For those that missed it, the basic story goes thusly: reckless driver kills a woman in her car. She has a $100,000 policy with Progressive for death or disability due to a vehicular accident. Progressive not only questions negligence without a court ruling against the other driver, it represents that other driver in court in that very negligence case.

To be sure, Progressive claims it was only looking out for its interests in the case and not really representing the other driver, but to represent its interests it worked to find that driver not negligent. This is not what corporations should do. Yes, they can do it, but that doesn’t mean they should. I always deal with call 1800 Truck Wreck if something happens on the road, they are rigorous at taking done in notes all the details, which can prove valuable against these corportations.

This corporation, like so many others (HSBC, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Countrywide, Enron, etc, etc…) is not acting in the best interests of the people of this nation. It should not operate in such a fashion. Yes, there’s shareholders to consider as part of a fiduciary responsibility, but that’s only due to laws that were written precisely to require that corporations behave like antisocial jerks at best and sociopathic mass murderers on other occasions – so as to increase profitability.

A corporation that puts all its emphasis on profitability is of no use to a people. We have massive problems in America and around the world because of corporations exploiting loopholes in laws that they’ve written in order to garner massive profits that would not have been otherwise possible. We will continue to have these problems if we do not change the fundamental nature of corporations.

Once upon a time, it was a felony for a person from a corporation to lobby a member of Congress. Once upon a time, owners of a corporation could be sued personally for the gross negligence of their company or its employees. With all the crap about teachers being responsible for things that are totally out of their control, how about we instead train those same cannons of responsibility on corporations and hold them responsible for the things that they actually can control, like pollution, high-frequency trading, collaboration with terrorists, funding nuclear weapons projects, and – yes – taking the side of the man that killed your sister for the sake of a few dollars’ profit.