Pop quiz for all of you paparazzi wannabes out there: Who is the richest person in the world? I'll give you a hint. It's not Bill Gates. It's not Warren Buffet.
Give up? It's Exxon! That's right, every sport utility vehicle's favorite pit stop also happens to have the legal rights of a person. Apparently the corporate megamachine has a softer, more human side.
Whatever the reasons, legal precedent explicitly gives corporations the rights of a person. Among other goodies, this means that corporations have the right to privacy. We wouldn't want anyone walking in on them when in compromising positions, after all. They also enjoy the right to free speech, too. Just look at the important political content of any magazine advertisement for proof.
But corporations seem to want to forget that personhood entails some responsibilities - including being accountable when you do something wrong. So now corporate America is working to roll back the only important accountability measures passed in decades.
A little background - in the post-Enron scramble for moral high ground, Congress passed a watered-down collection of rules called the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Among other "extreme" reforms, the act holds accounting companies responsible for shifty accounting practices and creates an oversight committee to try to make sure that someone is keeping an eye on auditing procedures.
If the Enron scandal was a wake-up call, two new committees of business leaders and Bush cronies are reaching for the snooze alarm. As reported in Sunday's New York Times, the committees, composed of an all-star cast of former executive branch secretaries, Fortune 500 CEOs and academic business school elites, are aiming at new legislation and rule changes that would gut any significant impact of Sarbanes-Oxley.
The committees' full demands haven't been made public yet. The politically savvy (read: manipulative) among them have decided to wait until just after Election Day to unveil their modest proposals.
However, a few things are clear about what will come from out of the process.
First, they will seek to limit the ability of overzealous (read: successful) state prosecutors like Elliott Spitzer of New York to pursue public-interest lawsuits against cheating corporations.
Secondly, they want to make sure that individual shareholders can't band together and sue them for fraud. Instead, they want to limit their accountability to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Basically, corporations want to be people as long as that doesn't mean that they are treated like people when they screw up.
One would think, of all parties involved, that the SEC would be in support of a measure giving them more power.
Yet a former SEC commissioner told the Times that the rule change would be "a shocking turning back" and said that it would only allow corporations a greater opportunity to own the SEC and its commissioners.
Don't get me wrong. I think that business is important. Businesses create jobs for people. They provide us with affordable goods. Businesspeople work hard. Sometimes, we need to give them a break and let them do what they do best without heaping piles of poorly thought out bureaucratic paperwork on their desks.
But come on, corporate America! People are starting to talk. We all know that you have most of the politicians on your payroll. We know that you've got a whole walk-in closet full of skeletons that we might like to know about hiding behind those privacy laws. Yet we've let you have your personhood. All we are asking is that you take a little responsibility when you blow it, just like the rest of us.
You wouldn't want us to think you were getting greedy, would you?
Taylor Jackson once dated an unnamed LLC. The relationship went sour when the corporation decided to move to Barbados for tax purposes. You can console him at: taylor.jackson@asu.edu.
