Liza at the lake, circa 1992
Liza has been looking for a long time to get into some of this real-TV action. I mean really, what could be more boring than C.O.P.S., or more horrifying than Temptation Island? Here are her two ideas for real-TV shows based on her legal experience:
Serves You Right
Follow the adventures of Bill Strucker, Licensed Process Server as he attempts to serve court papers on a seemingly endless series of wacky deadbeat defendants! Video crews are there to document the outrageous lengths to which these unsung heroes of the legal profession must go in order to get subpoenas to their reluctant subjects. They can change their names, they can fake their own deaths, they can avoid their own homes and families for weeks at a time, but you'll cheer in exultation every week as Strucker finally gets his man. The words "see you in court" have never sounded so sweet!
Jury Duty
Forget Bush's plans for tort reform. Jury Duty will revolutionize civil procedure in America by giving you the viewers direct control over the verdicts in large class-action lawsuits. Cases will be tried on live TV, in a no-holds-barred game show format where the only crime is boring the audience. The higher the ratings, the higher the award! Use your specially developed WebTV interface to vote on the verdict. After the vote, Jury Duty will offer the winners a final choice--they can take the money, or they can force the loser to undergo a public humiliation of their own devising on national television. Because Jury Duty knows what every lawyer eventually learns--that what people who sue people are really out for isn't the silver sound of money, but the taste of sweet, sweet revenge.
This theory is really very simple: given the current trend toward centrism in American politics, it would be much easier for everyone if both parties would field bipartisan tickets. Why should Gore have had to settle for Lieberman when he might just as well have found himself a real Republican? After all, how else is he going to get the Republican vote?
We've become so used to corporations as a fact of life that even though we talk about corporate this and corporate that we're usually not really aware of what that means. A corporation isn't just a really big company. It's a specific legal construct that was developed purely for the purpose of increasing the powers of evil, and here's why.
One of the main purposes of incorporating is to limit liability. Once you become a corporation, you personally cannot be sued for anything that your corporation is responsible for. For instance, say you are one of the many individuals in Chicago who runs a fly-by-night construction business. If you turn this business into a corporation, then when it's time for you to pay your workers' pension funds, and you don't want to do that, you can just bankrupt the corporation and they're SOL. You, meanwhile, still have assets, which you can use to found another corporation the next year which will screw its workers equally hard when the time comes for it to go bankrupt.
This, of course, is already bad. But wait, there's more.
Corporations don't just limit liability; they limit responsibility. In a corporation, administration and ownership are separated: the corporation is really 'owned' by the shareholders, but it's run by its board, its officers, etc. (Of course, in most corporations the board also owns stock, but this is just one of the many things about corporate law that is more a polite fiction than a description of reality.) Corporate law dictates that the primary duty of the people running the company is to take care of the people owning the company: in other words, their first duty under the law is to make sure that the shareholders make as much money as possible. What this means is that if the people running the corporations have the opportunity to do something that might be socially responsible but would make the corporation less profitable for the shareholders--like, say, doing a more efficient job of cleaning up its own waste--they are legally prohibited from doing the right thing.
That's right. Even if they all were visited by the good angels of social responsibility and converted in the night, so that they really yearned to be good to the earth and to humankind, they would still be sitting around in that boardroom with tears in their eyes signing the memos directing their employees to pollute, cheat, swindle and gouge, saying, "I know it's horrible and we're all going to hell, but what can we do? We have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders!"
Of course, this is what capitalism wants to do anyway--take care of capital at the expense of everything else. But the corporation, as a legal construct, is a way of institutionalizing that-- and of making it easier to reconcile the sometimes unavoidable conflict between that 'fiduciary duty' to maximize profit and the stirrings of the human conscience. When explaining why this is the root of all evil, Liza usually cites something she learned in a history of law class about some research the professor had done on slave sales in the nineteenth century. He went into the records and found that when plantation owners sold their own slaves they were less likely to break up families than when slaves were being sold at an estate auction by someone else who was acting for the deceased plantation owner. His conclusion was that the owners doing their own selling were free to try to be at least partially compassionate if they wanted to do so, whereas the agents who were selling slaves on behalf of the deceased owner's heirs felt a duty to get as much money as they could from the estate, which usually meant splitting families up and selling their members individually. And, if these auctioneers happened to feel bad about this, they could console themselves by telling themselves that they were only doing their duty to the property owners, and were not personally profiting.
So, as you can see, the corporation is one of the major things that greases the wheels of capitalism, and it has to be stopped. It used to be that corporation was only possible for very large concerns under very special circumstances; now, anyone and his dog can incorporate, and the result is the mess we currently have. Somehow, as a country, we must figure out how to stop this, and make the people who make the money accountable for their own actions.
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