Pegging corporations as sociopathic

The future where corporations rule may seem straight out of science fiction. But sadly, I'm not so sure these days with globalization trumping laws made by individual nations.

If anything, pegging corporations as sociopathic is a fine start.

Thom Hartmann has written quite a bit on this subject. Now I see there's another book out on the subject called The Corporation by Joel Bakan. While I'd love to get my hands on the book, I'll have to wait. Instead, here's a book review to whet your palate.

Corporate personhood traces back to the invention of corporations in Britain in the 1500s. What’s new in the past century is that courts have extended the idea of “personhood” considerably further than mere legal recognition, adding various Bill of Rights protections such as freedom of speech (thus thwarting campaign finance reform laws), the right to privacy (frustrating government safety inspectors), and so on.

Having bulked up on legal steroids, corporations are now capable of feats no mortal can match. They can shape-shift, morphing into new entities at will. They’re immortal, outliving generations of humans. They can teleport, dissolving in one country only to reappear in another.

None of these powers is inherent in the corporate form; each is the result of specific legal victories by corporate attorneys. Critics decry the steady encroachment of corporate power on democracy, yet the advance continues as global trade agreements define still more corporate rights and create institutional mechanisms to implement them.

In THE CORPORATION: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Free Press, $25), legal theorist Joel Bakan adds a new twist to the debate over corporate personhood. Rather than taking us through the labyrinths of corporate legal personification, Bakan instead poses a simple question: OK, so a corporation is person. But what kind of person?

Bakan suggests that society answer this question by giving the corporation the same sort of routine quiz employers use to spot potentially good workers and avoid hiring nut cases. His aim isn’t to pump the bottom line or to put any particular corporation on the couch. It’s the corporation as an institution that he’s intent on scrutinizing, using a book found on the desks of psychoanalysts everywhere—The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. First published in 1952, the DSM is now in its fourth edition, with 382 distinct diagnoses. Of course, none of these entries was conceived as a way of diagnosing an institution. But Bakan finds a trait-by-trait match between the standard actions of corporations and the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.

Like the classic psychopath, corporations are singularly self-interested, driven solely by the profit motive. They’re manipulative, even toward children. And they’re shallow in their relationships, laying off workers and wasting communities, incapable of remorse or empathy toward those they hurt. When breaking laws such as pollution controls appears to cost less than obeying such laws, they routinely do so.

Next step: prison for these beasts.