Isn’t this great?
On Friday, the former President’s namesake company, the Trump Organization, was sentenced to pay the state $1.6 million in fines. That is the maximum allowed by law.
I would be willing to bet that the state of New York spent more than $1.6 million dollars to get the guilty verdict (remember, it was a criminal case) against the Trump organization. It may be the maximum allowed by law, but one suspects that law is ages old, and it now amounts to a slap on the wrist. No, not a slap, a tap.
Corporations have always been a legal method for those who control them to avoid the legal consequences of their own wrongdoing. Some of those legal protections make sense. A mere investor should not be criminally liable if the corporation engages in criminal activity. As the Trump case demonstrates, the actual corporate officers can be held criminally liable for those criminal acts, providing, of course that they haven’t shielded themselves behind an impenetrable wall of legal dodges, as Trump himself likes to do.
Historically, corporations were at first rare. It took an act of the legislature to form a corporation, and they were authorized only for very special purposes. Gradually things changed, and anyone could form a corporation for almost any purpose, thereby shielding themselves from the civil and criminal consequences of their acts, unless the “corporate veil” could be “pierced”, something I can testify is easier said than done, having been involved in some cases involving that very concept when I was practicing law.
It would seem self evident that in a country that has the death penalty for human beings, there should be a death penalty for corporations. The Trump Organization should be placed under the control of a court appointed special master and its holdings (if any) liquidated with every dollar realized in the process forfeited to the state of New York.
It is probably a fact that, as the genius often alleges, the New York case was brought against his corporation because he owned it, and the prosecutor wanted to get him. This was entirely appropriate as it is only right that malefactors such as Trump keep their heads down and not basically publicize their criminality. There was, in other words, a payoff for the prosecutor other than the trivial penalty that could be imposed on the corporation. It is likely the fact that one reason more corporations are not brought to court for their wrongdoing is the expense involved in doing so compared to the fairly trivial penalties that can be exacted against them in the event of convictions. Perhaps we would see more corporations brought to some measure of justice if the punishment fit the crime.
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