“Corporations are people, my friend,” Mitt Romney famously said in 2011 while running for president. The Supreme Court decided the previous year that corporations could give money to political campaigns, just like people, and in 2014, the high court gave corporations religious freedom to deny contraceptives to employees, thereby letting them behave just as badly as people. If you prick corporations, do they not bleed?
Actually no, they don’t. But as of now, they can get presidential pardons.
The notion that corporations are people did not originate with the Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision in 2010. Way back in 1886, the high court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Union Pacific Railroad that corporations were covered by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. To be more precise, this question was addressed not in the decision (which resolved a local taxation dispute) but rather in a headnote that said the court “does not wish to hear argument on the question” of whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to corporations because “we are all of the opinion that it does.“ Somehow this non sequitur became legal precedent. “Later cases,” wrote Stetson University law professor Clara Torres-Spelliscy in a 2014 analysis for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, “uncritically cited the headnote as if it had been part of the case.”
You know what isn’t declining? Pardons for corporations. Trump has granted nine. These were never a thing before Trump—not in the modern era, and possibly never. According to Bloomberg’s Ava Benny-Morrison, the nine pardons wiped out $200 million in financial penalties, “some of which were destined for victims of wrongdoing.” Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri, told Bloomberg: “In any previous era no president would touch this with a barge pole. Maybe individual cases with some compelling reason, but the systemic elimination of criminal liability of major financial crime would never have happened before, and it didn’t.”
Half of the $200 million in wiped-out fines can be attributed to a single crypto company, BitMEX. The three co-founders of the company, a pioneer in crypto derivatives, all pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires maintaining certain safeguards against money laundering. Each paid $10 million in fines. Then, in July 2024, BitMEX itself pleaded guilty to the same crime, and this past January the company was fined $100 million.
Fair-ish. But, while the US proliferated the assembly line, the IC engine actually came about from a combination of French and German inventors. Though, the US did propegate an oil empire, its a tad unfair to place the blame solely with the US. Admittedly, the US has taken a hard right as to getting off its oil addiction.
The industrial use of lead goes back to the 4th century BC. Can't blame a country that officially formed 250 and unofficially started ~600 years ago for a problem that was around for ~2,000 before its start and had global usage. You'd be better off pointing to Agent Orange. But, that too was invented by a British company, Imperial Chemical Industries.
The existence of micro plastics isn't inherently the fault of one country. The biggest plastic-polluters are Africa and Asia. But, plastic was originally invented by the British.
13th Amendment + a nations right of self determination make that inherently not the US's fault ongoing fault. Slavery has been around for thousands of years. Africans did slavery too. Just look at the make up of Mansa Musa's pilgrimage (had ~12,000 slaves). Europe didn't get around to banning slavery until not long before USA did. Slavery was a crime against humanity by all of humanity, not an inherently unique problem to the USA, which got off its slavery addiction pretty quickly in comparison to the rest of the world. That again shows the general tilt towards liberty.