Seong Im Hong
September 24, 2012
Weekly Journal 3
This week, we ended our discussion on water pollution and then continued on to the topic of air pollution. By the end of the class, I was, as usual, smarter than I was coming in. I encountered some interesting ideas such as profits v. fines, which I researched a little on my own. (I did not research, however, what the dominant source of lead was from the 60s to the 80s because I did not want to ruin the surprise. I look forward to it.)
One idea that was particularly intriguing to me the last lecture was the struggle between profits and fines. To the laypeople, $11.2 million is probably more than we will see in our lifetime. Because of that, when I first heard that Exxon Mobile was fined that amount, I felt vaguely pleased and vindicated. Surely, I thought, that was a hefty change. I was mistaken. One strange and alarming thing about our society is that there is a gigantic gap between the corporations and the laypeople. Because of that, those who are unfamiliar with what I call “corporation-money-unit” feel themselves removed from corporations and their doings. Take Exxon-Mobil’s fines, for example. $11.2 million is impressive by the sheer number of zeroes attached to the 1s and the 2, but compared to Exxon’s $40 billion profit in 2006, the fine for pollution was tiny. Miniscule. Insignificant. (I tried to compare the proportion of the fines to the profit to my own expenses. According to my calculations, I would lose $0.16 from the $570 I get every month from scholarships. Not $16, but $0.16. Well, heck, I lose more in change falling out of my pocket each month than that.)
This made me wonder exactly what the judge was thinking. Did the zeroes attached to “corporation-money-unit” made him think $11.2 million harsh enough? Even the wealthy does not earn as much as corporations do. Or did Exxon-Mobile’s “freedom of expression” sway him? (And this is a whole another can of worms that is, though juicy, too sticky to deal with in a journal.)
This is why I think a policy of proportional fines (as in Switzerland and Finland) may be a good idea for this time in our society.
If we fined Exxon-Mobil (and any corporations or private citizens) an amount proportional to their income for a particular wrongdoing, I think that we won’t have a problem of repeat offenders such as Exxon-Mobil. Like Professor Alexandratos pointed out, Exxon-Mobil continued to illegally pollute the Arthur Kill because its profits were simply too big to not. What if the fine was $11.2 billion rather than $11.2 million? That means 28% of its profits, gone. (That percentage for me would mean a loss of $160, or my groceries exchanged for ramen noodles.) That means angry stockholders for executives to deal with. That means a warning shot.
However, I doubt that this will be adopted into our rightist politics anytime soon. In an era in which the wealthy are constantly told that they are under attack by the 47% of the American population who want to destroy their hard-earned success that they alone are responsible for, we will never even convince a congressperson to consider sponsoring the bill, let alone actually have their names appear anywhere near it. It probably would spell out an end to their political career after being labeled a socialist-communist-Muslim-atheist-foreigner. I read that the American Dream is a myth now, and that class differences are far too big for anyone talented and hardworking to actually climb up the social ladder as they did a hundred years ago. I read that the reason the poor vote Republican is because they genuinely believe that they will one day become part of the wealthy caste. Maybe that is so. Maybe the only way we can realize a policy of proportional fine is by having a vast majority of Americans realize that life isn’t as it was years ago. Money isn’t even vaguely worth the same for everyone, and that there really is a corporation-money-unit that is wildly bigger than a private-citizen-money-unit. I doubt many Americans will listen, though.
