Jailing A Corporate Person

                                                                                                written 9 June 2018

                                                                                                published 16 June 2018

            Corporate personhood is an insane fiction of our times. 

            Wells Fargo is in the news again, with the potential of a $1B administrative judgment by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CPFB), the third action in three years.  In 2016 Wells Fargo was found to have created 3.5 million accounts without their customers knowledge. The CPFB judgment was a fine of $185M, which amounts to $53 for each bogus account.  Evidence shows that Wells Fargo was not deterred from committing further illegal actions.  When there are no real consequences to illegal behavior, there is loss of moral standard.

            A real person convicted of a crime in a judicial court can be jailed, sometimes for life.  Depending on circumstances, a negligent action can result in a court judgment to repay damages, provide compensation for pain and suffering, and restitution for any permanent economic loss.  If found guilty of intent to commit the crime, punitive damages may also be awarded.  

            A jailed person has no further employment income.  If they are unable to pay their bills, the holder of a secured loan can foreclose, forcing the sale of the asset to retire the loan.  The remainder of the defendant's assets, including bank accounts and securities, are liquidated to pay any judgments, so unsecured loans can be a complete loss to the lender.  Employees of the defendant lose their jobs. 

            If corporations expect the benefits of being a person, shouldn't they be held responsible for their actions as a person?  In this example, it would start with a motion for a temporary restraining order to revoke the Corporate Charter of Wells Fargo, and initiate judicial proceedings.  The CFPB showed Wells Fargo created 3.5 million accounts, accruing fees without their customers knowledge, which constitutes fraud.  If judged guilty in a court of law, the Charter could be revoked, preventing Wells Fargo from doing further business, similar to going to jail for a period of time.  A judicial sentence of one day of jail time per fraudulent account would be more than 9,500 years.  

            A judgement of $1000 per fraud, for economic damages, and pain and suffering due to a loss in customer credit rating, would total $3.5B.  Since fraud is by definition an intentional act, punitive damages may be awarded.  This fraud was one of several, so the bank is a repeat offender, showing no remorse.  A factor of 100 times real damages is reasonable as a deterrent and an example to the larger industry, for an additional judgement of $350B.

            Wikipedia lists Wells equity value at $207B.  After secured assets were sold to satisfy mortgage holders, the rest of the equity would go toward covering the judgment.  Stockholders, holding unsecured loans, would lose everything.  Wells Fargo's employees (more than 250,000 real people) would be laid off.  All bank accounts, which belong to the accountholders, would have to be transferred to another bank.

            In the Wells Fargo case, no one died, but many people die as a result of corporate activities.  I have seen a bumper sticker reading "I will believe corporations are people when Texas executes one".   In the 70s, researchers for Exxon-Mobile, headquartered in Texas, discovered that continued burning of their product would raise global temperatures, putting humanity at risk.  To protect their business, Exxon chose to bury the research and fund climate denial, making them accessory to deaths due to climate change.  Such calculated mass murder by a real person could get them executed.

            Since corporations, like zombies, aren't actually alive, killing one is problematic. A quick Internet search shows zombies can be killed by destroying their brains.  The brain of a corporation could be described as the Board of Directors and Operating Officers.  They would be judged for their part in the corporate person, not because of any culpability as individuals.  Execute them and the corporation is dead.  Execute even one corporation, and business ethics would immediately improve. 

            Real people don't have limited liability for their actions, why should corporate people?  Even the threat of taking legal action against a corporation as a person would reveal that corporations are "fake" people, unwilling to be as responsible as real people, and end the insanity of corporate personhood "rights". 

Considering Time

                                                                                                 written 4 June 2018                                                                                           

                                                                                                 published 9 June 2018

            It is impossible to think, write, or talk, without temporal implication, since our language uses verbs with tense conjugation, assuming a linearity of time flowing from past through the present into the future.

            Philosophers have long grappled with time. Sophists declared time is a concept or a measure.  Parmenides maintained time was an illusion.  The Kabbala considers time a paradox, where the future and past are simultaneously present.  Leibnitz and Kant felt time did not exist in and of itself because we can only know objects as they appear to us.  Modern Presentism holds that only the present is tangible, as past and future are human-mind interpretations of movement.  The illusion of time is a common theme in Buddhism.

            Newton's mechanistic physics describes objective reality as three spatial dimensions, and a separate temporal dimension.  Einstein's physics of relativity consists of four dimensions, one of which is temporal, but different frames of reference have a different axis for time, depending on the relative motion between the frames of reference.  In relativity, time contracts and mass increases approaching the speed of light.  Massless photons, traveling at the speed of light, experience no time, arriving at their destination without duration.  Experience of time is a property of the velocity of the perceiver, and some consider time to be a poorly perceived fourth spatial dimension.  Einstein said "time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once".

            Psychological time is known to be flexible compared with the mechanical time of clocks.  A boring event seems to take forever, while enjoyment is over in a flash.  In very intense experiences, time can seem to slow down, allowing detailed perception and response.

            The left brain processes differences and distinctions of sequence, which is fundamental to the concept of linear time.  This seat of the ego keeps track of our life story, giving temporal continuity.  We "remember" the past, and plan for the future based on that past.  The present moment seems no more than an intersection between the past and future, but all action and experience happen in the present moment, which is eternal; past and future are just stories.  Our memory of an experience is limited and filtered, which is why "eye witness" accounts can be so varied.

            Since our "story" is a large part of the ego's structure, it has a stake in preserving the apparent reality of that story.  When we experience a present event, the ego immediately provides an interpretation in terms of stories from the past.  If we aren't careful with our attention, we accept these interpretations as an accurate perception of the moment, and act in response to the past story rather than the actual event.  Thus, the future becomes a consequence of the past, the present is not considered at all, and the ego's story of life feels continuous and whole.

            Our awareness of reality is not limited to the left brain ego story.  The right brain does not interpret experience in the same way, as it processes whole systems, not differences, so the present moment is its natural domain.  One function of mindfulness meditation is training attention to notice when left brain stories are running.  Our culture encourages the primacy of these stories as descriptions of reality, but practice allows one to shift away from automatic engagement with these stories and sit in awareness of the actual moment, uncolored by narration from the past.  Each moment then becomes an opportunity for change.  All action happens in the present, so we begin to evolve an ability to respond to current events, rather than automatically repeating the past, and our future shifts from being determined by the past, to being determined by the present moment. 

            In times of economic and environmental stability, endlessly repeating the past can help society endure.  But when conditions are turbulent and changing, this is a recipe for social collapse, like trying to drive looking only in the rearview mirror.  One doesn't have to look far to see that these are times of change, requiring new responses to old problems.

Price Of Gas

                                                                                                written 27 May, 2018

                                                                                                published 2 Jun 2018

            The price of gasoline is going up.  My standard of reference is Chevron regular, at $3.59/gallon last time I looked.  The increase is caused by global pressures on oil prices, due to physical, economic, and political forces.  Last week the price for benchmark Brent crude oil hit $80/barrel, the first time since 2014.

            The global economic recession after the 2008 crash lowered the demand for oil, but production remained the same, creating a worldwide glut, which depressed prices.  This was good for the consumer, but oil producers were hard hit.  For decades, discovery of new oil has not kept pace with depletion of existing oil fields.  The search for new oil is expensive, and it can take years to develop a new field.  This costs more energy and money because easily accessible oil has been found and, in many cases, already depleted.  The new operations lose money when market prices are low, but loans borrowed to finance the development must still be paid, so production continues.

            Fracking is a tertiary extraction method to get the last drops of oil out of the ground.  It is expensive to drill the wells and pump sand to fracture the rock so oil can be retrieved.  Individual deposits are relatively small and well production drops off within a few years, so new wells must be constantly drilled.  The oil industry claims this can go on for decades, but sceptics point out that current output comes from drilling the productive "sweet" spots, which are now mostly developed.  Heavy investment in fracking generated a boom in US oil production, but at a loss of $250B to date.  Higher oil prices are required to make fracking profitable.

            Few global oil producers make a profit with low oil prices.  Saudi Arabia organized an OPEC production slowdown in 2016, to reduce global oil supply.  This slowdown and growing oil consumption due to increased global economics, depleted the oversupply and oil prices rose.  While higher prices are good for oil producing countries and corporations, they are not good for the global economy.  Oil is a fundamental part of the economy and if it is too expensive, the economy can't function.  Sudden changes in oil pricing can be economically disruptive. 

            By June 2008, the price of oil had doubled to $160/barrel over the previous 18 months.  The US economy was fragile, over extended with massive debt in the subprime housing market, and the rapid increase in oil prices popped the bubble.

            There are similar global conditions today.  A recent column in the UDJ pointed out the precarious condition of the Argentine economy.  The global economy is connected, so a collapse in one place affects the whole world.  Real estate prices in the US are approaching pre-crash levels, almost doubling in the last 6 years, while wages are stagnant, and there is increasing debt in sub-prime auto loans.  The Chinese economy was booming in 2008, which helped the global economy recover, but China is growing more slowly today.  In 2008, the Fed lowered interest rates and threw trillions of dollars into the economy to prevent a depression.  Interest rates today are already low, and the national debt is more than twice as large, so the options are reduced.

            2018 global oil consumption is 99 million barrels/day.  With little stored supply, the market is tight, and reduction in production due to geopolitics, can cause abrupt increases in prices.  The decline of the Venezuelan economy has reduced their oil production by half, with risk of a compete production collapse.  The US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear treaty and re-imposition of economic sanctions, will reduce Iranian production.  Moving the US embassy to Jerusalem further inflamed tension in the area.  The threat of an Israeli/Iranian war is a real concern, which would likely reduce production in the entire region.  Any of these situations could cause a sudden reduction in oil supply, causing a sharp rise in prices, and renewed economic upheaval.

            We are stuck with the fact that oil prices the consumers can afford are too low for oil producers to make a profit, and prices that profit the oil industry are too high for our debt-ridden economy to carry.