by Stephen B.

Created on: July 15, 2008

Under the current federal law in the United States, a business has the same rights as any person as ruled by the Supreme Court in 1886 for the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company case. The ruling was based on the 14th Amendment and allows all rights of people to be extended to companies.

Right now any person who has broken the law is excluded from recieving any government money like welfare or financial aid. Basically both are like small government contracts that are handed out to people and when the time period is up the person must get it renewed much like a corporation has to compete for another contract when it is over.

The difference is that these companies are not excluded from government money after breaking the law. When a person breaks a law most times the law is state or local and they still get excluded from things like financial aid. When corporations break laws they are most often federal laws involving anti-trust and environmental issues.

Just like people though corporations can change so this bar should not be permanent, there should be period of exclusion where the company can reapply for reinstatement for elligebility in competing for contracts. Look at General Electric, they used to be one of the biggest polluters of fresh water supplys and now they lead the charge in green appliances and products.

Where the issue becomes more complex is that the people within the company that knowingly and willingly take part in illegal activities are usually the highest members of the company and not the low level wage workers. It is hard to punish the lower level people for something they had no part of.

The government is in a hard position because government contracts create lots of good jobs and often times get congressmen seats from smaller districts. Those congressmen might support these companies regardless of their illegal activities just to try and be re-eleted with elections every two years for members of the House of Representatives. Also, if we exclude corporations that have broken the law from competeing for government money than we will not be awarding many companies contracts since almost all of them have broken laws at one time or another.

Until the government changes the ruling of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company to giving corporations a different set of rules from people they need to stick to what every individual has before them. People that break the law are excluded from government money and as long as corporations have the same rights as people they should have the exclusion.

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