Prometheus 6

I said I wanted to get back to this.

Among the issues to be considered are whether laws need to be changed to limit both civil and criminal liability for companies, auditors and directors. One matter Mr. Scott cited is the proper role of state governments in financial market issues, including the cases brought by Eliot Spitzer, the New York State attorney general.

The committee will consider whether Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires audits of internal controls at corporations, should be changed. Critics say that such audits are too expensive and have kept foreign companies from listing their securities in the United States.

Mr. Scott said the committee would also review whether the Securities and Exchange Commission needed to adopt better procedures to weigh the costs and benefits of its regulations, and whether some other government agency should be charged with reviewing those decisions.

The final area to be discussed, he said, is shareholder rights, including the efforts of hedge funds to force changes in corporate policies, and whether shareholder approval should be required for takeover defenses.

Understand that a corporation is considered human for many purposes. I have many, many issues with that. For instance, I've always thought that, just as freedom of the press only applies if you own a press, freedom of speech ought only apply if you have a mouth.  That's not how things work, unfortunately.

Under our current agreements, the new corporate person is instantly endowed with many of the rights and protections of personhood.  It’s neither male nor female, doesn’t breathe or eat, can’t be enslaved, can’t give birth, can live forever, doesn’t fear prison, and can’t be executed if found guilty of misdoings.  It can cut off parts of itself and turn them into new “persons,” and can change its identity in a day, and can have simultaneous residence in many different nations.  It is not a human but a creation of humans.  Nonetheless, the new corporation gets many of the Constitutional protections America’s founders gave humans in the Bill of Rights to protect them against governments or other potential oppressors:

• Free speech, including freedom to influence legislation
• Protection from searches, as if their belongings were intensely personal
• Fifth Amendment protections against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, even when a clear crime has been committed;
• The shield of the nation’s due process and anti-discrimination laws
• The benefit of the Constitutional Amendments that freed the slaves and gave them equal protection under the law.

           Even more, although they now have many of the same “rights” as you and I - and a few more - they don’t have the same fragilities or responsibilities, either under the law or under the realities of biology.

This whole business of corporations as persons started so that they could be held responsible for contracts but has gotten WAY out of hand.

Wal-Mart's ambitious legal strategy strikes at the heart of what it means to file a class action. The company maintains that its constitutional rights would be violated if the court allows a suit to go forward involving up to 1.5 million of the retailing giant's current and former female employees. Because such a case would deprive the company of its rights to defend itself against each woman's claim, it argues, the courts should allow suits only on a store-by-store basis.

If the Ninth Circuit agrees and strikes down the multistate action certified by a lower court, it would likely kill the largest employment class action in U.S. history. More broadly, it would open wide the door for all large companies to make similar arguments. "A victory for Wal-Mart might mean that plaintiffs can't bring nationwide class actions anymore and that they might have to do them locally or regionally," says Mark S. Dichter, a management-side employment lawyer at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP.

It's gotten so out of hand that corporations actually have rights superior  to yours.

Consider: corporations have no bodies. They can break the law; so how do you punish them? Can't put them in jail. You can force its dissolution, but those who assembled and directed the corporation can just make another one.

And now we have the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, major economic and polittical forces, lobbying to remove responsibility for corporate wrongdoing from the humans that actually DID it.

You know what? We give corporations so much juice they ALL ought be required to give some back. Every corporation in the USofA should have a community service requirement along the lines that boradcasters used to. That they've cancelled the requirement on the one industry that had it, that the Community Reinvestment Act no longer requires them to actually reinvest in the community, lets me know it just ain't on theor radar screen. But it would be the right thing to do.