The Corporation: To-do List
October 4th, 2008
Watch the Corporation
I just finished watching a documentary called The Corporation, an intriguing look at the modern day exploits of global corporations. I wanted to quickly mention a couple points that I found particularly interesting:
- For all legal purposes, corporations are considered a person
- Being a person, corporations are allowed to give campaign constitutions because it is free speech
- Before 1987, the patent office clearly stated that it was not legal to patent any living thing. After a misguided supreme court ruling stating that a bacteria looked more like a chemical than a bug, a corporation was allowed to copyright that bacteria. The ruling now states that you can patent any living thing in the world except a full birth human being.
The end of the documentary gives a list of things we can do to remedy the issues that are posed by modern corporations:
- End corporate personhood
- Put people before profit
- Build economic democracy
- Use full-cost accounting
- Stop corporate welfare
- Localize ownership
- Support unions
- 3 strikes for corporations
- Be an active shareholder
- Jail corporate criminals
- Strength regulatory systems
- Get corporations out of schools
- Make trade fair
- Run corporations from politics
- Use local democratic power
- Support independent media
- Internalize externalities
- Buy local
- Work for worker rights
- Jam corporate culture
- Ride a bike
I think this is a fantastic list of things that people can do to fix some of the broken aspects of corporations.
I hope everyone has a chance to watch the documentary. I’d love to hear any comments anyone has on the film or about corporations in general.
Jeremy Blanchard: Student, Nerd, Enviro-geek
Question: What specifically is wrong with the concept of a corporation in your (or the movie’s) mind? Is it the fact that they have personhood? If so, why is this considered bad?
Also, I’m wondering about the list of things to do — specifically, I’m wondering what you mean by ‘building economic democracy’, ‘jail corporate criminals’, ‘make trade fair’, and especially, ‘internalize externalities’. In the case of the first three, I’m wondering what you mean by those phrases — both what the concept behind it is, and why you think that these things are not currently being done. As for the last phrase, what do you actually mean by that, given that the plain meaning is impossible to accomplish in any economy.
The concept of a corporation isn’t a bad thing. Obviously there is much to be gained from organizing large numbers of people in a systematic way to do business. Our current incarnation of the corporation tends to have many flaws: personhood without moral fiber, exploitation of labor and resources, and legal obligation to increase shareholder value.
By having the legal status of a person, corporations get all the constitutional rights of a person, but those rights weren’t written with consideration of how they could be used in that context. I think it would make more sense to give them the relevant rights in an “opt-in” manner. What I mean by that, is that courts could decide that corporations should be given the right to property and the right to privacy as it deemed necessary. Instead, we currently have an “opt-out” situation where corporations are given the full status of personhood, and courts slowly revoke certain aspects of that status as it deems necessary. I think the opt-out method allows for far too much exploitation.
In regards to the four items you listed, I was just transcribing the list from the film — not all of the issues were directly discussed. “Building an economic democracy” was referring to the fact that employees are rarely offered much say in the practices of the company.
“internalize externalities” (although an obvious contradiction) was referring to the idea that corporations usually try to force things into the category of an “externality” and therefore absolve themselves of any responsibility of it. This practice makes perfect sense if your only goal is short-term profit. If your goal is broader than that and includes well being of every species on the planet, you need to consider a lot of of aspects that fall under the category of negative externalities.
My biggest issue with corporations is the fact that their campaign contributes count as free speech. This gives them undo influence on our political system and likely leads to corruption to one degree or another.
In the early days of this republic, forming a corporation required an act of congress for precisely the reasons you state – bestowing personhood on a group of individuals in order to absolve any particular individual of liability for their actions, is a risky proposition. The articles of incorporation were carefully studied by congress (or not, but they should have done) to make sure that the “person” would behave in a responsible manner. Thus, an individual in the corporation who acted not in accordance with the corporation’s stated parameters was liable for their actions, and if they acted within corporate parameters, then the corporation was liable. However, in recent years, states have tried to out bid each other for laxest corporate laws, or least corporate taxes, so that forming a corporation is too easy. I agree that sometimes organizing a large group of people to a shared goal requires a corporation, but it used to be that the shared goal couldn’t just be “we want to make money hand over fist”. It had to be some socially appropriate goal that had the side-effect of making money hand over fist.