Well, a corporation is just, a different type of thing, and different types of rules should apply to something that isn't even a "person" right?

It may come as a surprise to many of you to hear that "corporations" are considered people under the prevailing interpretation of our Constitution. Although originally passed to guarantee equality for newly freed slaves, the Fourteenth Amendment was latched onto in 1886 by corporations as a means to protect their own interests, and has resulted in corporations being granted the same constitutional rights as human beings.
Indeed, if this lobby group gets its way, by way of the mounting legal immunities being granted to them, us humans will effectively have even less substantive rights than corporations.

When you or I break the law and are caught, we're prosecuted, and if found guilty, we're sent to jail. We also may be sued directly by a private party for compensation for the injuries we caused. When corporations break the law and are caught, should it be any different? They are, of course, strangely our equals under our constitution.

Imagine if a group of American citizens got together and said, we think it should be made harder for us to be sued or go to jail than it is right now, even though there are some recent serious and highly publicized crimes in our neighborhood. They then gather well-respected people in the community who form a committee, come up with recommendations, and get the head of their committee installed as the town's “rulemaker.”

They say to their former leader, we think the ideas you helped develop with us are really good, and we'd just like to make it harder to be held legally accountable for our actions. What if their former chairman simply said yes, adopted his/their recommendations, and then rewrote the rules without the input of the elected officials (save one highly unpopular president). What would you say, and/or what would you do? As absurd as it sounds, it appears this story is currently unfolding.

Admittedly, regulations do make it more expensive (for businesses) to conduct business, and the same is true of the regulation of businesses by the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002. However, regulations generally do save society as a whole money and resources in the long run.

Yes, requiring that seatbelts be placed in cars makes making cars more expensive, but in the long run it costs society, and ultimately taxpayers, less in medical care to pay for the otherwise catastrophic automobile accidents that occur each year (as well as the secondary costs of long term government welfare programs for the accident victim and ultimately their dependents).

Similarly, requiring corporations to wear the proverbial seatbelt of high accounting standards costs all corporations a little bit more in the short-term, but it also ultimately reduces the amount of catastrophic financial injury from mismanagement that can destroy entire companies.

Like drivers, those who administer corporate accounts will inevitably make errors, the question is only when these errors are made, how much damage are they likely to cause with or without safeguards in place?

Today, would you really ride in a car with no seatbelt? If you wouldn’t, why would you let corporate “persons” that determine the livelihood of most Americans and the health of our national economy, do any different?

Probably, more important than your own opinion, are the opinions of the thousands of Enron workers who suddenly lost their jobs and their retirement money due to the company’s financial mismanagement implosion.

Personally, I say, on the road and in halls of corporate America….safety first.