My friend Franklin Sanders is always well-worth reading. Here’s his latest (www.the-moneychanger.com):
Two centuries ago an English chief justice lamented that a corporation had “no body to kick and no soul to damn,” which pretty well puts them beyond the reach of justice. Good thing he’s dead — he’d choke sure enough if he saw what these “juridical persons” do today.
Miss not my point. A “corporation” is a legal fiction, a mythical entity created to dodge liability. A corporation is people. It can’t lift its fictional hand unless some real, live human lifts the hand for it. And today corporations are employed to dodge liabilities civil & criminal, especially for big banks & Wall Street felons-on-the-loose. Think: How can a mythical being commit a crime? Not possible. Some PERSON did it & hides behind the guilty corporation.
Thus today JPMorgan Chase agreed to cough up $2.6 billion dollars in penalties criminal & civil for its part in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.
But who cares? None of the human beings who were acting as JP Morgan Chase paid anything — JPMC’s stockholders paid it. Nor did anyone in management with oversight responsibility go to jail. Ne’er a one.
When they make me dictator, first thing I’ll do is not kill all the lawyers but kill all the corporations. At least it will be a bloodless revolution, since corporations can’t bleed.
That’s interesting and a shame so how do we know when a corporation is legit?
To see if a corporation actually exists and has not been dissolved you can usually look them up on the website of the state in which they were formed.
Typically they pay the state an annual license fee.
To see if they have a good reputation you can try Dun and Bradstreet and/or the local Better Business Bureau.
But note that many companies run by dishonest people will join the Better Business Bureau anyway.
And of course many big corporations rank well on Dun and Bradstreet.
Best advice is to trust new business contacts slowly and ask around.