Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It by Jeffrey D. Clements, Bill Moyers Page A
Authors: Jeffrey D. Clements, Bill Moyers
Ads: Link
than ten years after the explosion that killed six workers at the Equilon refinery, our inspectors are still finding significant safety violations every time we inspect one of the refineries in the State of Washington.”
BP’s oil refinery operations account for 97 percent of all “egregiously willful” and “willful” violations found by government safety inspectors over the past three years. Despite (or perhaps because) of this record of crime and misdeeds, in the first quarterof 2010 alone, BP made $5.6 billion in profit. And what happened to Tony Hayward, the CEO who wanted his life back after BP ruined the Gulf of Mexico and killed workers on the Deepwater Horizon? BP gave him a salary and bonus of $6 million in 2010 and awarded him $18 million when he left the company.
In June 2010, an organization called Green Change filed a petition requesting that the attorney general of Delaware initiate an action to revoke the Delaware charters of BP, a serial criminal. More than five thousand people joined the call. 6 A year later, the attorney general has not responded to or commented on the detailed petition describing BP’s crimes, let alone taken action. 7 We have had plenty of corporate “fraud, immorality, and violations of law” warranting charter revocation proceedings. We have not had nearly enough action by attorneys general and other state officials to enforce this law.
Too Big to Tell the Truth
Large corporations defy even mild controls of health, environmental, and consumer protection laws and then seek shelter from the Supreme Court’s corporate rights regime. Not long before
Citizens United,
the corporate “speech” campaign reached the point of claiming the right of corporations to lie, or at least to have the constitutional right of “breathing space” to protect them from charges of lying.
A California law allowed people to bring consumer fraud charges alleging that Nike fraudulently launched a campaign of lies about why no shoes were made in America anymore and whether Nike’s shoes were made by badly exploited poor people in brutal overseas sweatshops. Nike went all the way to the Supreme Court arguing that the transnational corporation had a “free speech right” to block the law. Again, the global corporations andcorporatist “legal foundations” rallied to the cry that corporations are people, and the Constitution prevents any restriction on corporate “speech.”
Covington & Burling (remember them from the cigarette child-targeting and Monsanto drug-created milk cases on pages 44 - 46 ?) filed briefs for ExxonMobil, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, and Glax-oSmithKline to support “corporate speakers’” First Amendment rights to block laws holding corporations accountable for massive deceptive disinformation campaigns. Covington & Burling wrote, “If a corporate speaker must limit its factual statements on matters of public concern to statements that no one could possibly challenge, or that the speaker could be certain it could prove as ‘true’ in a court of law or before a regulatory body, the result will be a deterrence of speech which the Constitution makes free.” 8 The Washington Legal Foundation brief went straight to the heart of the matter: the Court should not allow anything that might cause the corporate share price to fall. Washington Legal Foundation, one of the largest of the Powell-Chamber-inspired corporatist legal groups, argued that a corporation must be able to block a law like California’s or otherwise it would risk a “shareholder suit alleging negligence for the drop in stock values resulting from its failure to defend itself in the court of public opinion.”
The theme of all of these corporate arguments is only partly that corporations should have the same First Amendment “breathing space” as people do to debate public issues with passion, hyperbole, and even scurrilous attacks and arguable falsehoods. An additional theme is that global
BP’s oil refinery operations account for 97 percent of all “egregiously willful” and “willful” violations found by government safety inspectors over the past three years. Despite (or perhaps because) of this record of crime and misdeeds, in the first quarterof 2010 alone, BP made $5.6 billion in profit. And what happened to Tony Hayward, the CEO who wanted his life back after BP ruined the Gulf of Mexico and killed workers on the Deepwater Horizon? BP gave him a salary and bonus of $6 million in 2010 and awarded him $18 million when he left the company.
In June 2010, an organization called Green Change filed a petition requesting that the attorney general of Delaware initiate an action to revoke the Delaware charters of BP, a serial criminal. More than five thousand people joined the call. 6 A year later, the attorney general has not responded to or commented on the detailed petition describing BP’s crimes, let alone taken action. 7 We have had plenty of corporate “fraud, immorality, and violations of law” warranting charter revocation proceedings. We have not had nearly enough action by attorneys general and other state officials to enforce this law.
Too Big to Tell the Truth
Large corporations defy even mild controls of health, environmental, and consumer protection laws and then seek shelter from the Supreme Court’s corporate rights regime. Not long before
Citizens United,
the corporate “speech” campaign reached the point of claiming the right of corporations to lie, or at least to have the constitutional right of “breathing space” to protect them from charges of lying.
A California law allowed people to bring consumer fraud charges alleging that Nike fraudulently launched a campaign of lies about why no shoes were made in America anymore and whether Nike’s shoes were made by badly exploited poor people in brutal overseas sweatshops. Nike went all the way to the Supreme Court arguing that the transnational corporation had a “free speech right” to block the law. Again, the global corporations andcorporatist “legal foundations” rallied to the cry that corporations are people, and the Constitution prevents any restriction on corporate “speech.”
Covington & Burling (remember them from the cigarette child-targeting and Monsanto drug-created milk cases on pages 44 - 46 ?) filed briefs for ExxonMobil, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, and Glax-oSmithKline to support “corporate speakers’” First Amendment rights to block laws holding corporations accountable for massive deceptive disinformation campaigns. Covington & Burling wrote, “If a corporate speaker must limit its factual statements on matters of public concern to statements that no one could possibly challenge, or that the speaker could be certain it could prove as ‘true’ in a court of law or before a regulatory body, the result will be a deterrence of speech which the Constitution makes free.” 8 The Washington Legal Foundation brief went straight to the heart of the matter: the Court should not allow anything that might cause the corporate share price to fall. Washington Legal Foundation, one of the largest of the Powell-Chamber-inspired corporatist legal groups, argued that a corporation must be able to block a law like California’s or otherwise it would risk a “shareholder suit alleging negligence for the drop in stock values resulting from its failure to defend itself in the court of public opinion.”
The theme of all of these corporate arguments is only partly that corporations should have the same First Amendment “breathing space” as people do to debate public issues with passion, hyperbole, and even scurrilous attacks and arguable falsehoods. An additional theme is that global
Similar Books
