“Paid a fine with no admission of wrongdoing”

This video presents an excellent topic on which to shine the spotlight. Unfortunately, Oliver spends a bit too much time with “pooping on pigeon” jokes and too little time on examining the root causes of why corporate crime goes largely unpunished or lightly punished while personal crime is punished incredibly harshly.

Deferred Prosecution Agreements by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (YouTube)

It’s somewhat obvious to say that a just society would seek to build and grow a system in which most of the members can thrive. Sometimes, something bad needs to be pruned away. But how do you decide what is bad? When something causes harm to other members, it is bad. A corporation whose practices impoverish or kill other members should be made to stop doing that.

A corporation comprises many other entities, many of which do not need to be punished—or, even, morally, shouldn’t be punished—so how do you punish a corporation for malfeasance? It’s actually somewhat easier than with a person, because a corporation doesn’t have an indivisible soul or consciousness. You can, within reason, split it, reduce it, fine it, change leadership, etc. in order to retain the good parts while reducing and/or punishing the bad.

The reason that doesn’t happen is corruption and an utter lack of principle in the leaders of society. The way our system works is to lift up the worst assholes in society while impoverishing those who are unwilling to take immoral advantage of others in order to get ahead. We end up with an elite that comprises no-nothing assholes who are more than willing to defend and rescue each other in order to maintain the myth that they should be at the top.

So, when a corporation commits crimes, the people who would be in charge of determining the size of the punishment also happen to be directly invested in that corporation, and they most likely personally benefitted enormously from that corporation’s malfeasance. What is their incentive for preventing that malfeasance from recurring? What would be the incentive for punishing the people involved in the malfeasance at that corporation, when they simply did what they themselves would also have done to aggrandize themselves?

Summering in AcupulcoWhy would they do that when those people are most likely their friends and their children most likely attend the same private schools, when they most likely winter in Acapulco together?

The part that this piece completely misses is the endemic nature of the problem. The reason that corporate crime goes unpunished is that the elites, the wealthy, the powerful, the legislators, the authorities, are all in bed together. They don’t even really consider it a crime when a corporation kills people—those aren’t really people at all, since they don’t know them or anyone like them.