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We used to do this to horse thieves. How about executing a few corporations? (Photo by Joe Hall/Flickr)
In June of 2011, in a post titled Capital Punishment for Corporations: Time to Start, I wrote the following:
The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that corporations are citizens, their money is speech, and their right to buy politicians with their money is protected by the Constitution. If they are persons, in these respects, then why should their lives not be forfeit when they commit horrific crimes? We kill people who kill people, don’t we? And if we’re going to start meting out capital punishment to corporations, and I hope we are, I have some nominations for who goes first:
I am still very much of that opinion, and I have a new list of candidates for a corporate Death Row:
- Rising Pharmaceuticals of New Jersey, which in January, with the flames of the Coronavirus epidemic consuming China and threatening the world, realized that it was the only US maker of chloroquine, a drug that researchers thought might be a treatment for the novel virus. On January 23, Rising Pharma doubled the price it charged for the drug. Hang them.
- Wealth managers, who infest pharmaceutical and health-care companies like maggots on an old wound, are urging their hosts (isn’t that where parasites live? On a host?) to raise prices on things like face masks, protective clothing, and medicines that might be critical to controlling the pandemic. Kill all of them. By which I mean the companies, of course.
- The Unknown Subcontractor (Unsub) that provided the Centers for Disease Control with a test for the coronavirus that could not distinguish between the deadly virus and distilled water. 160,000 of the test kits were sent out, and more than a month of critical time was lost to the fight against the pandemic. This company should be identified, given a fair trial, and hanged.
- Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi provide 90 percent of the world’s diabetics with insulin, whose inventor sold the patent for a buck, expressing the quaint notion that it would be unethical for a doctor to profit from inventing something that helped sick people. Over the past 15 years, the insulin triad has raised the price of a 20-milliliter vial of insulin from $175 to $1,487. This execution should be public; burn the corporate charters on TV. (By contrast, the Tennessee guy who bought 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer to sell later at a profit was publicly shamed, donated the sanitizer to charity, but is being investigated for price gouging anyway. No such investigation is being made of the insulin triad.)
- Gilead Sciences, a California pharma company, owns rights to remdesivir, another drug being touted as a possible treatment for the coronavirus. While they haven’t announced any price “adjustments” yet — good of them, because we don’t know yet if it works — their past may be prologue. They are infamous for having charged $84,000 for a one-year course of their proprietary hepatitis C medicine. Did I mention that both these drugs were developed by researchers being paid with a government grant? Hang them, before they gouge again.
Then list is far from complete, yet with my prior nominations, corporate death row is getting crowded. So much so that the inmates will probably soon petition for compassionate release because, you know, coronavirus. We must be resolute. Hang ’em high.
Who manufactures piano wire? I’m gonna buy some of their stock; if they can’t beat this downturn no one can.
Downturn! … lol …
“Kill all of them. By which I mean the companies, of course.”
Of course.
Which fool called this a wonderful world?
That would be Louis Armstrong. Being born and raised in the apartheid South seemingly had no effect on his general outlook.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWzrABouyeE
I propose we fund a special institute for criminally insane corporations using the unpaid tax dollars of same. Then we tax the institute until the corporations “starve” to death.
‘Price gouging’ is a loaded term. The issue is more complex than it seems. For example: the gasoline panics of the 70s’ were characterized by long lines and skyrocketing prices. But consider: if it takes, say, 200,000 gallons of gas per month, retailing at $2.00 per gallon to support a given gas station, then how does said gas station stay afloat if its suppliers can only guarantee deliveries of 100,000 gallons? The station’s overhead remains constant, so prices have to double or the business will fail. Then where will consumers go to get their tanks filled?
And what if this ‘chloroquine’ actually works? Would it be better if there were NO domestic manufacturers at all? Should not this company be rewarded for whatever decision-making transpired in order to keep on making this stuff in the face of limited demand? I believe a simple ‘yes’ is in order.
I’ve been in business most of my adult life; OK, small-time, seat-of-the-pants shit, but business just the same. And I can tell you – it ain’t no picnic!
Agreed: it’s complex. However, with the U.S. economy centered on the profit principle rather than the common good, obvious perversions arise. I saw a headline (didn’t read the article) that price gouging is actually good, I suppose much like greed is good. It’s a mechanism of price discovery, which is to say, just how much profit can be wrung out of scarcity when serving a captive (or panicked) public. Some have observed that perverse incentives instruct companies with narrow market niches to artificially restrict supply to drive up price, which then establishes a new normal consumers are grateful to pay, after which supply can be increased. So yeah, supply and demand curves are complex, not just in keeping a business in business but in maximizing profit — the foundational ethic of economics American-style.
The rest of the developed world recognized that public health is a right best administered through a central government agency. The U.S. intransigently insists that a for-profit patchwork of researchers, providers, and middlemen is the best way to handle things. The 2020 pandemic has demonstrated how woefully inadequate that patchwork is. Will we learn the lesson and reorganize, meaning nationalize public health? The majority of the public wants that. Profiteers don’t.
True, health care needs to be an exclusive function of the state.
But, as far as ‘artificial supply constrictions’ and related market manipulations are concerned, such activities can actually incentivize creativity within the business sector. Consumers – scrappy monkeys all – get restless with questionable prices and policies, and stale product lines, and are ever in search of newer and better solutions to their perceived material and service needs. Crafty proprietors and CEOs, investors, inventors and marketers are always on the lookout to bring down a weak link in the supply chain, and lay claim to the newly vacated territory. It’s all Charlie Darwin shit…and it works fairly well despite a noticeable lack of concern for the common good.
In fact, the economy is now being gutted like a fresh trout in the name of dusty sentiments having to do with the ‘common good’. A few hundred old and sick people succumb to an illness which, for the overwhelming majority, is merely bothersome [I know, I have it]. The result: tens of millions lose their jobs, children go without lunches, and businesses collapse by the thousands! The arithmetic to explain how our nation will recover from this contrived economic catastrophe has yet to be invented.
I call it ‘Tasteless American Excess’ applied to health care management. Does anyone else see it this way, or am I simply a grumpy old fart?
If you want a weak link in the supply chain, you can’t do better than the stock market. Actually you can – corporate bond markets. Ah screw it, the US economy.
Suppose it had to come from somewhere: the apologies of a market fundamentalist. I won’t bother to argue to a true believer what a massive failure magical market mechanisms (Darwin, Smith, Hayek, and others roped in as theoretical explainers) have proved to be.
OK, so I take a few cheap shots – big deal. And I agree that capitalism lends itself to abuses, sometimes egregious; this is only human. But the fundamental attribute of private enterprise is freedom – the license to create. The problem seems to be one of scale: huge corporations, like mega governments, can be as cancers on the very societies they serve.
Dunno that I made any cheap shots. Goes to the heart of matters, no? But in the interest of rapprochement, I’ll offer that those countries further along the continuum toward socialism than is the U.S. appear to be faring little better in the midst of crisis than are we. National health services elsewhere have been unable to stem viral infection rates (Britain appears to be not even trying, gambling instead on a wished-for “herd immunity” called into being without evidence), though they do have the considerable benefit of a unified response that doesn’t bankrupt people willy-nilly. A wider cost-benefit referendum on capitalism beyond healthcare I’ll leave to another time.
One of the more amusing consequences of industrial civilisation has been to make the most puerile, pampered and sheltered generation of middle class Americans think they are “rugged individualists” who understand “capitalism” even better than their own “capitalist” masters. Worked very well for the rugged individualists while torrents of imperial tribute poured in, not quite so much nowadays. Nevertheless, old dogs etc.
On a somewhat related note, the long known, inexpensive antimalarial called chloroquine actually does seem to work quite well against covid-19. It was the Chinese who discovered that and let the world know, for free. Subsequent French and Australian researchers have largely confirmed that and let the world know, for free. As a proud non-US citizen, I suggest the US should follow those countries’ lead and provide the bare minimum of healthcare to their population, during a plague.
Alternatively, on the rugged individualist side, tonic water is also antimalarial so you can put gin into it and spend your quarantine drinking a classic English cocktail. Best case it’ll kill the virus. Worst case, you get special James Bond cufflinks, for free, upon your entry into limbo!
Medicine for profit is inherently evil.
Enough said.
To paraphrase a line from “Men In Black”: Your response to this crisis is everything we have come to expect from a system founded on selfishness and greed.
Profit- driven medicine is too often untrustworthy. Think “0-stage” breast cancer- something they are backing off of now, but not before many women were x-rayed with overly sensitive machines, biopsied, underwent surgery, then radiation and/or chemo, for a blip on a screen that would take twenty years- if ever- to become stagable. But hey! They’re survivors, right?
I have seen too often the ghastly tortures of treatment based on cleverly marketed hopes. Good medical professionals do not SELL things.
Get the damned pharma commercials of the air. Stop marketing medicine. And “wellness care”? I don’t even want to go there.
When something’s not right, go to a doctor. Don’t go to doctors to find something wrong. We have seen all too often that they will.
Oh- and to get back on topic- I agree that if corporations want to be persons, they must be subject to the same penalties as genuine persons.
On the other hand…
Let’s get rid of corporations. It was a neat trick to be limited in group liability while skimming the goodies on an individual basis.
I suppose it would throw a monkey wrench into the mega-industrial civilization we SO enjoy right now..
If we can’t do that, maybe every friendship, every family, every boy or girl scout troop, every cult, every individual, etc. should incorporate.