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The Superhuman Corporation in Ancient America Print E-mail
Written by Sid Davis   
superhuman orporation superman One day in the future, historians will publish a book—or transmit a digital file, more likely—about the decline and fall of the United States of America. This history might point to any number of fatal causes. It might talk about how the country fiscally starved as its richest citizens paid fewer and fewer taxes, or it might discuss the trillions spent on costly wars to seize oil from other nations. But most likely this future book or file, if it’s well researched, will conclude that the United States failed because of the corrupting power of corporate money.

Examples of this corruption will be plentiful, but if the future historians are asked to select a primary culprit, or at least a piece of the puzzle that encapsulates the misfortune of the fallen empire, they’ll probably point to the corruption of American courts that brought about rulings placing corporate rights above those of people. They’ll explain that via two-hundred-plus years of litigation—from Dartmouth College v. Woodward to Citizen’s United—corporations fought for and were finally bequeathed a fully human status that was known at the time as “corporate personhood.”

Power always corrupted American law, the historians reveal. It was once legal to buy and sell other humans, to name just one system that was glaringly immoral yet protected under the law. So it’s best not to conflate “legal” and “logical,” at least not if one hopes to understand the shape and scope of American corruption. The law was malleable, a thing to be modified by powerful men who sought profit. The courts would twist the law into any shape needed to serve the powerful. Legality in ancient America provided a veneer of respectability, but had no relationship to whether something was right. Quite the opposite—corruption was used to bring about legality.

superhuman corporation factory smog Thus, corporate personhood was legal in ancient America, but it wasn’t right. The future historians get to the heart of the matter by pointing out the obvious: a corporation isn’t a person. A corporation is a potentially immortal, vastly wealthy, conscienceless entity, and to give it anything even approaching the same rights as a person makes it not human, but superhuman, a construct vastly more powerful than any one person. This truth will of course be completely self-evident to people in the future, but will still require a detailed explanation for purposes of autopsying dead America. So the historians forge ahead.

Because corporations are potentially immortal, they experience no physical consequences from, for example, generating toxic waste or selling unhealthy products. The corporation doesn’t develop a hacking cough, or an inoperable tumor. But humans are subject to sickness and death based upon what happens in their environment. This gives them a powerful incentive toward environmental preservation that corporations lack. Instances of corporations poisoning entire swaths of the ecology run into the tens of thousands. The historians have compiled those in Appendix A.

Corporate immortality has a second serious effect. When a powerful industry has outlived its usefulness it doesn’t retire or die like a human, leaving room for its younger, more innovative brethren. Instead it tries to lock its advantage in place, and if it has accumulated enough political power it can block civilizational advancement. This happened to the U.S. more than once. For example, by the 1980s its petroleum industry should have been shrinking in favor of clean energy industries as the negative effects of crude extraction on the ecology, the climate, and on global political stability became clear. Instead, the U.S. went to war to defend the profits of its oil companies, eventually killing millions.

Corporate longevity isn’t bad in itself. What made it a serious problem in ancient America was a lack of imperative for corporations to function for the common good. They were conscienceless. And lacking conscience, they had no qualms driving up the cost of commodities, or destroying the public sphere, or shipping millions of jobs overseas. They saw no wrong in deliberately pushing toxic derivatives that bankrupted schools and pension funds. All these practices were manifestly immoral, as well as deeply damaging to American society, but to the conscienceless corporations they were actually desirable outcomes.

The last and most important reason a corporation is not a person is because by nature it is above the law. Wrongdoing is dispersed in such a way that the corporation cannot be held accountable for its actions in the same way as a person. For example, in ancient America, if a human was caught robbing his neighbor’s house, he faced an array of charges, was forced to return what he stole, and punitively fined. Many convictions carried jail time and removed him from the street. But corporations that defrauded or robbed the public faced fines that were a fraction of what their fraudulent activities had accumulated. They were not barred from doing business—i.e., thrown in jail—even in cases where the crime was severe. Only rarely did any of its individual executives, managers, or employees go to jail.

The future historians focus on the importance of this point. Imagine for a moment, they say, a man robbing his neighbor. Imagine that his penalty is a fine totaling a fraction of what he stole. Ancient Americans would have been terrified at the thought that a neighbor or rival could rob them and simply pay a fractional fine. They would have protested that such lenient punishment actually created an incentive to steal rather than generate wealth through productive labor. And they would have been right. Yet that is the way it was for the corporations.

Knowing they were effectively unpunishable, thousands of American corporations stole, defrauded, dodged taxes, cooked their books, vacuumed up public funds, and used political influence and a corrupt judiciary to change the few laws that restricted their activities. They had human rights but no moral limitations. Yet these immortal, vastly wealthy, conscienceless entities dared to call themselves “persons.” The falseness of the label should have been obvious to ancient Americans, and indeed, some were aware of the grave problems superhuman corporations presented. But looking at the place on the map that used to be called the United States, it’s clear the problems were too serious to overcome. The country became just another historical footnote, another nation destroyed by greed, corruption, and empty ideals.