FoodBanter.com - View Single Post - Whole Foods CEO: No corporation should ever be prosecuted for crimes

PeterL[_1_]

wrote:
> Published on Thursday, June 29, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
>
> Whole Foods CEO Mackey Endorses Cato Book - No More Corporate Crime
> Prosecutions
> by Russell Mokhiber
>
> Most people who shop at Whole Foods are liberal yuppies.
>
> They have enough money to spend $9 on a pound of cherries.
>
> They believe that shopping for groceries at Whole Foods instead of
> Safeway or Food Lion or Giant or Wal-Mart is the politically correct
> thing to do.
>
> They probably believe that the President and CEO of Whole Foods is a
> liberal like themselves.
>

Lots of unsubstantiated assumptions about who shop and why they shop at
WF.

The classic setting up of straw man.

> They of course would be wrong.
>
> John Mackey is instead a libertarian with right-wing tendencies.
>
> Mackey says that Milton Friedman is his hero.
>
> He's a devotee of Ayn Rand.
>
> He's opposed to national health insurance.
>
> He's a union buster.
>
> And he has recently endorsed a book published by the libertarian Cato
> Institute whose author concludes that no corporation should ever be
> prosecuted for crimes - no matter the corporation, no matter the
> crime.
>
> The book - Trapped: When Acting Ethically is Against the Law - is
> written by Georgetown University Professor John Hasnas.
>
> "John Hasnas shows that new laws and regulations too often force CEOs
> to choose between acting legally and acting ethically," Mackey says
> in a blurb on the back cover.
>
> Unlike most books on white collar crime, which tend to rehash bland
> academic theories or cut corporate crimes of years past and paste them
> with dogmatic rants, Trapped is actually a compelling read with an
> original idea sprinkled here and there.
>
> Hasnas' big idea is that the whole system of prosecuting corporate
> crime is undermining the liberal principles built into traditional
> criminal law and designed to protect individuals against the power of
> the state.
>
> The result is that corporations are forced to turn on their own
> employees to save their own corporate hide.
>
> Hasnas is a hard line libertarian. He worked for a time as lawyer for
> the politically aggressive, right-wing, and privately-held Koch
> Industries - one of the nation's largest oil companies.
>
> And instead of concluding that we should fix the criminal justice
> system so that corporations and federal prosecutors can no longer gang
> up on individual employees - he concludes in his book that
> corporations should never be criminally prosecuted - ever.
>
> No matter the crime.
>
> No matter the corporation.
>
> Hasnas wants to do away with corporate criminal liability.
>
> If there is a crime committed by someone within the corporation,
> criminally prosecute the individual, he says.
>
> But a corporation can't commit a crime and should not be criminally
> prosecuted.
>
> Ever.
>
> We wanted to know: does Whole Foods' CEO Mackey agree -
> corporations should never be criminally prosecuted?
>
> No matter the crime?
>
> No matter the corporation?
>
> Does the libertarian John Mackey support the big business funded Cato
> Institute and its right wing ideology with cash - or just with
> quotes?
>
> Whole Foods spokesperson Kate Lowery did not return numerous calls and
> e-mails seeking comment.
>
> ------
> Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate
> Crime Reporter.