A corporation is not at all like what you’d normally think of as a business, where owners start their own enterprise, pay their workers and are held responsible for the actions and successes or failures of their own company.

A corporation is owned by members of the public - its shareholders. And because people own a corporation, our country has treated corporations as individuals, with all the First Amendment rights of expression and speech that any other individual in this country has.

Unless the corporation is a person or a city or a housing cooperative, it’s usually a ravenous profit-maximizing machine that stops at nothing to increase its share’s value. It’s answerable to its shareholders - and all they want to see is their share’s value go up.

Fair enough. Most businesses are profit-maximizing or else they don’t last very long.

The difference in corporations lies in the enormous resources a corporation gets from its public ownership and the lengths to which it will go to keep costs low and sales high.

Part of profit-maximizing involves finding the cheapest labor available - even if that labor is on the other side of the world and will take any job for only a few cents a day.

The educated anti-sweatshop crusader understands these wages are far more than anything else offered in a Third World country and that most of these workers are lucky to even have a job.

He or she also understands the problems come when a corporation’s profit-maximizing nature drives it to force abortions on workers, beat them into efficiency and have mandatory 14-hour work days.

I’ve met sweatshop workers who tell me that this is a reality. And I believe them.

But before you crucify corporations in general, it’s important to remember that corporations aren’t immoral - they’re amoral. They’re devoid of morality. They answer only to their creditors. And they have the potential to have a very positive impact on our society.

To put it another way, the corporate bagel chain on Grand River Avenue isn’t evil for forcing out the Bagel Fragel Deli - it’s just efficient. That’s what corporations do. They’re like financial life-forms, and they’re very hungry.

Former employees of Enron Corp. seemed surprised when the executives of the company effectively stole their money. As is common for corporate employees, they had much of their retirement savings invested in company stock.

The stock did very well because they and everyone on Wall Street knew that Enron was the largest power trader in the world, that it owned more gas pipelines than any other company, and that it was the largest financial supporter of President Bush’s political career.

Enron painted a picture of reliability to everyone with its life savings riding on its success and assured the company’s financial future could not look more optimistic.

What none of these people knew, - except the executives - was that Enron was earning billions of dollars less than it was paying, and it now seems clear that Enron’s executives went to great lengths to hide it from the entire country.

Enron Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Lay told his shareholders the company was in fine financial shape.

He and his executives continued to encourage their employees to keep their stock as they sold off what shares they had before the company’s crash came.

They made out with millions of their employees’ money.

Imagine arriving to work one morning to find a memo saying something like this: “Attention all employees: Whatever retirement funds you may have previously had, have been reduced to $4,500. Please clean out your desks by the end of the day.”

I’m happy to say that what they’ve done is probably illegal, and some of them may end up in jail for it.

While this won’t directly help anyone, I hope the country uses this opportunity to definitively say how unacceptable this kind of practice is.

I’ve heard of business ethics before, I haven’t the slightest idea what they are, but I’m sure this sort of thing can’t be allowed.

When Bagel Fragel went out of business, that was efficiency - I guess. But rich executives taking millions of dollars of their employees’ money is just predatory greed.

Andrew Banyai is a political science and pre-law senior. Reach him at banyaian@msu.edu.