Big Corporations, Not Cops, Have a License to Kill

PG&E just pled guilty to killing 84 people in California. The company was repeatedly warned that its faulty equipment was going to start a wildfire. In 2018 their equipment did start a fire- resulting in the deaths of scores of innocent people and destroying the small town of Paradise, California. The company was still on "probation" for a 2010 fire that killed eight people. That fire was caused by an explosion of one of their transformers.

The company's President appeared in court and confessed to 84 counts of manslaughter on behalf of his company. Nothing happened to him, or any other executive of PG&E. His company was assessed with fines. They were huge fines, but the company is paying them. There isn't a single real human being who is being held legally accountable for the reckless decisions which resulted in the deaths of eighty-four innocent people. Not even a $10 fine.

Look, I don't approve of police using excessive force. It is unfortunate that persons resisting arrest are sometimes killed while being taken into custody. If a policeman abuses his authority with malice aforethought, of course he should be held legally accountable for it. Even if they kill someone in custody by gross negligence, they should still be held accountable. And by and large, they are. While the media is getting us in an uproar about a legitimate problem, but one that does often get addressed when it occurs. What the media is mostly ignoring is a much larger problem that is baked into the cake of our system. Large corporations have a license to kill. 

The PG&E management whose decisions killed 84 people won't pay any legal price for their actions. Corporations have gotten too big. They have more access to our government than real flesh-and-blood citizens do. The laws are written by their lobbyists and voted in by politicians whose campaigns are funded by them, running on a party label which is financed by them. No wonder that same government bails out Wall St. over Main St. 100-1. And it will continue to do so, passing the crushing debt to do so onto our children. That's why FEDGOV shouldn't have the power to bail out anyone.

This is an issue on which left, right, and the middle can all agree on. Corporations, themselves a creature of government, are too powerful. The people who run them are too powerful. The biggest are basically immortal, and overtime more wealth is being transferred from the middle class to them. When they mess up, the are bailed out. If we mess up, or even experience misfortune beyond our control, we lose our homes. They make our laws, they loot our kids, and now they take our lives with impunity. The principle of incorporation as a shield for legal consequences has been taken too far. Localism has very specific ways of dealing with the problem of corporatism, and the other twelve ways that control of our lives is systematically taken from us and handed to ever more distant capitol cities. 

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