded fair wages. But, wait, now unions are synonymous with socialism, another hackneyed myth that has been used on the American people since the first red scare in the early 1900’s.
America is the land of opportunity, but at the essence of our existence is fairness and a level playing field for everybody. Fairness ensures those who want to achieve can and those who are already established cannot take advantage of others.
Corporations are not people and do not need to be considered such to do business. Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens summed the argument up solidly in his dissent to the Citizens United decision.
“The Court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation. It will undoubtedly cripple the ability of ordinary citizens, Congress and the states to adopt even limited measures to protect against corporate domination of the electoral process (…) Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires. Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their ‘personhood’ often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of ‘We the People’ by whom and for whom our Constitution was established.”
David Breland is a senior majoring in communication. He can be contacted at [email protected].