#TBT: Corporations are not people, but they might be drug lords

I live in Chicago, and we have come under national scrutiny for the high homicide rates that have continued in some of the areas of our city. Having lived here all my life, I know the city is much safer than it has ever been, but I also see that some areas continue to struggle with gang violence related largely to the trafficking of illegal drugs. In the same vein, we hear of the troubles in the Mexican border towns where drug cartels move their products. In both these cases, and other similar situations, we have people trying to live their daily lives under the specter of risk posed by the presences of businesses operating outside the law.

And then I read Tim Dickinson's brilliantly written but troubling account of the history behind Koch Industries and how they grew their wealth and turned it into a powerful platform from which to create more wealth and protect their interests. From everything within the article, it became abundantly clear that the only difference between the actions of the various businesses related to Koch Industries and the actions of the street gangs and cartels of the drug business....

Is that gang members go to jail or get killed when they kill people...the Kochs just get richer.

[NTSB] Photo of explosion that killed two teens in Texas in
 1996. The explosion was the result of a poorly maintained
pipeline

Reading the details of the piece - much of it garnered from the Koch's own words, details of court cases against them, whistle-blower reports, and as much information about a private company as can be garnered from FOIA requests to governments with which they deal - it becomes abundantly clear that the Kochs consider human life to have a finite value that gets figured into the equation of how to run their business. Unlike, say a person, who would lose their freedom, property, and any hope of continuing on in a normal existence, if the business practices of the Koch's cause someone to die (which they have) or shorten the lives of another (which they have) or cause irreparable harm to a community (which they have) it is simply a part of doing business. A person's life is only worth what they are likely to get in a lawsuit against the company. The value of a community is only worth what they might have to pay in fines for clean up. This kind of capital-centered capitalism follows the same thinking of the Capone operation and today's gangs.

Yet, we as a society celebrate people like the Kochs and (rightly) seek to imprison the drug gangs. We place this value on business "excellence" but only to the point where someone might end up holding a gun to our face. If our truck gets blown up because a pipeline leaked, that's an accident, even if the "accident" came from the deliberate negligence of a business leader. Because the decision that lead to the death was a business one, that somehow makes it ok in our book.

It is not ok.

We need to have much less tolerance than we do for people's lives being subject to their value on a balance sheet. At the turn of the 20th century, it was conservatives who understood that unbridled capitalism will devalue human life, the environment that supports that life, and the social structures that join us as people...all the things that give us high quality of life. It is no coincidence that once we understood that and put safeguards in place, we enjoyed the greatest growth in lifespan, quality of life, and social equity yet experienced in human civilization.

And then we blew it.

Today, and really since the 1970s, we have allowed morally bankrupt capitalists to tell us what society values. We have allowed them to control more of our economic capital, given them the keys to own our political system, and placed our lives in their hands by the choices we have made. We have - on the whole - accepted the line that business is always good and regulation always bad. Our political system has decided that money is speech, and those with more money get to say more, and that by virtue of their attainment of wealth, they have earned that privilege. We have been wrong, and we need to stop treating people like the Kochs as valued men of high achievement, and call them what they really are...

Criminals.

The outrage against violence in my city should be equal to the outrage we cast on men like the Kochs. Anyone who trades human life for their own gain should end up in prison and not on the cover of business magazines. Until we start holding the people within corporations to the standards we ask of people in general, we will never reach the just, equitable, and peaceful society that our Constitution holds as our nation's aspiration.

Those who operate both legally and morally in our country's economy should - and often do, at least as far as I see - have disdain for the actions of people like the Kochs. Regulation, when properly applied as it is most of the time, provides a transparent description of the marketplace that we the people regard as equitable and of value to us as a country. Requiring those who pipe flammable products across the country to maintain their infrastructure at the highest level of safety is not an onerous and superfluous requirement...it recognizes that selling something while killing people is wrong. Requiring that those who speculate in a commodities market have the capital on hand to back their gamble is not totalitarian domination, it is common sense that every casino in the country follows. Asking our business leaders to comport themselves with the same moral approach that we ask of every single member of our society is not an anti-business philosophy...

It is a pro-people philosophy.

We need our capitalism to be more person-centered and less profit-centered. The modern manner of executing capitalism has not found a manner for the system to value people, so we turn to regulation. With the market completely manipulatable by business, the consumer can usually only demand change in drastic circumstances...and even then only if an independent media draws attention to the matter, and government calls those responsible to the carpet, and almost always only after many people  have been killed. It is up to us whether or not this is acceptable. If you do not find it acceptable, then make noise...with what you purchase, with how you vote, with where you spend your time...in every conceivable way, make some noise.

Kudos to Tim Dickinson and Rolling Stone for putting the truth in print. I only wish I could shake the feeling that a large portion of our population will not read the piece and see it for how it gives a glimpse into the consequences of unbridled, morally corrupt capitalism, but will celebrate the Kochs for what they have done.