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Changing the Corporation
The corporation is no more than an aggregation of capital managed for the proportional benefit of those who supply it. It is a system controlled by managers, administrators and clerks largely for the benefit of passive investors looking for a higher return than they can earn elsewhere.
It makes no sense that government should provide the very wealthy with a tool that poses a continuous threat to the public interest. Government's job is to protect the public interest, not sponsor those that destroy it.
Doing nothing
In Common Sense Thomas Paine from argued for a change of government, but what he said 232 years ago has application today.
The current situation has become intolerable. Governments now stand by while modern corporations destroy. Governments are responsible for creating the modern corporation. Citizens are responsible for creating government. We have furnished the means through which the destruction is conducted. In the words of Paine, "our calamities [are] heightened."
This problem is not getting fixed. Indeed it is getting worse. As each year passes, more communities are destroyed, human rights are violated and millions die. Corporate induced climate change now threatens all six and one-half billion inhabitants on this planet.
If nothing is done, the catastrophic effects predicted of global warming will become a reality. Pollution and human rights abuse will continue to move around the globe as governments in one jurisdiction pass laws and governments in others do not. Employees and our communities will continue to be threatened by globalization. New problems will take their place among those left unsolved as even newer technologies are developed and government finds it impossible to keep up.
The most serious part of this problem, however, is not the physical damage that is being done. It is the damage being done to the civic spirit of the people. They have begun to feel that it doesn't pay to be a good citizen. They have begun to lose hope.
Each year they see governments of their elected representatives acting to prefer corporate interests over their interests. They know this is wrong, but they see no way of correcting it.
Not understanding the true source of this problem results in the blaming of government and corporate personnel. When successive changes in personnel do not solve the problem, despair sets in and people begin to withdraw their support for government and their involvement in politics. They reason that government is ineffective and their involvement will have no effect. They conclude they should not waste their time. Their withdrawal increases the power of the modern corporation to set the agenda. As a result, government loses its focus on solving human problems. This makes it more irrelevant to the average citizen and corporate abuse of the public interest becomes even harder to eliminate.
Each year more give up on government ever solving the problems caused by corporations. They come to believe that big companies will always control government. They no longer worry about what kind of world they will leave to their children and future generations. They believe instead their lot in life is simply to find a way to make a living in this madness.
As they give up on government, they give up any hope of influencing the world we live in and will leave for the generations to come. Corporations then fill the vacuum. Their political power gets stronger. This, in turn, makes it harder for government to pass new laws protecting the commons from corporate abuse. It is a vicious cycle. Abuse begets loss of hope begets more corporate political influence begets more abuse.
Abuse of the commons by the modern corporation will not go away if it is simply ignored. If nothing is done, humanity's suffering at the hands of the modern corporation will continue to multiply. Each generation will suffer more than the one that precedes it. The question is what to do.
Treating the symptoms
Humanity's future is and always has been dependent on it recognizing and solving the world's problems as they arise. The inability of government to rein in the damage caused by modern corporations is such a problem.
Whenever great change is needed, there are always those who will argue that it is not or that change is impossible. Those that argue change is impossible are the most disturbing. They have given up hope thereby consigning humanity to a future where corporations make the rules and people obey them. This is a form of corporate slavery that no human being should suffer or accept.
Those that will argue change is not needed will almost always come from the classes which are benefiting most under the current system. Their fear of losing the benefits they have earned, won or inherited keep them from taking the next step forward.
They will suggest that the community's afflictions are not that bad and point out that corporations have done much to benefit the community in the past. In making this argument, they give no credit to mankind's ingenuity. They forget that corporations are not the reason for progress—people are. Companies only act through people. Every new piece of corporate invented technology was really invented by a human being or group of them working together.
The company was just the employer. It provided the capital. Essentially, they argue that without the aggregation of capital there would be no progress. In this respect they are probably right. It is desirable for society to have a means to put capital together. Capital funds research and development of new technologies.
However, a corporation with no responsibility to the public interest is not the only possible means for capital to come together. There are other ways to fund the development of new ideas. Capital should be able to come together in ways that are less destructive.
Sometimes those who argue that change is not needed will claim that the market will sort it all out. Those companies that are bad citizens will lose customers and go out of business. The problem with this argument is all the harm that is caused before they do go out of business.
General Motors is a good recent example. Here was a company that dragged its feet every step of the way. Only when the US government saved them from oblivion did they change their mind about designing more fuel efficient cars. In the meantime, billions of tons of carbon dioxide from vehicles they manufactured were emitted into our atmosphere that need not have been.
The idea that the market will demand corporate citizenship is a myth. All we have to do is look around us at the dozens of companies that are destroying the commons to see that the market is not delivering on this idea.
Fundamentally, there are only two answers to the problem of intentional corporate abuse of the commons. Either governments must be strengthened to give them more power to rein in corporate abuse of the commons or the corporation's inclination (and, in certain cases, compulsion) to wantonly harm the public interest must be eliminated.
Strengthening governments
The conventional wisdom is to answer that weak government is the problem. This conclusion is supported by the corporate sector which is forever pointing the finger at government for being the ineffective and incompetent. In doing this, business seems to lose sight of the fact the fact that they have controlled government for more than a generation.
One must wonder if the current financial crisis will change the way business looks at government. The world's financial experts have managed to ruin their businesses losing more than two trillion dollars of other people's money. Who have they called upon to ride to their rescue? Government.
The obvious response to the charge that government is the problem (though not one usually put forth by business) is to try to strengthen government so that when corporate abuse arises, the government can quickly contain it. This has already been tried thousands of times. For the most part, it hasn't worked.
Volumes and volumes of ineffective business regulation are testimony to the fact that making government tougher on business does not work. Since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1961 tens of thousands of environmental laws and regulations have been enacted around the world. These laws undoubtedly have made the world a better place to live today than it would have been otherwise, but is the Earth's environment in better shape today than it was then? Definitely not.
With the rise of the union movement in the US and elsewhere, working conditions in big companies improved. Child labor and working hours were reduced. Workplace safety improved. Yet, these problems were not eliminated. Most of them just moved from one jurisdiction where they would no longer be tolerated to another one where they would. Companies did not stop taking advantage of workers. They simply moved their operations where the lack of regulation allowed them to continue violating the human rights and dignity of those they employed.
I once lived in Manchester, New Hampshire, home of what was once the biggest textile manufacturing complex (also the biggest sweatshop) in the world. When these facilities unionized in the early 20th century, what did the modern companies that owned them do? They moved to the South where the union movement was not as strong and they could continue to pay low wages and impose lousy working conditions. Then, when the union movement caught on there, they moved their operations overseas to Southeast Asia, China and elsewhere. This saga continues today.
When tobacco was found to cause cancer, new regulations were passed in America and the developed world limiting where and how these products could be advertised. Did this halt the steady growth of people dieing every year from tobacco related illnesses? No, the industry simply found other ways to make their products attractive to undiscerning consumers and other markets (specifically China and countries in the third world) in which to advertise them.
The problem of corporate abuse of the public interest cannot be solved by imposing more laws and regulations that try to restrain the corporation one abuse one jurisdiction at a time. The best that can be said about this strategy is that it moves the abuse around from one jurisdiction to another. It doesn't solve the problem; it just moves it elsewhere, to places where local governments are willing to accept it for a while.
Another shortcoming of this strategy is that it actually makes some corporate abuse of the commons legal. That which before was wrong but not illegal becomes legitimatized. Environmental laws don't eliminate pollution. They permit amounts of it up to a level which the government determines for a while to be safe.
Confronting corporate abuse in this manner is like treating the symptoms of a disease. It may reduce the adverse effect of the symptoms, but because the underlying cause has not been dealt with, the problem keeps coming back. Sometimes it comes back in a strain that is even more difficult to cure.
Personhood
Seeing that eliminating corporate abuse of the public interest one abuse one jurisdiction at a time will not work, some have suggested the solution lies in strengthening government by eliminating the constitutional rights of corporations. As Benjamin Franklin did more than 200 years ago, they correctly recognize that the liberal democracy is ill equipped to protect the public interest when the rich and powerful are bent on harming it.
In order to reduce the exposure of the commons to this problem they would change the US Constitution so that corporations no longer be entitled to the protections it affords citizens (e.g. the right to free speech, due process, equal protection and to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures). Corporations would remain dedicated to the pursuit of self-interest, but government would be under no restriction in making or prosecuting new laws against them.
It's easy to see why this idea is appealing to some. It takes a "strict construction" approach to the Constitution. "Corporations are not even mentioned in the Constitution. How then can they have rights under it?" Also, "corporations are not people. Why are they afforded the protections provided for people in the Constitution?"
Proponents of the "eliminate corporate personhood" idea believe fundamentally that the key to eliminating corporate abuse is to turn off corporation's right to free speech. They presume that this will eliminate corporations' ability manipulate government through the use of that right. This, in turn, will allow government to more stringently regulate business and, through this rather indirect route, corporate behavior will be improved.
Is this realistic? Money always seems to find its way into politics. If corporations remain dedicated by law to the pursuit of profit, will they not still find ways to bend government to their own purposes? Shouldn't we first try changing the purposes before we start messing with the Constitution?
Corporate constitutional rights also encompass much more than just freedom of speech. When corporate personhood is eliminated does this mean corporations will no longer be entitled to a fair trial? Does it mean legislators will be able to pass laws in favor of one company and against its competitors? Does it mean an individual loses her property rights once she puts her property into the hands of her wholly-owned corporation? Have the proponents of this idea considered the effects of creating two judicial systems: one for corporations that would have no constitutional rights and one for individuals who do? Under which rules would corporate directors and officers be prosecuted? Under existing rules where, as individuals, they are entitled to their constitutional rights or under new rules where, as personnel of (and somehow tainted by) the corporation they serve, no constitutional rights would be recognized?
Finally, this idea also ignores that abuse of the commons by the modern corporation is not exclusively an American problem. It occurs all over the world and is caused by hundreds of companies formed and operating outside the U.S. Judicial decisions by US courts giving companies the rights of citizens under the US Constitution cannot be the source of the problem when companies operating outside the US damage the commons just as much.
Taking away the constitutional rights of corporations is not the answer. There is a conflict between the way our government is supposed to work and the goal of the modern corporation. The way to remedy this conflict is not to make it acceptable for government to treat corporations unfairly.
Changing the corporation
We shouldn't need to change government to allow it to be able to govern its own creation (corporations). Instead, we should modify the corporation into something that is more capable of being governed.
The corporation is an artificial entity created by the corporate law. This law gives the corporation its purpose and dictates in broad terms how it is to be achieved. These terms were changed in the last half of the 19th century to eliminate provisions designed to protect the public interest. That has proven to be a mistake. Doesn't it make more sense to admit that mistake and put respect for the commons back in the corporate law and back in corporations?
Comments
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50 Comments so far
Show AllThomas M
I didn't think that the corporation had "personhood" under the constitution. Nor has it been decided by Congress or the Supreme Court that it has equal rights under the law as a flesh and blood person. You know, the 1895 railroad case and the court clerk's notes taken and built upon for the last hundred or so years to presume that corporations have the same rights as persons. Corporations had been very restricted before 1900. Why not now??
Any comments would be appreciated.
TM from Texas? If so, welcome back :-)
And if the reference to corporate personhood was snuck into the wording of a Supreme Court decision, then in effect the Supreme Court did decide it, unfortunately. That's why bills passed by Congress are so mind-numbingly full of references to and amendments of definitions...the wording needs to be exact. Whatever is written into a law or decision becomes law.
I believe the wording was snuck into the header which technically sets no legal precedent in itself. The problem is, subsequent courts cited the header in the body of rulings, thus making it law.
"Doesn't it make more sense to admit that mistake and put respect for the commons back in the corporate law and back in corporations? "
Then we're back to the problem he pointed out in previous sections...that would only apply to corporations in the U.S.
Wow! I will have to keep an eye out for the book... was just reading another article here on CD about the plastics pollution in the pacific and thinking about a comment on the thread someone made that in this time of 'jobless recovery', shouldn't we be putting people to work dealing with such things as all that potentially toxic waste in the ocean... Seriously, of all the unemployed and underemployed people I personally know (I'm one myself), I'm sure that given some new industries/work programs... ecologically intelligent industries focused on retooling and reskilling for bioremediation would have great appeal. I hate to think of all the young people languishing in the limbo of our economic wasteland, their passions and talents eager for the 'green jobs' and 'hope' and 'change' promised..... I see them now and then on street corners working to muster up the enthusiasm to get people to sign up to fund greenpeace projects or attempting to outfit the poor of my city with bikes as they struggle to pool their resources and resilience and adapt to a world very unlike their parents adapted to at their age, but i also see more and more of them either unemployed or hanging onto jobs where they serve lattes to their fellow working-class-heroes downtown or mind-numbing retail jobs scrimping together enough to attend a community college course designed for the world we lived in a decade ago that likely will leave them in the same spot when they graduate... the concept of RIGHT LIVELIHOOD is one that has for way too long been run roughshod over by the pervasive profit-motive focused only on monetary accumulation. even nonprofits have to devote enormous time, energy and budget on fundraising to do work that is sorely needed... to UNdo the damage done by mindless consumption and corporate profiteering, waste and injustice.... i wonder how many millions the world over are as frustrated/paralyzed by the paradox of a stubbornly stuck employment paradigm of waste and mass production of questionable value as the ever-growing lines of job-seekers or unemployment-collectors in my city are...while the karmic baggage of ignorant junk accumulation, piracy and exploitation keep piling up to fowl not just land and sea but our airwaves and ultimately, our hearts and minds? There needs to be a initiative on the part of government to pay attention to the commons and not trust the 'free market' to somehow magically, organically correct the ills it itself has created. Hopefully the conciliatory suffering of fools at town hall meetings is finally coming to an end with a wakeup call that there are plenty of very large fish to fry when it comes to addressing corporate as well as government responsibility in cleaning up the economic quagmire. Dealing with the aftermath of the concerted dismantling of the commons (on steroids during the Reagan, Clinton and Bush administrations) to accommodate the feeding frenzy of the privatizing empire-building military/industrial/media complex is THE challenge of our time and our species. Swords into ploughshares= wasteful idiocy into localized sanity/healing. Work that is REAL is what we need. And corporations of, by and FOR the PEOPLE. I'm curious to find out more about the author's definition of 'the commons' and how to transition out of such an openly hostile-to-the-commons period as we've been through.
-- Taking away the constitutional rights of corporations is not the answer. --
Do the opposite!
If corporations have the rights of persons, they surely have the right to the 13th amendment.
Corporations have the right not to be slaves.
Corporations have the right not to be owned by persons.
Free the corporations!
Corporations are not owned by persons, other corporations, or any real or fictitious entity. Shareholders merely own "an option on the profits". The idea of a corporation is that it is not owned, that there is no entity responsible for its behavior and legally liable for the consequences.
A constitutional amendment doesn't really "change" the Constitution, It merely restores us to the original intent of the people who wrote it--check concentration of power.
You don't have to deny due process, etc. A simple statement that freedom of speech is limited to truthful commercial speech ought to do it. A panacea? No. A practical start? Absolutely.
And limiting the commerce clause could restrict the power of gov't to centralize economic power and control which they have done over and over again using the commerce clause to override states' attempts to increase corporate accountability. (See arguments for Federal control of the Drug War)
Increasing any federal gov't power is contra-constitutional as the hope of most of the founders was a gov't that did not concentrate power. What they couldn't see was that the Industrial Revolution would enable vast concentrations of economic power
Re cassandra August 20th, 2009 11:34 am
Well-reasoned and well-stated.
Thom Hartmann's book, "Unequal Protection," tells how corporations got the rights of natural persons under the law. It's not a pretty story.
Changing the Corporation
You want to change the USA version of a corporation, you'll have to destroy it first, destroy it utterly, then start over from ground level.
I believe that without a doubt.
I want to run an idea by all of you and see what you think. I do not know if you saw the youtube videos by a talented musician whose guitar was broken by United Airlines. Apparently, United refused to pay the cost for repairing his guitar. So, this young man made a video. It got so many views (more than 5 million) that it embarrassed United, and the company had no choice but to reimburse the man for the cost of repairing his guitar. Dave Barron just released his second video. It has United in a corner. So here is my idea:
Obviously there are many talented and well-educated people who post on CD. Are any of you musicians who could write songs and post them on youtube about these corporations that are robbing the public? Since our politicians are bought and controlled by corporations, maybe this is one way we can strike back. Your thoughts??
I'm often asked why I supported Ralph Nader for the Presidency and not Obama.
I respond that they decided that a few angry Muslims living in a cave on the other side of the world were the greatest threat to the country.
I decided that the corporations were.
Well said. But Mr. Hinkley has a problem with that enemies or friends thing. He's a lawyer. Like our President Obama, he wants to analyze things from several angles until he can "advise" on the most prudent course of action. He cannot put the word "corporation" next to the word "evil" and see a relationship. He would see an alligator eating a tourist in florida and defend the alligator if said reptile was owned by a large corporation. Evil, wrong, immoral, etc. are words that simply don't have meaning in is lawyer lexicon of sophistic terms. I gave him the benefit of the doubt the first time. But now I see he's a very smart corporate shill put out there to defend corporate criminal hood otherwise known as personhood.
"Not understanding the true source of this problem results in the blaming of government and corporate personnel."
Hinkley gets closer to the real issue. Instead of blaming the symptom of greed, as most critics of corporations do, Hinkley suggests there is a deeper fundamental flaw within corporations, and yes, there is.
Ever-increasing growth, as measured by compounding interest concepts, is an inherent flaw embedded in the corporate and debt structure. Every corporation, from prisons to drugs, has expectations of ever-increasing growth. When growth limits are approached, management will be stressed to continue growth, one way or another, as demanded by shareholders expectations of returns.
http://theformofmoney.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2006/9/6/2302146.html
Funny that all the alternatives suggested by the intellectual elite involve the state robbing us to fund the whim of the politically-connected.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
I suggest that people take a close look at the idea known as Participatory Economics, also known as Parecon or Particiety. It has some significant differences from doctrinal socialism. For example, it does not maintain the functional separation of workers from management that has caused some worker owned factories in socialist or socialist influenced regimes to recapitulate into an elite class (constantly developing new skills and influence) vs. expendable workers (trapped at one skill level doing repetitive work with no real input or influence over how the factory operates).
One way in which it does this is to train all workers to do all the jobs in the factory--both assembly line and managerial--with a combination of formal and on the job training. This includes periodic rotation of workers from the factory floor to the offices so that no worker is trapped forever in one repetitive powerless position with no opportunity to gain new skills or to influence operations. It bases pay not on class or formal education per se, but on the degree of difficulty of the work, the number of hours worked, the inherent physical and/or mental dangers associated with the type of work, etc.
I do not agree with its dismissive attitude toward private ownership of factories and many kinds of property, however, I do believe that private ownership could be maintained in most instances under such a system were American corporations stripped of their arbitrarily and nonsensically acquired "equal protection rights" where they are (since the early 1880s) viewed as "artificial persons" equivalent to flesh and blood persons under law. This misapplication of the 14th Amendment removed local town council oversight--with periodic reviews--of the business operating licenses of corporations. Town councils once had the right in this country to determine if corporations were acting in the best interests of the community and if they did not they lost their business licenses to operate in that community.
American corporations have used their falsified power as "artificial persons" above and beyond any meaningful or timely local, State, national or international oversight by the various citizens in whose communities they operate in order to morph into multinational monsters who use former corporate managerial types to secretly adjudicate their labor and environmental predation in the secret tribunals of the World Trade Organization--accountable to no nation or its citizens and, in fact, designed specifically to trump State or national sovereignty on a whole host of laws that impact our workers and our environment.
A combination of Participatory Economics and a four-tiered system of local, State, national and international citizen oversight (including direct online voting referendums regarding specific corporate operations that are anti-community, anti-labor, and anti-environment as well as on periodic operating license renewals) would allow for a citizen/community-centered workplace and economy that is not based solely on the ruthless maximization of profit for its own sake. This would create a world where corporations exist to serve citizens and citizens do not exist to serve, starve, die or be killed by corporations.
Many Marxian thinkers believe that Marx's massive critique of Capitalism, on the whole, still stands, e.g. David Harvey. Marx's "solutions" are a separate issue. And many of those Marxian thinkers would argue that Marx's solutions were never implemented. Regardless, we know a lot more about what can go wrong now. Micheal Albert (Parecon) is trying to promote dialog with other Leftists, to solve the problems of the past. I think this is very promising.
Marxian thinkers were warning of a financial "train wreck" in the first couple of years of the Bush administration - if not earlier. If we have not fully analyzed and understood the problems we face, then we will not be able to create a real "solution". I know that people would like to "move on", unfortunately, Marx's analysis of Capitalism is still relevant.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Marx's analysis of late 19th and early 20th century capitalism is still relevant in some fundamental respects. But contemporary global high technology integration of capitalistic information systems, instantaneous satellite transactions of capital, off-shored corporate HQs and ownership, multiple illegal or falsified corporate identities unrestricted to any national border, etc., complicate the problem of national and international reform of capitalism, let alone his form of revolution. Contemporary capitalism has mutated to the point of affecting only the merest pretense of nationalistic patriotism in the U.S. and many other nations. Any substantive critique of capitalism as it now exists has to take these things and many others into consideration. To struggle against Halliburton you must take your movement to Dubai, not just Houston.
That said, the solutions Marx proposed for the capitalism of his period were rich in labels and conclusions but poor in terms of step-by-step instructions. They were never implemented because he never laid out logically coherent plans for their implementation. He did not outline any contingency plans to kick in if his Revolution got bogged down the police State phase. His concept of a working relationship between management and labor was still a dichotomy that would and did inevitably recapitulate into distinct class separation--despite his references to workers' and other various types of governing committees.
Cicero was an idiot corporate hack and that statement by him reveals the shallowness of his wisdom.
PE, on the other hand, sounds marginally OK--like the application of (really complicated and theoretical) common sense to the workplace, without the false assumptions caused by a somato-emotional compulsion to dominate and destroy. But the workplace, like every place dominated by humans, generally shows very little common sense and lots of compulsion to dominate and destroy.
So how do you expect to make it work?
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Cicero was a former consul and attorney in the Roman Republic in the years immediately before and during its devolution into the dictatorship of the Caesars. He was one of the only known Roman statesmen who publicly spoke truth to power during that pivotal transition period--even arguing cases before Julius Caesar (where Caesar was acting as magistrate) as a lawyer opposing Julius Caesar's previous legal decisions. Cicero's legal arguments, speeches and numerous incisive quotations are still studied for their excellence in terms of both legal and democratic thought and the perfection of their Latin grammar.
Consider the inverse of his quotation "Freedom is participation in power": Slavery is exclusion from power. Both statements are true as absolutes and matters of degree. One is free to the degree that one participates in the power system(s) that make decisions affecting one's own life. The more participation in power you have within the system(s) that affect your life, the more free you are from coercion, manipulation, exploitation, etc., because you have more personal power and information to affect change to mitigate or avoid adverse conditions. Conversely, one is more deeply enslaved to the degree that one is excluded from the apparatus of power that makes decisions that affect one's own life. The more excluded one is from any access to power within the system(s) that affect your life, the more subject you are to coercion, manipulation, exploitation, etc., because you have less personal power and information to affect change to mitigate or avoid adverse conditions.
Cicero appears to confound you perhaps because he is talking about real civic participation in real power that yields measurable degrees of personal liberty under the rule of law as opposed to the illusory "freedom" that most contemporary Americans (who have no sense of civic duty or civic engagement) believe they have even though almost every aspect of their lives is now pre-scripted, pre-limited, prepackaged and pre-sold in quality and quantity by corporations, politicians and institutions whose names the vast majority of them do not know and do not want to know.
If you believe you are truly as free as any member of our ruling upper-class in almost any respect you care to describe, then you are either a member of that upper class with full and direct lines of access to any Congressperson or presidential candidate who will take your campaign donations (and who will eventually profit from your corporation as a future lobbyist) or you are a fool. Bush and Cheney are the freest of the free: Scott free after 8 years of nearly every major war crime in the book. They still participate in the REAL power structure even out of official power.
These conditions are why the vast majority of contemporary Americans are so incredibly powerless despite their petty illusions to the contrary. They have forgotten that a Democratic Republic is a participatory form of limited self-government that was originated to put an end to inherited rule by aristocrats. They have opted out of civic engagement and allowed corporate oligarchs to rule by default. Their supreme powerlessness and frustration is directly reflected by the fact that Americans are the population most heavily medicated for mental health disorders--especially depression--of any developed nation in the world.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow" is easier said than accomplished without blood, sweat, tears, organization, participation and worn shoe leather in the REAL world.
Thanks for that!
Freedom is much deeper than the quote implies. I believe it is most importantly a mind-body state of integration that removes internal conflict and allows wholehearted and often almost magically-effective action. It is very rare; very few people have done the necessary work on themselves to attain it as a state with any regularity. With extraordinarily rare exceptions, we do not simply decide to be free any more than a person simply decides to run a marathon in 2 hours. We have to train for it. Note that this is not the apparent certainty of fundamentalists, which merely represses conflict into the far, deep unconscious. Jim Bakker is an example of one way that works out.
This doesn't mean this is the only way to view freedom; other ways are legitimate including Cicero's. It just reveals the relative shallowness of his viewpoint: considering power politics, aka Realpolitik, and not the psychology or humanity (especially ecologically-embedded humanity) behind it. Likewise, to say that “slavery is exclusion from power” leaves out the vast, overwhelming majority of what slavery is and dramatically oversimplifies it—maybe not to the writer but certainly to the unimaginative or literal-minded reader at least. While I wouldn’t say I disagree with your statements about being free from coercion, etc., I’d say they are such a small part of what freedom is, and mischaracterize the reality of power, that they lead us far away from what we should be paying attention to and how we should be living. The writer’s name suggests, as much as the argument (especially the final shot about the “REAL world” ) that metal might respond with scorn about my supposed naiveté, but his/her’s is an engineer’s viewpoint vs. a poet’s or a sage’s. It is also, perhaps, the view of someone who has not held such “power” and does not realize, as many people do who get it, that it is far more limited and illusory than it appears. Psychological realities are in fact more real than most beliefs people who live in the “REAL world” have.
The phrase "participation in power" contains all sorts of assumptions—about how important power is and the society in which one lives—or doesn’t. One might attain complete freedom by absolutely refusing to participate in power structures, as a condemned prisoner might. Free? Not free? Why not both? We’d need to examine those assumptions in far more depth to really understand the limitations of the “REAL world” point of view.
One can “participate in power” without really having much of it; one can “participate in power” without being anything remotely resembling free. How free was/is Karl Rove? George W. Bush? Barack Obama? How free was Hitler, who said “All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself”? He should know.
Cicero doesn’t “confound” me at all, and I suffer no illusions about the extent to which we are controlled, mostly through psychological means—which is how the less brutal version of Fascism Lite we live under functions. It is exactly why I put so much importance on personal and systemic psychological work as well as personal and political action, and why I think Cicero’s, and the “engineer’s” view of freedom and power is so limited. My life now is one of becoming more free in exactly that sense—removing myself from the coercively false choices presented in corporatism’s sleight-of-hand distractions from their Realpolitiking. I have always lived that way, and am well-along, and as such things tend to do it has taught me that I still have far to go. It has also taught me that participation in power without a philosophical-spiritual-psycho-physical-emotional basis is running on a treadmill without an off button in a veal calf stall.
Most history has been written by members of the aristocracy and reflects their bias. Since those are also our biases it's very hard for us to recognize them as biases rather than simply facts. Cicero was one of the aristocracy (not too many slaves and peasants wrote books) and his "truth-speaking" must be taken in context: he was criticizing one faction of the aristocracy in defense of another faction of the aristocracy. Try The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome by Michael Parenti for a different view.
How about engaging in the idea of decentralization and allowing small businesses more leeway? Over the years, too many laws favored the big corporations at the expense of persecuting the small companies.Take Big Auto for example. How many car companies are local and regional instead of "too big to fail" national? And none of them are really unique. I agree that we need to reform the corporations but we also need to not only reform Congress but also stop allowing government and Corporate America to stifle real innovation and creativity from non-monied people. It's a total shame and an utter embarrassment that this country has to import all new technological innovations and inventions from other countries while ours rots as a laughing stock nation.
Robert C. Hinkley is on his way, and he is to be congratulated - coming from the corporate world, but he has not arrived yet. For those who have really studied the American corporation, he would helped to look at the work of Richard Grossman.
OTOH, talking about the problems of corporate power, we not should fool ourselves, we are really talking about Capitalism. And, the best critic of Capitalism is Karl Marx - who Hinkley clearly has not read.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
While Marx provided the sharpest critique of 19th century and early 20th century capitalism, unfortunately the "solutions" he came up with were too theoretical to work in the real world except temporarily and only on very small agricultural scales like that of the Israeli Kibbutz. No large scale attempt at communism has ever successfully achieved the "withering away of the State" and its gradual replacement with the worker owned and operated industrial paradise. The Soviet Union and communist China only intensified their police States and slap-dash command economies until the Soviet Union collapsed and China's leaders chose to convert into a toxic hybrid of totalitarianism and crony capitalism. Cuba, in its way, after it lost Soviet economic support, is perhaps the most valiant attempt, but Cuba depends on foreign tourism and remittances and is technologically stagnant. Although it is worth saying that Cuba's system has wonderfully preserved many of its rainforest and coral reef habitats and Cubans have learned much about agricultural self-sufficiency with healthy non-processed food. They provide doctors and medical training for many poor nations and have a more efficient and cost effective health care system for most common types of injuries and illnesses than we do in the U.S. Still most Cubans live in what most Americans would consider grinding poverty--although we are being inexorably dragged down to their socio-economic level by our ruthless oligarchs as we are converted into a nation of post-industrial serfs and unemployed and/or homeless "surplus population."
Personally, I've felt since the late 1980s that both American political Parties are obsolete with respect to solving the real world problems of America, let alone those of the rest of the world. I also believe that the old Right/Left, communist/capitalist view of economics and politics has been obsolete since the Polish Solidarity Movement was effectively castrated by the IMF/World Bank regime. So far as I've been able to discern (and it has been more difficult to engage communists in this discussion or to find communist books that attempt to deal with these issues), neither capitalism nor communism honestly approach or have updated their basic dogmas to intelligently address the global issues of human over-population and human degradation of the global biosphere. I've seen no nuts and bolts ideas from either end of the old paradigm spectrum that intelligently elaborate a system for equitably redistributing resources, medicine, education, family planning and gainful employment opportunities around the world in what is now a thoroughly predatory Globalized Plutocracy. I have heard no capitalist or socialist or would-be communist nation's leaders posit a set of internationally agreed-to BASELINES (minimum acceptable criterion) for shelter, food, clothing, medicine and education as a decent humane economic guarantee to all the world's citizens. All religious, academic, media and intelligentsia circles have failed to effectively address these issues.
Because so much damage has been done for so long, and overly scattered efforts for positive change have been so drowned in the adverse propaganda, political machinations and self-interested conceit of the super rich, whatever comes now in the next few decades will be inevitably more traumatic and radical the longer intelligent systemic change is avoided.
Americans, including wealthier "fall mountains, just don't fall on me and my dinner circle" progressives lack a realistic, organized and effective concept of solidarity on any scale wider than their localities and that is insufficient to the scale of the looming national and global crisis. If the falling mountains don't throw these insular progressives' lives into upheaval (as they most certainly will the people in less affluent urban population concentrations), the various continual aftershocks will.
How can the left/right economic view be obsolete? Either there's private control of capital or it's publicly owned/worker controlled.
The policies that the left has been endorsing forever are still the nuts and bolts answers- nationalization of industry, worker control, single land tax(if not nationalization), declaration of human rights etc.
As we can see with the present Health Care situation that the Government is a branch of Corporate interests - It's too late to think there is a legal way to control them.
The Corporations own the system.
I think we have to be very clear about just what the Corporation is -
The Corporation can Never Ever do the 'right' thing - (It can only do the most Profitable thing). In fact ironically it is against the law for it to do otherwise. (The share holders could sue the management of the Corporation if they tried to do anything other than make as much profit as possible).
The Corporation has no 'morality' - It is a Profit machine - It will happily destroy the planet and then sell a repair kit or just bio-domes to live in (If you can afford them).
There is Nothing that the Corporation will not do to try and make money - It will do anything to make money. Anything.
There is zero point in negotiating with it or trying to 'change it' back to something else.
I can see only two solutions -
1. The Corporation's actions are defined by its shareholders - you could target them and try to get them to change the corporation. But I suspect that this is a non starter as there are Corporation that own Corporations. . .
2. Create a separate system. Basically pay your dues to the present system (or you'll make yourself an instant target) but deal as much as possible with the separate 'off the grid system' - perhaps local networks or some Parecon like idea. Of course as soon as it becomes successful Corporate interests will try to co-opt it or crush it. It would have to be done with a very clear understanding of its anti corporate root. Of course in the end there will be a conflict of interests.
I suspect that this idea would be seen as a threat surprisingly sooner than you would think. . .
"The most serious part of this problem, however, is not the physical damage that is being done. It is the damage being done to the civic spirit of the people."
This is true because, among other reasons, the civic spirit of the people is the spearhead of our rules and regulations to limit the plunder. This author indicates the key ingredient missing in the formula for human happiness: mass civic responsibility.
It's needed everywhere but is particularly important in the USA because US elites feverishly pursue world dominance. They seek to impose consumption slavery on all of humanity, an attempt to expand their spectacular "success" in the USA.
This author focuses on the corporation, but if the elites don't have the corporate construct, they will abuse whatever takes its place. Say we create a real social democracy with strong limits on privatization. These elites will instead feverishy exploit state power for personal gain. So we prefer distributed power, strong local communities.
So if you want to get serious about long term solutions, you have to home in on the root of the problem - it's not in the structures we create, it's in the spirit driving what we create. Reject the elites' constructs by default. Cultivate a spirit of universal equity/justice and the right structures will follow.
It used to be joked that the robots will eventually take over the world. Well, it's already been long underway. The robots don't look like the mechanical devices conjured up in fiction (although those are already being developed to control us, too.) No, they have developed in a far more sophisticated manner and possess much more political/economic/psychologial power. They are called corporations.
The robots that run these corporations look deceptively like human beings. But, ala the explanations of the movie, The Corporation, and Thom Hartmann, they are possessed with a sociopathic drive to maximimize profits (especially short-term) at all costs. It's not that they wish to hurt anybody. Its simply not something that concerns them.
Lots of people don't believe it's happening because they can't look out their windows and actually see giant robots crushing the homes of the poor and middle class, stomping down trees, punching away mountains, and pissing in the rivers and oceans. No, it's done more gradually and (only relatively) more subtly.
Lots of people are mad but can't figure out what the hell is going on, what the hell is hitting them. The robots that control most of the mass media use lies of commission and omission to hoodwink and banboozle them.
Many are driven to hopeless apathy. Others search around for leaders who'll explain the world in a simple way( I realize I too, am oversimplifying for effect; the difference that this is essetially true) that tells them who their enemies are. These sociopathic media leaders like Limbaugh and Beck turn reality upside down so that the fascistic nature of their robotic associates and paymasters is projected instead onto all who would threaten, however bravely or meekly, any of their wealth or power. Some of these media robots and some politician-robots go so far as to demonize opponents (I am demonizing also, but in an essentially truthful way) of the Corporation Robot to the point of suggesting such opponents may not deserve to live.
This is a very dangerous situation, and as Rachel Maddow would say, needs to be widely reported as such.
Sincerious,
I love your analogy of corporations to robots.
Some commentators have likened the corporation to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a monster created by human beings that went wrong. Joel Bakan at the University of British Columbia in his book and film by the same name, The Corporation, has charged that the corporation is a psychopath.
I prefer to think of the corporation as a computer with bad programming; much like the HAL 9000 in the book 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. If you remember, the HAL 9000 was the onboard computer in the spaceship that was sent on a mission to Jupiter. The astronauts referred to it and communicated with it by calling it HAL.
HAL was supposed to assist the astronauts in achieving their mission. It was designed to run everything on the spacecraft. There was only one problem. Pretty soon it became clear that HAL was using its considerable abilities to kill them.
Come to find out, there was a problem with HAL’s programming. Something in its circuitry dictated that its survival took precedence over the lives of the astronauts.
So it is with the modern corporation. Like HAL, they were invented to serve mankind. Like HAL, their programming (the corporate law) was determined by human beings. Like HAL, the survival instinct hot wired into their programming has the potential to cause the destruction of those they are supposed to serve.
Although there was some question as to whether or not HAL had real emotions, corporations definitely do not. They are not greedy nor are they capable of being shamed. A corporation is nothing more than a piece of paper that says that its stockholders and corporate personnel are acting together in furtherance of a business.
One other difference between HAL and the modern corporation is that corporations have no ability to act all by themselves. HAL turned things on and off and made sure the ship ran smoothly. It really didn’t need human beings. Corporations on the other hand, only act through their people--directors, officers and other personnel. They have no ability to act on their own.
Corporations don’t abuse the commons, their people do. The key to eliminating the flaw in the corporation’s design is to understand how it causes directors, managers and employees to intentionally and continually abuse the commons after they become aware of the harm the company is causing. Armed with that understanding, we then must do something that causes these people to stop the harm rather than perpetuate it.
Emphasis here is placed on the words intentionally and continually. Accidents happen. People who manage and work for big companies are sometimes negligent. Their negligence sometimes results in tremendous harm to the commons. Union Carbide’s accident at Bhopal, India in 1983 and the wreck of the Exxon Valdez in 1989 are examples.
Accidents are not caused by a flaw in the design of the corporation. They are caused by acts of God and human negligence. Intentional or continuous corporate abuse of the commons, on the other hand, is something else. It is no accident. It is willful, carried out with full knowledge of the consequences of the action being taken. If the person causing it wants to, it can always be prevented.
Company managers are fully aware of the damage their company is causing and they fail to do anything to stop it. They even lobby to be able to continue doing it. CEOs and directors of coal mining companies all know that burning coal contributes to global warming, but this doesn’t make them stop or even mine a little less. Directors of tobacco companies and tobacco distributors know their products kill fellow human beings, but this doesn’t make them stop. Executives in both these industries have been known to mislead the public about the adverse effects of their products.
Today, government authorizes companies to pursue self-interest without restraint and then tries to limit the adverse consequences of this mandate by passing new laws where and when they are able. This is a flawed strategy. Big companies now have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in businesses and technologies that harm the planet, mankind and the welfare of our communities. It is natural that their management tries to protect these investments in any way that they can, including interfering with the democratic process.
The business world has no shortage of talented people. We should not be surprised that, when compelled to do so, they are capable of managing the political process to achieve their employer’s needs.
It is also a flawed strategy for another reason. The liberal democracy was not designed to govern powerful citizens bent on pursing their own interests through the destruction of the commons. It depends on citizenship. To work, it needs its most powerful citizens to be its best, not its worst. The modern corporation needs to be re-programmed to make it a better citizen.
"The modern corporation needs to be re-programmed to make it a better citizen"
The modern corporation needs to be shrunken down so it can drown itself in a coffee cup. So we on the far-left began advocating many moons ago for limiting asset ownership and enterprise size to ten man-powers. Everyone knows the greatest efficiencies come from small enterprises. Everyone knows the greatest human fulfillment comes out of small enterprises, small incomes, e.g. 1x to 2x the poverty level. We don't need large corporations. The industrial revolution is over. The experimental results are in: The liabilities of mass production outweigh the benefits. The sustainable community layout favors craftsman guilds and cottage industries. We want to live in natural settings for a variety of reasons. We have this agenda. It's called localism. This is the ideal we promote in our choices, votes, demands. We understand human nature and nature in general. We've made our decision to live sustainably under natural laws.
Well said...
I think Clarke also chose the acronym HAL to express the disdain for corporations like IBM (only a letter away)...
Who created the code systems for the nazi war machine and concentration camps... Very chilling indeed...
CC
Some disagreement on certain points:
Corporations weren’t designed to help mankind [sic]. They were designed to help a particular class of people. The fact that that happens at the expense of the rest of the people (and in the end, of all people) has always been known but was not considered in that design.
OK corporations don’t kill people, people do. And regardless of how we change corporations the ultimate cure for that is psychological. But to implement those psychological cures we must change parenthood, education, work, government, politics—and corporations. It’s a circular problem that can only be solved by working on all of it at once. But the chief means as well as the end must be kept in mind. Psychological problems are solved by psychological means. But if you ain’t got money for the bus how you gonna get to your therapist's office?
Accidents ARE caused by a flaw in the design of corporations. Bhopal and tens of thousands of other murderous and damaging “accidents” were caused by our unwillingness, in the form of corporate unwillingness, to consider people as more important than profit. They were caused by structural, rule-engendered unwillingness to face, investigate, report, and correct past mistakes. They are caused by the twin facts that those companies who caused Bhopal and the Exxon Valdez never apologized, and were never forced to suffer the full consequences. That is caused not only by a design flaw in the leadership structure of the corporation directly affecting those operations it is a design flaw (in both corporations and politics) that allows corporations to own politics. Not only are there no accidents, or simple “negligence”, there are no Acts of God. The design flaw in corporations-–their psychopathic nature—-is there because we as a traumatized species contain fear and therefore rage, and corporations are one main place in our system where that rage is expressed.
One common technique for corporations who knowingly engage in destructive behavior—making cigarettes or other cancer-causing products, for example—is to distract by laying the blame on individuals, claiming “lifestyle choices” are the cause, sacrificing individuals outside the corporation for the purposes of the corporation and its officers. on rare occasions when this doesn’t work individuals within the corporation are sacrificed—-the supposed “rotten apples” of Abu Ghraib or the mail fraud letters about the climate and health care bills, eg. Outsiders, hirelings and then finally, if it’s really bad, the CEO is scapegoated and the other directors AND THE CORPORATION and the corporate structure itself are all left unquestioned and unchanged. You, as a corporate apologist flack might, ask us to scapegoat a few, make some cosmetic changes and leave the structure that has caused so much destruction essentially intact.
“Today, government authorizes companies to pursue self-interest without restraint and then tries to limit the adverse consequences of this mandate by passing new laws where and when they are able. This is a flawed strategy.”
It absolutely is a flawed strategy, and the correct strategy is not to tweak a few aspects of the programming but to change entirely the conception, purpose, structure, operation, place, abilities, rights, and responsibilities of corporations. The corporation is not a person, and it is not a citizen. It is a malfunctioning projection of our own shadow calling out for radical change in both it and us, and nothing less will do.
It is political reform that is necessary first. Now, the paid speech of corporations, not recognized in the Constitution, is given preference over the free speech of people, which is guaranteed by the Constitution. It is one thing to allow free speech, but to allow paid speech to silence free speech by dint of greater volume is unconstitutional.
An interesting piece, equal parts Thom Hartmann*, Dennis Kucinich and Rebecca Solnit (who ‘s written brilliantly on hope and despair)** while trying to rebut each. Judith Lipton said “The therapy for despair is action.” We can also do actual therapy for despair. The work of Joanna Macy (The Work That Reconnects, etc) is excellent, as is individual therapy.
But some of the logic and assumptions are flawed. For example: an individual does not stop being an individual when s/he becomes an employee of a corporation, and so would keep individual rights. This wouldn’t negate efforts to make both corporations and individuals answer to higher standards than now.
One could argue that stronger government IS the answer to multinational corporations. WORLD government, a federation of states that would limit the ability of corporations to play one country against another, would enhance individual rights, reduce war and exploitation, and may be the only way to have the regulators stronger than the regulated. And just because we have the same problems outside the US Constitution’s jurisdiction doesn’t mean they’re not for essentially the same reasons. A Constitution without specified limits on corporations is essentially the same as no Constitution, or a different constitution without limits on corporations. To begin to change corporations we must change either the Constitution or the interpretation of it.
It’s clear to me--although there’s no room here to adequately defend the premise--that neither corporations nor government are the problem, that our current nearly-species-wide psychological afflictions are the problem. That doesn’t mean we don’t also need to change both government and corporations, especially since they both actively (although perhaps unconsciously) impede any improvement in our emotional state. I look forward to seeing what Hinkley has to say about one part of the solution.
*Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights
**Orion Magazine, for example
J4zonian,
You say:"And just because we have the same problems outside the US Constitution’s jurisdiction doesn’t mean they’re not for essentially the same reasons. A Constitution without specified limits on corporations is essentially the same as no Constitution, or a different constitution without limits on corporations. To begin to change corporations we must change either the Constitution or the interpretation of it."
I am not sure you are correct on this point. The whole personhood argument is about taking away constituional rights--to free speech, due process, equal protection, etc. It is not about restricting corporate behavior.
I would agree with you that we need more restrictions on corporate behavior---not just in America, but everywhere. The question is do you have to (or is it wise to) take away constitutional rights first? I think not.
The governed meeting the duties of citizenship is necessary for liberal democracy to be sustained. The problem with corporations is that they have the rights of citizenship, but ignore the obligations. Taking away their rights will not solve the problem. Restricting their behavior so that they begin meeting the duties of citizenship will be, at the very least, a good start.
CC,
I believe it is about restricting corporate behavior BY taking away assumed 'rights'--rights that have no basis in reality, strict construction or common sense, but which, in the rarified world of Law have spiraled out into making it possible to legally defend egregious and destructive corporate behavior while making it impossible to oppose them legally in many meaningful ways.
(where, for example, a supreme court justice (2, in fact) can actually believe that it is not wrong or unreasonable to execute a person who has been proven innocent in court; where a bill supposedly meant to avoid onrushing climate catastrophe exempts agriculture, one of the chief causes of climate change, while removing the ability of the EPA to do its job and regulate pollution which causes climate change.)
Maybe we can fight off the depredations of corporations without saying THEY ARE NOT PEOPLE; we should certainly be doing everything we can on that front. But we need to do everything we can on ALL fronts, including destroying this ridiculous fiction that corporations are persons, deserving of human and civil rights. No one who is not insane is or would or will, because of this, interpret it as removing rights from ACTUAL people, which from the disharmonious vibrations I feel in the electron field I believe is the unstated undercurrent in your post.
Restricting their behavior is a fine idea and yes, not only a good start but something I've been working on for decades. But if the Law that thinks they are people prevents that--for example, makes it OK for them to lie without consequences while preventing others from telling the truth (if it can be misconstrued as "libelous") about their destructive practices and products--then we can't in fact restrict their behavior without destroying the fiction of their rights. In other words, good luck with that.
"When successive changes in personnel do not solve the problem, despair sets in and people begin to withdraw their support for government and their involvement in politics."
That was 2008. This is 2009.
You say that, even if laws are passed, corporations will get around them and rich individuals will bribe the politicians. And this is your excuse for not regulating corporations? Corruption exists so we are fucked? A lawyer who says laws are useless. Priceless!
And this:
Eliminating corporate personhood is not the answer. What's the question, counselor? You talk about how money runs and rigs any and all systems yet you refuse to address the significance of corporate personhood in limiting human liability. You refuse to say it is a responsibility dodge. Without corporate personhood, the people that run the corporations would be held LIABLE for their actions just like the rest of us.
And why the stone dead silence about income definitions used to avoid paying taxes? IF only people were taxed and all compensation was taxed as income, all those money games that corrupt our society would be much more difficult to play. But you just don't want to go there, do you, counselor?
Hinkley, we are not stupid here. We get it. We follow the money. The legalistic devices used by PEOPLE are and always will be the problem. Let's be specific. You fucking sophistic lawyers that don't give a damned whether something is right or wrong are the main part of the problem. You watch a band of highly paid criminals dress in suits and call themselves a corporation and now we have to accept that predator in our midst and seek to "tame" it somehow. I say you are blind, deaf and dumb.
You are confused by your verbosity or complict in corporate chicanery.
Which is it?
It's time for full disclosure, counselor Hinkley.
Are you in the employ of corporate officers paying you to defend corporate personhood? If so, when did they approach you and why?
Also, how much are you being paid, whether in money or fringe benefits or a promise of some future windfall or pecuniary privilege?
Tell us the truth now sir. Show some integrity.
J4zonian,
It is certainly true that people can maintain their individuality within a corporation. There are varying degrees of being programmed and swallowing the koolaid. The most extreme examples of idividuality that come to mind are whistleblowers, such the health insurance employees in the documentary Sicko, who reported on how much they hated their work, and more recently the executive at Cigna who spent an hour with Bill Moyers.
Sincerious,
You are right of course that some people have the courage to maintain their total personhood and become whistleblowers. Isn't this an insignficant minority, however, in terms of total numbers?
Lawrence Mitchell, a law professor at George Washington University in Washington, DC, says that going to work for a big corporation requires you to check a large part of your total personhood at the door. By this he means that when you work for a company you are hired to fill a role—a director, CEO, CFO, Vice President of Engineering, General Counsel, etc. In fulfilling that role the only thing the company wants you to contribute is your expertise in the area required by your role.
Corporate personnel are not expected to contribute the full breadth of their experience as human beings. Specifically, no one is supposed to try to advance moral or ethical positions or suggest that the company should do something more to protect the public interest than the law requires. To do so is usually considered naïve and may even be career shortening.
Corporate roles are characterized by different levels of power. Personnel at the top of the organization chart have more power than people at the bottom. Professor Mitchell goes on to say that the inequality of power in each of the roles creates a situation where the weaker parties' moral devel¬opment is stifled and the stronger parties become inattentive to rationality or justice.
It is easy to see how this results in people acting on the corporation's behalf in a manner that is contrary to the public interest. The people up the organization chart are under pressure to deliver improved financial results. They want increased profitability. They want this achieved by any legal means (and sometimes even when the legality is questionable). “I don’t care how you get it done. Just get it done.”
People down the chart have no alternative, but to comply. They comfort themselves that it is their job to do what they are told and that nothing they have done is illegal. Moreover, their contribution to the final result was small and in and of itself not immoral or unethical. When questioned how the commons end up getting harmed, they deny any responsibility. “Don’t ask me. I just work here.”
The combination of all the individual actions, however, is that the company engages in legal, but immoral or unethical, behavior that damages the public interest. In the end, everyone consoles themselves that what their company is doing is not illegal. Often, they ignore the fact that it’s not illegal because the company and its lobbyists have conspired to influence the political system so that it isn’t.
The corporate design puts company personnel in a situation where they have little or no ability to protect the public interest when protecting the public interest would adversely affect the company’s bottom line. It’s a system designed to promote the advancement of private interest over public interest. People within the system play roles that contribute to the destruction without any direct responsibility for the damage the company causes. This is why the modern corporation is such a lousy citizen today.
Although all corporate abuse occurs through the acts of people directing, managing and working in the corporation, it is a mistake to blame corporate abuse of the commons on them. By blaming the company’s people, the real culprit—the design of the corporation--slips away unnoticed.
sincerious,
I believe you're referring to my statement that people maintain their individual RIGHTS when they are employees of a corporation, entirely different from whether they maintain their individuality.
"an individual does not stop being an individual when s/he becomes an employee of a corporation, and so would keep individual rights." to commit the sin of quoting myself.
I was not commenting on the question you bring up, only on a point brought up by Mr. Hinkley, one of many strawperson and other arguments of illogic he uses: whether taking away fictional rights from corporations would cause a person involved with a corporation to lose his/her individual rights...an argument so ridiculous I left it only vaguely repudiated. Always a mistake, I've found out on these pages.
It occurs to me that as Mr. Hinkley is a corporate lawyer and the Law is notoriously illogical and often nonsensical, there may be points I'm interpreting as mistakes in logic which are in fact true observations of, and reasonable conclusions from, the illogical world of law. Granted, but as far as I can tell (I'd be happy to hear otherwise) my points are still valid, as we should always try to bring the Law kicking and screaming into rough parallel to the known universe, and also to the ideal plane, where fairness, decency and democracy are among our criteria.
If you build on a foundation of sand, then pass a law that declares that sand is bedrock, will the building withstand the storm?
We've got a couple, if not more, big storms coming our way---climate and demographic---and what is natural and sound will make it, what is unnatural and bullshit will not.
The corporations [read corporate heads] are creating the very conditions that will make their own existance impossible. The masters of the mass market have just recently gutted the mass market, as an example.
Ignor them. Withdraw your support from them at every opportunity. Stay out of debt and get out of the way. They will fall.
If this point of view is correct, here's an off the wall prediction for you: So far, the perfect example of state-corporatism is, not the USA, but China. The melding of state and corporation. The prediction? China will be the first to fall...the big winner in the race to the bottom.
What can we hope to save besides our own hides? Spirituality, art, music, ideals of human rights and peace...add your own.
Just as not all men are the same, not all corporations are the same. When Ben and Jerries was incorporated, the two set up a system whereby the CEO could only make as much money as the formula would allow, based upon salary of the lowest paid person in the corporation.... the CEO could not get a raise before the lowest paid employee. Also a certain percentage had to be distributed to non-profits....
Alas, the preponderance however do not fit this example. I believe that "personhood" MUST be stripped from corporations. period. I would also suggest 'sunset' clauses upon any corporation or partnership even, that would expire say after twenty years, and in order to be rejoined, would have to have financial, environmental and labor relations examinations.
Dispite my 'libertarian' leanings, I'd probably cede that no corporation should ever be allowed to get "too big to fail".
nobodyknown,
Your idea of "sunset" clauses has precedent. In the first century of the American liberal democracy most company's had limited life. In order to get their charters renewed they had to keep on the good side of the legislature (i.e. by protecting the public interest). This no doubt had the effect of improving overall corporate citizenship.
I am not sure if it still does, but California as recently as 10 years ago had a provision that allowed the state to revoke a corporate charter in the event of corporate behavior that harmed the public interest. A group of activists led by a lawyer whose name I think was Robert Benson, brought a suit to have Unocal's charter revoked on these grounds.
The action failed. These days no government official wants to put local employees out of work by revoking a corporate charter.
The point is, however, that it was once recognized in America that the law should require companies to be concerned about more than just the pursuit of profit. They had obligations to the public interest. There are other ways to change the programming of the corporation to bring this concept back and once again require companies respect and protect the public interest. They should be explored.
Yes, but we're sinking fast.
The Corporation floats the wrong people to the top of the power structure for the wrong reasons. They infiltrate the government, and the rest will be history.
The system is tricked out beyond salvage. Only Ben and Jerry's will survive because they are using the corp business form properly.
Widget, Inc. will only change when everyone either makes other arrangements, makes their own widget, borrows one or fixes one up or signs up at the co-op to use the one they got at a garage sale.
I believe that all states have "provisions" for revoking charters, but I'm not aware of any that have occured. As Snydly (below) points out, the problems are compounded once the corporations are in the government. I've had one-on-one conversations with each, Tom Linzey and Ralph Nader in the past about corporate powers. The problems I see stem from a lack of public understanding about the problems of corporations having 'personhood'. That includes elected officials. As Mr. Linzey pointed out to me, Black's Law Dictionary itself is not law, even though it is the source that courts and law makers go to reference definitons. The fight against corporate personhood must be fought minute point, by minute point. The courts will not address the issue as a whole. In the mean time, corporations make giant strides in gaining control over local, state, federal and international governing bodies. I can "predict" what the natural outcome of this evolution will be, but I certainly hope that I'm wrong.... I'm open to any and all ideas...
nobodyknown,
You have been hoodwinked into believing that the source of the problem is the corporation getting involved in politics. The hope you have been sold is that once corporations lose their personhood then real people can get back on top. I don't think so.
Let's say that the constitution was amended to eliminate personhood and the corporation's right to free speech. Now neither congress nor state legislatures would be prohibited from passing laws against corporate speech. Do you think they would? Do you think other countries would follow?
Also, corporations would no longer have the right to due process (which among other things includes the right to a fair trial) and equal protection. Do you think this is the way America should govern? Do you think the rest of the world would follow?
The personhood movement sells emotion to the far left, but is incapable of delivering a solution. It is a dog which is all bark and no bite.
It thinks that the problem is corporate speech and once you take that problem of corporations will be solved. Voltaire said, "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." This kind of attitude recognizes that speech is not the problem. It is people falling for it that is the problem. It's time the citizenry grew up and stopped falling for it.
Our duty is to speak for the other side in a way that overcomes corporate speech and convinces our fellow citizens what the corporations are selling is wrong.
Our other duty is to change the corporation back to something far more benign than it is today. It wasn't always this way. Broad restrictions can be placed on their behavior to protect the public interest. It's time we did so and stopped talking about limiting companies' right to speak.