Corporations Are Toddlers Too

The Supreme Court this week listened to arguments in a case that questions whether Royal Dutch Shell can be sued for aiding and abetting the Angolan government in the murder of a group of activists.

Now I'm not going to wrestle here with why on earth any US court would hear a case about a foreign company committing murder on foreigners in a foreign country. That's apparently something we do under a law called the Alien Tort Statute that was aimed at pirates like Blackbeard.

Part of our general habit of sticking our national nose (and military and apparently legal system) anywhere we please.

What apparently is at issue is whether or not Shell can be held responsible for killing people.

Their argument -- corporations don't kill people, people kill people.

This is one companies like to pull out when they know that none of the actual actors will get caught or punished. If the CEO were in fact the bad guy and still had that job, the company might just prefer that it be charged and fined....like BP has been over and over.   None of its executives have ever gone to jail but the company is a three-time felon.  You can learn all about that here. But I digress...

The Justices this week were pretty darn skeptical of the arguments that people could sue Shell for these crimes that were allegedly committed at the behest of the company and with its knowledge. Now I understand that it wasn't some set of incorporation papers that ordered the murders, it was people who were (if the story is true) working for Shell. But they were doing so (again, allegedly) as representatives of the company.

That the Court would wonder, aloud, whether Shell could be a defendant strikes me as a classic case of cognitive dissonance.

Justices Roberts and Kennedy both questioned whether a corporation could be held responsible for torture and genocide since the law banning those acts didn't overtly use the word corporation. THis is the same court that almost exactly two years ago in the Citizens United decision ruled that corporations have the same rights to free speech as people.

I just pulled up the constitution on another screen here and did a quick word search. The word corporation doesn't appear anywhere in that document -- at least not up through the bill of rights. It's certainly not in the first amendment that gives me the right to write whatever the hell I want here about this Supreme Court.

The court seems to be saying that a company can participate in the life of this country, enjoying the full rights of its citizens, without taking on the responsibilities of those citizens.  That sounds like life in my house when I had toddlers. They could eat the food, jump on the furniture,  and break all the toys they wanted and no one asked them to clean up or pay up.  But sometimes, when they went too far, I'd take away the toys and put them on top of the refrigerator.

So I'm thinking that if the court rules against Esther Kiobel, the Nigerian widow looking for justice, then we ought to go back there and ask them to take away some of the toddlers' toys, starting with the right to free speech.