A while
back I was reading a mystery novel (a reasonably good one, actually) that left
me feeling at the end that something wasn’t right about the story. It had to do
with several mysterious deaths that turned out to be related to a large
corporation trying to cover up pollution for which it was responsible. At the
end, the case was cracked and the CEO of the company was frog-marched in front
of the TV cameras after being arrested for murder.
And I found
myself saying, “I don’t think so.”
I don’t
think so, not because I believe in the wonderfulness of large companies and the
free market. I concede they do some things well and provide some value, but on
the whole I think they need to be encouraged less and tamed more. But if
there’s one thing I’ve learned about big corporations during my time on the
planet, it’s this:
They are
incredibly conservative and risk-averse.
Lawyer Them to Death
Few things,
really, are riskier than committing a murder. When a body is found or someone
mysteriously and inexplicably disappears, the police tend to take it seriously.
Once experienced detectives start poking around in something like that, there’s
no telling what they’ll find and where their inquiries will lead. If you kill
somebody, one oversight, one person talking out of turn could lead to your
being in a position where you have far worse problems than worrying about your
retirement plan.
So why take
the chance when there’s a safer alternative? In the case of a corporation, that
would be to keep up the illegal activity until caught, pin it on some
mid-to-low level flunky, and have your lawyers negotiate the best deal possible
with whatever regulatory agency is overseeing the activity in question.
Once that’s
done, you calculate the costs to the decimal and decide whether it makes more
sense to stop the illegal activity or keep doing it and pay any future fines
and legal costs if caught again. Then you make that decision and move on.
Viewed from that perspective, it makes a lot more sense to lawyer your tormentors
to death than to actually kill them.
But It Happens on TV
Nevertheless,
on TV, in the movies, and in popular novels, corporations are frequently
depicted killing people who threaten them. Yet stop and think about it. How
many real-life cases can you name of corporations having someone killed? And
don’t mention Karen Silkwood, because suspicious as her death appears, there’s
no hard evidence to connect Kerr-McGee to it.
Which
raises another question: Can it be that corporations are bumping people off
wholesale and doing it so well they get away with it? Again, I have my doubts.
From my observation and experience, most big companies are at least somewhat
inefficient, and it’s hard for me to believe that large numbers of them
suddenly become deadly effective if they decide to kill someone.
Unless
we’re talking about an outright criminal enterprise, murder is not going to be
a standard business practice. Nearly all murders are committed by individuals
acting on emotions and impulses they can’t control. Corporations are more
systematic and have far more options than individuals. The Supreme Court may
have ruled that corporations are people, but when it comes to murder, that’s
seldom the case.
