Five Candidates for the Corporate Death Penalty

Published on Thursday, October 20, 2011 by Single Payer Action

by Russell Mokhiber

One of the most famous signs to come out of Occupy Wall Street stated simply: “I will believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”

That was sort of a joke.

But in fact, for the benefit of real live human beings, some corporations ought to be executed.

When it comes to the serious crimes that big corporations engage in – pollution, corruption, fraud, threatening the lives of real Americans – the death penalty is off the table. (photo: David Shankbone)

My guess is that most of the occupiers at Wall Street would be in favor of the corporate death penalty.

Some – like Richard Grossman – would criminalize the corporate form.

But if you want to take the incremental approach, here’s my list of five candidates for the corporate death penalty.

Health insurance corporations. Most western industrialized countries – with the exception of the USA – already have this death penalty in place. In those countries, corporations are not allowed to sell primary private health insurance. Instead, there is a public single payer – everybody in, nobody out. Under this death penalty proposal corporations like Aetna, CIGNA, UnitedHealth, and Wellpoint would be put out of business. And with a public single payer to replace them, we’d save billions of dollars and the lives of more than 45,000 Americans who die every year from lack of health insurance.

Nuclear power corporations. Do we really need a Fukushima here in the United States? We do not. Without government loan guarantees and federal limits on nuclear liability, the industry would be put out of business. So, we could simply cut the federal subsidy and that would be the end of it. And we should. A wide range of safer, cleaner energy options is available to replace the energy currently being generated by unsafe nuclear power.

Giant Banks. Wells Fargo. Citibank. Bank of America. JP Morgan Chase. Morgan Stanley. Goldman Sachs. They should be executed – broken up and replaced by smaller banks. Break up the big banks. And impose a hard cap on their size. No bank should have assets of more than four percent of GDP. There is support across the political spectrum for this proposal. During the debate over financial reform, the measure garnered 33 votes in the Senate – it was called the Brown-Kaufman amendment.

Fracking corporations. Hydraulic fracturing – fracking – is wrecking havoc in the northeastern part of the United States. Any corporation engaged in fracking behavior that threatens drinking water supplies ought to be put out of business. Anti-fracking activists in New York have already drafted legislation that would criminalize fracking corporations.

Corporate criminal recidivists. Legislatures should adopt provisions to strip corporations of their charters for serious corporate violations or for recidivist behavior. Some states already have such provisions, although they are rarely invoked.

Some corporations have been put to death for wrongful behavior, but they have been mostly smaller companies.

In 1983, the Attorney General of Virginia asked the state’s corporation commission to dissolve a book company convicted of possessing obscene films.

But when it comes to the serious crimes that big corporations engage in – pollution, corruption, fraud, threatening the lives of real Americans – the death penalty is off the table.

If we are serious about corporate crime, the death penalty is a deterrent that will work.

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. He is also founder of singlepayeraction.org, and editor of the website Morgan County USA.

New Earmark Rules Have Lobbyists Scrambling

New Earmark Rules Have Lobbyists Scrambling
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
New York Times
Published: March 11, 2010

WASHINGTON — Jolted by a sudden tightening of the rules, lobbyists and military contractors who have long relied on lucrative earmarks from Congress were scrambling Thursday to find new ways to keep the federal money flowing.

“The playing field has changed dramatically,” said Michael H. Herson, a lobbyist in Washington whose firm, American Defense International, represents numerous defense industry contractors who have already put in their requests this year for earmark money.

Those clients, who along with hundreds of other businesses got $1.7 billion last year through the controversial practice of awarding earmarks, will now be barred from receiving money under a new policy adopted Wednesday by Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee.

House Republicans, seeking to outdo the Democrats in ethics reform, went even further Thursday by agreeing to swear off all earmarks, for both nonprofit and commercial organizations, for the next year.

“This is the best day we’ve had in a while,” said Representative Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who has been a fierce opponent of earmarks — no-bid contracts directed by lawmakers — but had found little support among Republican colleagues before this week. “In terms of us getting this moratorium, the stars were aligned. What the Democrats did certainly motivated the Republicans.”

Senate leaders, however, have not rushed to follow the House, a situation that would set up a clash when the two chambers try to reconcile their spending bills.

No one was willing to predict on Thursday how that confrontation might play out. Meanwhile, defense contractors and the “K Street” lobbyists in Washington who often represent them were planning new ways of packaging their financing requests — and trying to keep the revenue coming in.

Some firms talked of partnering with hospitals, universities and other nonprofit organizations in seeking federal money, an idea that Congressional officials said might not be allowed under the new rules. Others said they planned to become more aggressive about applying directly to the Pentagon and other federal departments and agencies, and not Congress, for grant money. Still others are warning their clients to diversify their financing sources and become less reliant on Washington.

“For firms that have made their living on getting earmarks for their clients, this is a sea change,” said Joseph M. Donovan, managing partner at Nelson Mullins Public Strategies Group, a Boston lobbying firm that represents about 50 private and public clients. “It fundamentally changes their business model.”

Mr. Donovan said his company had anticipated a sharp cutback in earmarks because of the political mood in Washington and began taking steps to help clients navigate the new landscape. That includes hiring an in-house writer to help them apply for federal grants directly from executive branch agencies instead of Congress.

Because that grant money is usually awarded based on competitive bids, he said it would be harder for smaller companies with promising research-and-development ideas. Contractors will have to be “more strategic” in their thinking, he said, “because I don’t want to be in the position of telling them that things are being done through a wink and nod and you’re just going to get a million dollars.”

In the Senate, some lawmakers have defended earmarks as a necessary tool for Congress to exercise the power of the purse and influence federal spending. Supporters say that for every “Bridge to Nowhere,” the Alaska earmark project that became infamous five years ago, there are worthy projects that get less attention.

As one example, supporters pointed to the earmarking of tens of millions of dollars in the 1990s to General Atomics and other military contractors for early development of what became the Predator program, the unmanned drones now used frequently in airstrikes in Afghanistan. Senator Daniel K. Inouye, the Hawaii Democrat who leads the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that if the House ban on commercial earmarks had been in effect then, “we would not have the Predator today.”

Limiting earmarks to nonprofit recipients is not necessarily a cure-all. For example, Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat famous for his earmarking largess, set up the Concurrent Technologies Corporation in his district in the 1980s as a nonprofit research center for metalworking, and he helped guide more than $1 billion in defense earmarks to it before he died last month.

Executives at Concurrent contributed frequently to Mr. Murtha’s campaigns. The group has come under scrutiny by F.B.I. investigators looking into pay-to-play allegations against the now-defunct lobbying firm P.M.A., which represented Concurrent and other clients that got earmarks.

Whether earmark money will dry up complete