The Problem with Corporations
So people are annoyed with Target for caving on their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, because the Wannabe Dictator has seized upon the acronym as a useful device to divide us. Those same people are delighted that Costco and a very few other corporations have announced their continued commitment to these basic values of human decency (oh, and good business, too).
Every so often, we are reminded that some corporations are just obscenely large, and some of us get bent about that. The problem is not that Disney or Amazon or Apple or ExxonMobil or Wells Fargo or Nestle etc. etc. etc. are too big. Well, that’s a problem, but it’s not THE problem.
By their very nature and structure, corporations are ruthless and atavistic. (I’ll wait while you look up that last word.). They are a special category of entity, intentionally set up to protect the individuals who embody them from having legal and personal responsibility for the things they do. I pause here again to allow that last sentence to settle in.
Corporations can do things that individuals would be punished for. They cheat, steal, lie, slander, defame, physically injure or even kill. And never get punished. At the law, the only method yet devised as punishment for a corporation (Enron and Arthur Andersen notwithstanding) is terribly unpopular and also devilishly ineffective: punitive damages.
Everyone remembers the case of the little old lady who got a huge verdict from McDonald’s for coffee being hot. 99% of the time the story is told, it’s to demonstrate the outrage that this lady got rich somehow over not knowing that coffee is hot. The actual details, though, tell a different story.
I used to be married to one of the lawyers who represented McDonald’s in cases like that, and I got a glimpse into some of the circumstances. McD’s mandates how hot the coffee is, and requires it to be dangerously hot when it’s poured, even though it frequently loses money to injured employees (mostly through attrition and not through compensation) who scald themselves on the job. Too bad, so sad, don’t be a klutz.
McD’s also obsesses over the cost of the cups they buy and have to hand out to ingrates who just use them and then throw them away. So they are always looking for ways to reduce that cost to zero. If they could just have a coffee hose that shoots white-hot lattes into our undeserving maws, they totally would. In those pre-Starbucks days, when the only sizable competition on coffee matters was Dunkin’, there was open season on cup quality. So the cups back then were sometimes sturdy paper cups, when the franchisee was a tender-hearted weakling who didn’t mind paying exorbitantly to please the douchebag, er, customer, and sometimes they were the world’s flimsiest styrofoam only somewhat held in shape by the top, like the one handed to the little old lady in the renowned case.
If you go to a lot of different McD’s, you have a sense of how different franchisees run their show, and you might be alert for a cheapskate before you brave the drive-thru. When they hand out the coffee at the drive-thru window, sometimes they hand it to you by holding the top, and sometimes by holding the sides. If the former, you grab the sides to pull it into your car.
And if the goddam cup is the cheapest piece of shit ever, and you have little or no experience doing the drive-thru thing, you might be surprised by how fucking hot that goddam cup is, and you might squish it as you bring it into the car, your brain in full panic mode. When the top gives up the ghost and decides to pop the fuck off, you might end up with a crotch full of scalding coffee.
That shit would hurt like hell if you had thick-ass trucker jeans on over your manly junk. A brief word to any men in the audience on the subject of junk before we plow ahead: if you are the proud owner of a set of man-giblets, chances are you have no idea what lady parts feel like from the inside. I have been given to understand (being afflicted with a bishop and ottomans) that the her-style situation is blessed with a WHOLE LOT more nerve endings. My lady wife frequently complains to me about my ham-handedness when I’m getting frisky, for example. If I was just using Ol’ Hammerhead to provide me information about the world, I would be REALLY limited in what I could say is going on. Try this experiment at home. PLEASE only at home! Take two glasses of ice water and put them on a table. Take your junk out of your manly, manly jeans. Take your bishop in one hand and simultaneously touch it to one glass while touching the other glass with your non-bishop-holding hand. Which glass do you notice as cold first? Simultaneous? Bullshit.
Ladies, welcome back.
What if you had just exploded your cheap-ass coffee cup all over your crotch, only you didn’t have a set o’denim on? What if it was a flimsy lady-garment like a dress or a skirt, and fancy silky underthings underneath? Did I mention the lady in question was in Arizona? So it wasn’t snowpants she had on. Did I mention she was old?
She boiled her lady parts in coffee right there in her car. She was really badly injured and disfigured. How funny is that now? Notice it will only be bros and NRA spox chix laughing at this point.
When she complained to the manager, he (of course it was a he) was a dick about it. The owner (another he) backed up the manager in being dicky to the lady, who had serious medical bills and a permanently-scarred hootchie. According to these fuckers, they had nothing to do with her injuries. Or her permanent benching from the evergreen-for-everyone-but-incels pastime of getting laid. Before you snicker that old people shouldn’t have sex, they can and do and should. As you read this, your grandmother is probably getting nailed in her nursing home by the dapper gentleman down the hall. If that disturbs you, good.
So when the jury agreed with her, that they did indeed have mostly everything to do with her injuries, rather than pony up and pay for her medical sitch, they hid behind McDonald’s having rules about hotness. So the jury turned their attention to a gigantic corporation with unimaginable resources. How do you make McDonald’s feel pain?
The law is unable to really and fully offer a punishment to a corporation.
People working for corporations do illegal, immoral and awful things on a daily basis all over the world. They will never be held accountable for those things, and that is by design.
For me, it would be better and more equitable to outlaw corporations. That will not happen.
P.S. This essay was written on a tablet produced by child labor, typed on a keyboard probably made by child labor, while listening to a music player probably manufactured by child labor. It is playing music recorded almost a hundred years ago, and most of the musicians were probably cheated out of proper payment, and every artist involved (composer, etc.) most likely denied fair compensation for their work even at the time, to say nothing of the use and enjoyment of their work many decades or centuries after. The license to play this music was included in a bundle of access, etc. to a big corporation. So I am part of the problem with all of you.
Sorry.
