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If you got caught robbing a bank, the chances are
excellent that you’d be facing some serious time in the pokey. But
what if a bank robs you? Corporate executives and their lawyers like to claim
that a corporation is a “person” with all of the rights of an
actual human being — yet when one of these outfits goes bad and gets
caught violating laws the lawyers drop the pretense of personhood,
insisting that although this entity might be fined, it can’t be put
in jail or given a death sentence, because . . . well, because it’s a
financial structure, not a human. Embracing this game of now-you-see-us,
now-you-don’t, the Bushites have devised a neat way to go soft on
corporate criminals. Called the “deferred prosecution
agreement” — or DPA — this ploy allows corporations and
banks that are guilty of everything from robbery to bribery to be given a
get-out-of-jail-free card. Monsanto, Merrill Lynch, and some 50 other
corporations have recently been allowed to pay relatively cheap fines and
agree to certain internal reforms rather than be prosecuted for their
crimes. Under this scheme, even the big mortgage hucksters could end up
writing checks and walking away. DPAs were originally meant to help real people
(usually first offenders) get a second chance, but they’ve become the
favorite wrist-slap of Bush prosecutors and corporate violators, who argue
that full prosecution could be “a corporate death sentence”
with “catastrophic collateral consequences,” so these criminals
shouldn’t be treated like mere people. Of course, such judicial favoritism creates an
incentive for criminal behavior, because corporations now know that they
can likely avoid prosecution if caught. And fines are no deterrent —
multibillion-dollar corporations can simply absorb them as a necessary cost
of doing business.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator,
columnist, and author.
This article appears in May 1-7, 2008.
