In some respects it’s shame that the death penalty has been taken off the statute books in the United Kingdom. Perhaps the law could be changed to allow us to finish off the global corporations that currently threaten our society.
Corporate identities have a strange position in our society legally speaking, in so much as that they are considered a legal entity in their own right – a legal person if you will. This status removes liability from the owners of the organisation and allows the entity to behave in an exploitative manner without consequence.
So if a corporation is a person what sort of a person is it?
Well in the 2003 movie “The Corporation” this idea is explored in detail and the conclusion is that Corporations behave like psychopaths. Dr Robert Hare expands on this:
[blockquote]One of the questions that comes up periodically is to what extent could a corporation be considered to be psychopathic. And if we look at a corporation as a legal person, that it may not be that difficult to actually draw the transition between psychopathy in the individual to psychopathy in the corporation. We could go through the characteristics that define this disorder, one by one, to how they might apply to corporations. They would have all the characteristics, and, in fact, in many respects, the corporation of that sort is the proto-typical of a psychopath.[/blockquote]
So if our corporate entities have the same legal status as an individual in society and demonstrate psychopathic tendencies should we not be allowed to sentence them to death? Here’s my vision of that future.
{gallery}corporate-gravestones{/gallery}