Judicial dissolution
Negligence, such as causing preventable disasters, is one example of justifications often cited by proponents of a corporate death penalty [1]Judicial dissolution, sometimes called the corporate death penalty, is a legal procedure in which a corporation is forced to dissolve or cease to exist.
A “corporate death penalty” is the revocation of a corporation’s charter for significant harm to society.[2] In some countries there are corporate manslaughter laws, however, almost all countries enable the revocation of a corporate charter. There have been numerous calls in the literature for a “corporate death penalty”.[3][4][5][6] Most recently a study argued that industries that kill more people each year than they employ should have an industry-wide corporate death penalty.[7][8] Some legal analysis has been done on the idea to revoke corporate charters for environmental violations[9][10][11] such as for severe environmental pollution. Actual corporate death penalties in the United States are rarely used.[12] For example, Markoff has shown that no publicly traded company failed because of a conviction that occurred between 2001 and 2010.[13]
Companies suggested as deserving the corporate death penalty include Eli Lilly & Company, Equifax, Unocal Corporation, and Wells Fargo.[14][15][16] “If Volkswagen or other examples in this volume were forced out of existence, this would send a message,” John Hulpke wrote in the Journal of Management Inquiry in 2017.[17]
One argument against its use is that otherwise innocent employees and shareholders will lose money or their jobs. But author David Dayen argues in The New Republic that “the risk of a corporate death penalty should inspire active governance practices to protect their investments.”[18]
Historical examples[edit]
In 1890, New York’s highest court revoked the charter of the North River Sugar Refining Corporation on the grounds that it was abusing its powers as a monopoly.[19]
Would a Corporate Death Penalty be cruel and unusual punishment?
“Instead of asking why a corporation can speak as freely as a person, perhaps we should ask, “Why is money considered speech?””
Executing a corporation would be similar to declaring a chapter 7 bankruptcy, with a few additional steps to ensure that the actual people hiding behind the corporation committing these atrocities don’t profit from them. First, nationalize the corporation to ensure that all equity holders forfeit their investments. Then all worldwide assets need to be confiscated. And as a final act of deterrence, all members of the board of directors and corporate executives must have all their assets seized and be banned from employment for life. If their conduct rises to the level of a crime, the executives must also be held personally liable according to the laws of the criminal justice system. Some executives have to be jailed.
Humans receive the death penalty for the most heinous crimes. Why shouldn’t corporate legal personhood also come with the death penalty? Is it that they get to be people when they benefit but cease being people when they need to be punished? No!
IG Farben Companies: Bayer, Sanofi, BASF and Agfa
IG Farben, one of the world’s biggest chemical cartels, was not merely a passive beneficiary of the the Nazis and the Holocaust. They were active participants. The Nuremberg trial transcripts show us that the executives of IG Farben directed and controlled Hitler’s policies. In the 1930s, IG Farben was the biggest contributor to the Nazi party. It even helped form an economic plan on behalf of the Nazi party. The passage below is an example of the IG Farben executives pulling the levers behind the scene in the Nazi party.
IG Farben executives were also instrumental in convincing Von Pappen to hand over the proverbial keys to the kingdom to Hitler in 1933. Its collaboration didn’t stop there. It was one of the most loyal ideologues for the Nazi party. The Nuremberg trials exposed the infernal depths of IG Farben‘s crimes. The company itself was deemed liable for: slavery, genocide, and illegal human experimentation. Its biggest profit came from selling Zyklon-B to the Nazis, the gas used in the gas chambers, the most common death penalty apparatus used by the Nazis.
In 1945, IG Farben was dissolved for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The executives were also later tried in a different proceeding. In 1948, many of IG Farben’s executives were found guilty of war crimes. One prominent executive was Fritz Ter Meer, who was convicted for creating Auschwitz. His other crimes included: slavery, genocide, mass rape and crimes against humanity. Ter Meer only served two years in prison for his role in one of the worst atrocities known to man. In 1950, he was paroled for “good behavior.” However, the three powers in the Western zone: France, UK and the US reconstituted the IG Farben cartel into four companies: BASF, Bayer, Sanofi and Agfa. The original shareholders (who were convicted of perpetuating the Holocaust) were given ownership and all their assets back. In fact, Fritz der Meer was reinstated and he continued to serve on the Board of Directors for Bayer until his death. The descendants of the IG Farben executives are still some of the wealthiest people in Germany.
The IG Farben companies seemed to have continued their culture of ethnonationalism. In the 1990s, they admitted to deliberately infecting Africans with HIV and paid millions for this crime. In 2015, after it became public that Bayer tested a cancer medication on Indians, India revoked a drug patent for Bayer. Contravening Indian law, they did not make the drug available for Indians even though they had no problem experimenting on Indians during the R&D phase. Responding to the Indian Supreme Court ruling, then CEO Marijn Dekkers exclaimed, “We did not develop this medicine for Indians. We developed it for western patients who can afford it.”
Adding Monsanto’s Crimes to Bayer’s Balance Sheet
Monsanto ran the defoliation campaign using Agent Orange in Vietnam. Even today, children in Vietnam still suffer birth defects. On top of it, Monsanto tested the effects of Agent Orange on US soldiers, for which they paid compensation. They also sprayed cancer causing pesticides in Hawaii.
Chiquita – Pleading Guilty to Hiring Colombian Death Squads
In 2000, a Chiquita executive admitted to hiring Colombian paramilitaries that were classified by the US government as terrorist organizations. The Chiquita executives claimed that it was for “security purposes.” Of course, these paramilitaries didn’t protect the factories. Instead, they “subdued the land,” marching indigenous people at gunpoint on a “trail of tears.” On top of displacing thousands, these paramilitaries have killed at least 4000 people.
The most unforgivable part is that the attorney who defended Chiquita was the former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. During the Bush years, Eric Holder negotiated with the justice department on behalf of the Chiquita executives. All his clients pled guilty. None of them went to jail and Chiquita was fined only $25 million. Eric Holder even made a statement chastising the justice department for the proverbial slap on the wrist. He claimed, “If what you want to encourage is voluntary self-disclosure, what message does this send to other companies? Here’s a company that voluntarily self-discloses in a national security context, where the company gets treated pretty harshly,[and] then on top of that, you go after individuals who made a really painful decision.”
Nestlé – Infant Deaths, Slavery and Water Privatization
Nestlé illegally marketed their infant formula to poor women in Africa, who were forced to work long hours to make ends meet. They marketed it as a convenience, in contravention to national laws and international code. Nestle’s actions increased the infant mortality rate in Burkina Faso and Togo. Every year, nearly 25% of Togo’s infant mortality and 11% of Burkina Faso’s infant mortality are caused by baby formula.
Nestle is a huge maker of chocolate in the world and 60% of the chocolate its manufacture uses child slave labor in Africa. However, Nestle won’t monitor thitseir supply chain to make sure they don’t use child slaves. Instead, it continues violating the law and all morality brazenly and without consequence.
Like many other companies in South America, Nestle funded death squads in Colombia which murdered many union workers and activists. Finally, Nestle is using up the world’s fresh water supply for bottling and making water too expensive for people to drink.
Other honorable mentions for privatizing water:
- Bechtel not only privatized the water, but they even got rights to the rain. After Bolivia asserted its sovereignty, Bechtel tried to sue Bolivia in the World Bank Arbitration court. Thankfully after public outcry, the suit was dismissed.
Umicore
Umicore is the successor company for Belgian Union Minere. As soon as Congo got its independence, it funded paramilitaries to create an ethnostate called the “Free State of Katanga.” The white nationalist paramilitaries were responsible for assassinating Patrice Lumumba, and later, these same paramilitaries assassinated the first UN secretary General Dag Hammarskjold.
To learn more about these atrocities, listen to our interview with Andreas Rocksen.
In 1964, a BBC Comedy sketch succinctly explained all the atrocities committed by this one company:
Shell
Shell Oil, through corruption, received concessions to drill in the Niger-Delta. Sometimes, when the prime drilling spot was on top of a village or town, they paid paramilitaries to displace people and murder any activists who spoke out against the colonization of their homes. Shell also intentionally polluted areas in the Niger Delta, making parts of it uninhabitable, displacing 40,000 people. In violation of local law, Shell refuses to clean up these areas that they polluted.
They are also responsible for killing entire fisheries, which further threatens an already food-insecure population.
Other Fossil Fuel Disasters: Chevron, Exxon-Mobil and BP
Check out our interview with Greg Palast to understand how Katrina was a manmade disaster created by the oil companies.
Tyson Foods
Nearly 9000 miles around the US gulf coast is a “dead-zone.” This means that it cannot support marine life. Tyson, which has food production factories in many locations along this coast, is deemed the #1 culprit in creating their dead zone
It also abuses its labor force. Tyson regularly smuggles undocumented immigrants across the border. However, if these trafficked individuals tried to form a union, Tyson has no problem siccing ICE on their trafficked labor force. Last year, Tyson sicced ICE on employees who demanded a decent wage. While ICE arrested the parents, children were left alone and crying.
Amidst the covid crisis, Tyson employees in California have compared their conditions to modern slavery.
Purdue Pharmaceuticals
Purdue Pharmaceuticals had a shamleless predatory scheme to market addictive opioids to doctors. It also employed a quasi-legal bonus scheme to bribe doctors, pharmacies and healthcare workers to further the atrocity. The NIH explains all their predatory behavior:
From 1996 to 2001, Purdue conducted more than 40 national pain-management and speaker-training conferences at resorts in Florida, Arizona, and California. More than 5000 physicians, pharmacists, and nurses attended these all-expenses-paid symposia, where they were recruited and trained for Purdue’s national speaker bureau…
One of the cornerstones of Purdue’s marketing plan was the use of sophisticated marketing data to influence physicians’ prescribing. Drug companies compile prescriber profiles on individual physicians—detailing the prescribing patterns of physicians nationwide—in an effort to influence doctors’ prescribing habits. Through these profiles, a drug company can identify the highest and lowest prescribers of particular drugs in a single zip code, county, state, or the entire country.
A lucrative bonus system encouraged sales representatives to increase sales of OxyContin in their territories, resulting in a large number of visits to physicians with high rates of opioid prescriptions, as well as a multifaceted information campaign aimed at them. In 2001, in addition to the average sales representative’s annual salary of $55 000, annual bonuses averaged $71 500, with a range of $15 000 to nearly $240 000. Purdue paid $40 million in sales incentive bonuses to its sales representatives that year.”
Obviously, there are many more corporations that probably deserve the death penalty! If there is a candidate you’d like to nominate, please comment and I will see if I can add it to the list
Why the war in Iraq was fought for Big Oil
Editor’s Note:Ten years ago, the war in Iraq began. This week, we focus on the people involved in the war and the lives that changed forever. Antonia Juhasz, an oil industry analyst, is author of several books, including “The Bush Agenda” and “The Tyranny of Oil.”
CNN —Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with winners: Big Oil.
It has been 10 years since Operation Iraqi Freedom’s bombs first landed in Baghdad. And while most of the U.S.-led coalition forces have long since gone, Western oil companies are only getting started.
Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq’s domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. A decade of war later, it is largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms.
AdvertisementFrom ExxonMobil and Chevron to BP and Shell, the West’s largest oil companies have set up shop in Iraq. So have a slew of American oil service companies, including Halliburton, the Texas-based firm Dick Cheney ran before becoming George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000.
The war is the one and only reason for this long sought and newly acquired access.
Full coverage: The Iraq War, 10 years on
Oil was not the only goal of the Iraq War, but it was certainly the central one, as top U.S. military and political figures have attested to in the years following the invasion.
“Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Then-Sen. and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”
For the first time in about 30 years, Western oil companies are exploring for and producing oil in Iraq from some of the world’s largest oil fields and reaping enormous profit. And while the U.S. has also maintained a fairly consistent level of Iraq oil imports since the invasion, the benefits are not finding their way through Iraq’s economy or society.
These outcomes were by design, the result of a decade of U.S. government and oil company pressure. In 1998, Kenneth Derr, then CEO of Chevron, said, “Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas-reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to.” Today it does.
Exclusive: Hans Blix on ‘terrible mistake’ in Iraq
In 2000, Big Oil, including Exxon, Chevron, BP and Shell, spent more money to get fellow oilmen Bush and Cheney into office than they had spent on any previous election. Just over a week into Bush’s first term, their efforts paid off when the National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Cheney, was formed, bringing the administration and the oil companies together to plot our collective energy future. In March, the task force reviewed lists and maps outlining Iraq’s entire oil productive capacity.
Planning for a military invasion was soon under way. Bush’s first Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, said in 2004, “Already by February (2001), the talk was mostly about logistics. Not the why (to invade Iraq), but the how and how quickly.”
In its final report in May 2001 (PDF), the task force argued that Middle Eastern countries should be urged “to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment.” This is precisely what has been achieved in Iraq.
Here’s how they did it.
The State Department Future of Iraq Project’s Oil and Energy Working Group met from February 2002 to April 2003 and agreed that Iraq “should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war.”
Arwa Damon: Iraq suffocates in cloak of sorrow
The list of the group’s members was not made public, but Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum – who was appointed Iraq’s oil minister by the U.S. occupation government in September 2003 – was part of the group, according to Greg Muttitt, a journalist and author of “Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq.” Bahr al-Uloum promptly set about trying to implement the group’s objectives.
At the same time, representatives from ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Halliburton, among others, met with Cheney’s staff in January 2003 to discuss plans for Iraq’s postwar industry. For the next decade, former and current executives of western oil companies acted first as administrators of Iraq’s oil ministry and then as “advisers” to the Iraqi government.
Before the invasion, there were just two things standing in the way of Western oil companies operating in Iraq: Saddam Hussein and the nation’s legal system. The invasion dealt handily with Hussein. To address the latter problem, some both inside and outside of the Bush administration argued that it should simply change Iraq’s oil laws through the U.S.-led coalition government of Iraq, which ran the country from April 2003 to June 2004. Instead the White House waited, choosing to pressure the newly elected Iraqi government to pass new oil legislation itself.
Did Iraq give birth to the Arab Spring?
This Iraq Hydrocarbons Law, partially drafted by the Western oil industry, would lock the nation into private foreign investment under the most corporate-friendly terms. The Bush administration pushed the Iraqi government both publicly and privately to pass the law. And in January 2007, as the ”surge” of 20,000 additional American troops was being finalized, the president set specific benchmarks for the Iraqi government, including the passage of new oil legislation to “promote investment, national unity, and reconciliation.”
But due to enormous public opposition and a recalcitrant parliament, the central Iraqi government has failed to pass the Hydrocarbons Law. Usama al-Nujeyfi, a member of the parliamentary energy committee, even quit in protest over the law, saying it would cede too much control to global companies and “ruin the country’s future.”
In 2008, with the likelihood of the law’s passage and the prospect of continued foreign military occupation dimming as elections loomed in the U.S. and Iraq, the oil companies settled on a different track.
Bypassing parliament, the firms started signing contracts that provide all of the access and most of the favorable treatment the Hydrocarbons Law would provide – and the Bush administration helped draft the model contracts.
Why women are less free after Iraq War
Upon leaving office, Bush and Obama administration officials have even worked for oil companies as advisers on their Iraq endeavors. For example, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad’s company, CMX-Gryphon, “provides international oil companies and multinationals with unparalleled access, insight and knowledge on Iraq.”
The new contracts lack the security a new legal structure would grant, and Iraqi lawmakers have argued that they run contrary to existing law, which requires government control, operation and ownership of Iraq’s oil sector.
But the contracts do achieve the key goal of the Cheney energy task force: all but privatizing the Iraqi oil sector and opening it to private foreign companies.
They also provide exceptionally long contract terms and high ownership stakes and eliminate requirements that Iraq’s oil stay in Iraq, that companies invest earnings in the local economy or hire a majority of local workers.
Iraq’s oil production has increased by more than 40% in the past five years to 3 million barrels of oil a day (still below the 1979 high of 3.5 million set by Iraq’s state-owned companies), but a full 80% of this is being exported out of the country while Iraqis struggle to meet basic energy consumption needs. GDP per capita has increased significantly yet remains among the lowest in the world and well below some of Iraq’s other oil-rich neighbors. Basic services such as water and electricity remain luxuries, while 25% of the population lives in poverty.
Share your story of the Iraq War
The promise of new energy-related jobs across the country has yet to materialize. The oil and gas sectors today account directly for less than 2% of total employment, as foreign companies rely instead on imported labor.
In just the last few weeks, more than 1,000 people have protested at ExxonMobil and Russia Lukoil’s super-giant West Qurna oil field, demanding jobs and payment for private land that has been lost or damaged by oil operations. The Iraqi military was called in to respond.
Fed up with the firms, a leading coalition of Iraqi civil society groups and trade unions, including oil workers, declared on February 15 that international oil companies have “taken the place of foreign troops in compromising Iraqi sovereignty” and should “set a timetable for withdrawal.”
Closer to home, at a protest at Chevron’s Houston headquarters in 2010, former U.S. Army Military Intelligence officer Thomas Buonomo, member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, held up a sign that read, “Dear Chevron: Thank you for dishonoring our service” (PDF).
Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with losers: the Iraqi people and all those who spilled and lost blood so that Big Oil could come out ahead.
