Pissed.
I know that’s the first feeling I get looking at the photos of the devastation of the gulf coast. I’m pissed that people were so stupid, so mindlessly greedy, that they were willing to play dice with God’s creation to achieve a higher shareholder dividend. Someone must pay. And that someone shall be BP, the company that made this disaster inevitable. That’s what anger demands: a recipient.
But is it sufficient to lay the blame with BP? Wasn’t Exxon similarly greedy and negligent during the Valdez disaster? And why stop there? Why not look at Union Carbide and Bhopal? Or, to use a more timely example, Goldman Sachs and our financial system? Why are so many corporations so blatantly rogue?
Could it be because the system is designed to reward the rogue corporation over the responsible? More below the fold.
Take a moment to re-examine one of the great progressive bête noires: corporations’ legal equality with humans. Humans have a complex set of requirements for survival: food, clothing, shelter, clean water, clean air. Corporations need none of that, so long as they have human labor and money to feed them. So, of the two groups, which is going to be least inclined to protect the fundamental needs for human survival? Sure, the corporations can’t afford to kill off the humans; but they can’t afford to provide them their needs in abundance, either.
Imagine if BP’s executive management had been perfectly conscientious citizens serious about BP’s obligations to put the environment before the bottom line (an obligation that most Republicans will tell you doesn’t exist, but just stay with me for a second). At some point, some shareholder is going to look at a quarterly report and see that profits, while healthy, weren’t as great as their less-conscientious competitors’.
Do you think that management team survives? I don’t.
So what we have here is a system in which responsible corporate behavior is not only unusual, but practically impossible. The shareholders demand dividends. Executives that fail to put the dividends above all else are summarily fired. This is the way our system is designed to operate. And we’re going to take this out on BP? They’re just playing the game by the rules we’ve made. Right?
An argument can be made, with some justification, that much of the blame here falls on government for being ineffective or even complicit in its role as referee and watchdog. The point is correct, government has been those things. We’d like to think that Democratic governance will change much, most, or even all of that. But the sad fact is that the Republicans are going to have their turns in the White House, too. That is also, at this point, designed into the system, which means that government nonfeasance is essentially designed into the system as well. We can’t rely on government to mitigate the structural incentives that demand that large corporations work the very margins of the law without rest to maximize their profits. The only solution is to remove those incentives.
Another argument can be made that corporations are merely collections of people — that it is people making these irresponsible decisions, and those people should be regarded as moral lepers who would make those same decisions even without the umbrella of corporate shielding of liability protecting them. This argument ignores the lessons of the Milgram Experiment — that people will do unconscionable things to each other when an authority figure assures them that it is quite alright. Groupthink is the human race’s most destructive tendency, just as dangerous in the hands of greedy corporatists as it is in those of megalomaniacal militarists. That we have constructed these monstrous legal entities that feed on money and labor, destroying our environment, economy, and way of life in the process — and given them equal legal footing with us even — explains every outrageous corporate misdeed in the long history of corporate misdeeds. The problem here is systemic. These accidents are not accidents. They are the collateral damage we choose to accept by granting corporations such special place in our society.
I’m not sure yet exactly what kind of reforms to propose. I personally am fond of the idea of abolishing corporations outright, but I also recognize that some legal shielding is necessary to make entrepreneurism feasible. I also think that setting a legal limit on market cap, to prevent megacorporations from even forming, would by itself prevent disasters of the scale of the Deepwater Horizon. I do know that capitalism does best for everyone when we have large numbers of small companies, not the inverse situation we have today, but that’s an economics debate for another day. Still, I would rather be faced with solving the relatively minor misdeeds of smaller companies than the catastrophic disasters that megacorporations routinely leave in their wake. If we can’t eliminate business playing by the margins of the rules, we can at least mitigate the risks inherent in living by such a system.
So, excuse me if I’m not gung ho about boycotting BP. BP is just the symptom. The disease runs far deeper. It’s going to take us years, maybe decades, to cure it… but I think our moral obligation to take on that fight is crystal clear. The time to reign in the corporate plutarchy has come. Without fear of hyperbole, I say that the alternative will be extinction. The law of averages will eventually make that inevitable.
