According to the fourteenth amendment of the United States constitution, corporations have the equal right to life, liberty, or property that you and I have. Don't believe me? Read it for yourself...
"14: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws..."
If you're still not convinced that the fourteenth amendment protects corporations' right to life, liberty, or property, don’t worry…neither am I. Originally, the fourteenth amendment was made to protect the rights of newly freed slaves after the end of the civil war. After the industrial revolution, however, some very clever lawyers convinced the Supreme Court that the fourteenth amendment protects corporations also.
Why is this a problem? Prior to this Supreme Court ruling, corporations had to prove that they served the public interest to get a charter and to maintain a charter. A corporation with the same rights as a living, breathing person only has to serve its own good. This is a problem because "corporations have no soul to be saved and no body to incarcerate." (Baron Thurlow)
I don't intend to label the leaders or citizens of oligarchical corporations as immoral or unethical anymore than I would label a slaveholder as immoral and unethical. In his personal life, a slaveholder may have been a kind and gentle person to children, the elderly, and even his own slaves. The institution however is most obviously unethical and immoral, and it breeds immoral and unethical practices.
Conversely, I cannot label the leaders or citizens of a church as moral or ethical. The only conclusion that I can deduce is that churches breed moral and ethical practices because of their structure and what they stand for.
So, if we must label a corporation as a person, then what kind of "person" is he? To answer this question, we must find what is common among all corporations; the answer is that all corporations are legally bound to place the financial interests of their owners above competing interests. Therefore, a corporation is a "person" that lives, first and foremost, to make money. And history shows us that the more oligarchical and less democratic a corporation is run, the more a corporation will attempt to pass off his own obligations and costs to an unaware or uncaring public--in order to make more money. Unmet obligations and unpaid costs result in environmental exploitation, human exploitation, slavery, the sale of harmful products, sweatshops, negligence resulting in employee deaths and injuries, and job outsourcing. Here are a few specific examples of costs that corporations unsuccessfully passed on to the public during the 1990's: (1) Exxon pled guilty to criminal charges related to the Valdez oil spill and paid $125 million (2) GE was guilty of defrauding the federal government and paid $9.5 million (3) Chevron was guilty of environmental violations and paid $6.5 million (4) Mitsubishi was guilty of anti-trust violations and paid $1.8 million (5) IBM was guilty of illegal exports and paid $8.5 million (6) Pfizer was guilty of anti-trust violations and paid $20 million (7) Odwalla was found guilty of food and drug violations and paid $1.5 million (8) Sears was guilty of financial fraud and paid $60 million. (If you want to read about 1,000's of more violations visit http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/)
In psychiatry there is a name for this kind of person that lack's moral and ethical intentions. I will give you the qualifiers of this psychiatric condition and you give me the diagnosis:
(1) Callous unconcern for the feelings of others
(2) Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships
(3) Reckless disregard for the safety of others
(4) Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit
(5) Incapacity to experience guilt
(6) Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors
Give up? These are the psychiatric qualifiers of a psychopathic individual. What does this lead us to conclude about our decision to give corporations the same status as "persons"? Probably a conclusion similar to the one that Doctor Frankenstein came to after he created his own imitation of a "person".
(Information taken from the documentary The Corporation)
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