The Corporate Death Penalty

There's a movement afoot, one which you may not have ever heard of. It's the Corporate Charter Revocation movement, and it seeks to punish corporations which have committed crimes much the same way individual criminals are punished.

Corporate charters are granted by We, the People, to allow a company to perform a function that otherwise could not be accomplished, whether due to extreme expense or potential liabilities. They can be revoked by We, the People.

A corporation has no heart, no soul, no morals. It cannot feel pain. You cannot argue with it. That's because a corporation is not a living thing, but a process - an efficient way of generating revenue. It takes energy from outside (capital, labour, raw materials) and transforms it in various ways. In order to continue 'living' it needs to meet only one condition: its income must equal its expenditures over the long term. As long as it does that, it can exist indefinitely.

When a corporation hurts people or damages the environment, it will feel no sorrow or remorse because it is intrinsically unable to do so. (It may sometimes apologise, but that's not remorse that's public relations.)

When a corporation's charter is revoked, the company would not be dissolved, but it would go into receivership. The corporate officers, the people who created the policies and strategies that led the corporation to commit crimes, would be fired. The workers would not be fired, no one who is not guilty of corporate crimes loses a job.

Just like an individual felon, a corporation whose charter is revoked would lose its right to participate in the political process (a right which is dubious in any case). That means no lobbying, no soft money donations, no underwriting political speech, and no membership in industry groups which participate in these activities.

Alabama is currently the only American state in which an individual citizen may file a petition to have a corporation's charter revoked.