Forum Post: 99% of Corporations Are Good; 99% of People Who Work in Banks are Good People

Just look around ourselves, and we will see the many benefits that have come from corporations. (This web site is probably hosted by a server from a non-profit corporation.) We should not be working to destroy corporations, banks or even Wall St. Instead, we should demand accountability for crimes against society that senior corporate officials have committed.

We should demand that corporations be held to the same high standards of law that individuals are held to.

When a low level bank teller gets caught embezzling money, she is prosecuted and imprisoned. When senior level bank officials commit crimes against society, they are merely allowed to dissolve the firm and lay everyone off.

If corporations have rights of free speech as the Supreme Court asserted in Citizen’s United vs. Federal Election Commission, then with rights come responsibilities.

We should demand that senior officials of corporations, members of their board, and their executives be criminally prosecuted for crimes against society.

We should demand that laws be passed to strengthen criminal prosecution of executives and board members of corporations when they commit crimes against society. 99% of ordinary citizens are already subjected to stringent criminal laws. Why should corporations be protected by limited liability?

We should demand that corporations be subjected to the laws of checks and balances that a democratically government has to obey.

It took a mere letter from a US Senator Joe Liebermann to Amazon.com to kick WikiLeaks off Amazon’s servers. Other large mega corporations such as PayPal, Visa, MasterCard and Bank of America, followed suit and froze payments for WikiLeaks, starving it of a lifeline of money for survival, collectively and effectively strangling it. Imagine if that was your own web site or your business (or if FaceBook did that to your facebook account.)

When the US government froze Libyan accounts, it did not request a court of law to pass a ruling. It merely requested US banks to do so, and the banks happily complied. Imagine if that was your bank account. When the Founding Fathers created the Union and wrote the constitution, they saw government as the great threat to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. They instituted checks and balances on government. They were so fearful, they passed the 2nd Amendment so that the People could forcefully reclaim their rights from an errant Government.

Little, however, did the Founding Fathers foresee the rise of Mega Corporations. The recent Supreme Court Citizen’s United ruling finding much of McCain-Feingold unconstitutional highlights the limited protections the Founding Fathers gave Americans private enterprises. Putting aside the incendiary question of whether what WikiLeaks did is right or wrong, the WikiLeaks strangulation shows that government can use private mega corporations to do what it cannot do through legal means. Like the slaying of Thomas Beckett, government claims deniability. It does not cost government money: politicians did not even have to pay Amazon, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard or Bank of America to do the deed.

Even more so than government, Mega Corporations wage a war that is the selfish interests of their executives. We are all familiar with principal-agent problems, but when the principal is the American public, the problems are magnified. Money votes for corporations, not the American public; and when the government uses mega corporations to do its nasty deeds, it is really an Orwellian twist.

The oligopoly of Mega Corporations has become Big Sister, and Big Sister is watching you.

DEMAND STRONGER LAWS FOR CRIMININAL PUNISHMENT OF CORPORATE MISDEEDS

DEMAND AN END TO THE ECONOMICS AND POLITIC OF UNBRIDLED GREED