FWD: Corporations

[Barry Carter]

Dear Friends,

Here is the second of two articles that were just forwarded to the Ecological Economics forum.

Corporations

http://www.fixgov.com/richardstimson.html

Draft by Richard Stimson
We start with solutions to world problems involving corporations that are
most likely to meet with the approval of all members of the FixGov group and
continuing with ones that may be more debatable. These ideas have been
distilled from postings to the FixGov forum. Each proposed solution is
numbered for convenience in referring to it when members offer comments.
PROPOSALS ON WHICH WE ALL ARE THOUGHT TO AGREE
1. Corporations, especially the multinationals (also called transnationals),
must be brought under control. They have extended their size and power to
the point that they are a threat to the planet and its inhabitants. Some
corporations are actually bigger than many national governments in the
world. They are able to get free of environmental regulation by threatening
governments that they will move to a more permissive jurisdiction. They
undermine and destroy labor unions by similar threats or actual movement of
factories to areas of low or non-existent standards for wages, health, and
safety.
2. Remove the legal fiction that a corporation is a person. Here are 10
differences between corporations and real people: (1) Corporations have
perpetual life, (2) Corporations can be in two or more places at the same
time, (3) Corporations cannot be jailed, (4) Corporations have no conscience
or sense of shame, (5) Corporations have no sense of altruism, nor
willingness to adjust their behavior to protect future generations, (6)
Corporations pursue a single-minded goal, profit, and typically are legally
prohibited from seeking other ends, (7) There are no limits, natural or
otherwise, to corporations' potential size, (8) Because of their political
power, they are able to define or at very least substantially affect, the
civil and criminal regulations that define the boundaries of permissible
behavior. Virtually no individual criminal has such abilities, (9)
Corporations can combine with each other, into bigger and more powerful
entities, and (10) Corporations can divide themselves, shedding subsidiaries
or affiliates that are controversial, have brought them negative publicity
or pose liability threats.
3. Improper influence on government officials must be prevented. Outright
bribery is used in some countries. Elsewhere, large corporations and their
wealthy controlling stockholders influence public officials by campaign
contributions and by favors such as expense-paid trips to luxury resorts,
interest-free loans, and free use of corporate jet planes. They also
underwrite propaganda campaigns to help political parties and candidates. To
circumvent election laws in the US they stop short of saying "vote for X" or
"vote against Y" but come as close to that as possible. Although it is
illegal for corporations to contribute to political campaigns, they seem to
have done so by various loopholes and subterfuges.
4. Newspapers and broadcasters need to be freed from the control of
corporate cartels. Since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 there has been a
parade of media mergers and over 4,000 radio stations have been bought up in
the United States, while television networks are now in the hands of huge
corporations like General Electric, Viacom, Disney, and Rupert Murdoch's
News Corporation. Murdoch also controls large portions of the television and
newspaper media in Great Britain, Australia, and elsewhere. Corporate media
have done their best to hide corporate scandals and to downplay or distort
any protests against corporations.
5. Corporate efforts to undermine pure food laws, to raise livestock under
factory conditions with dangerous use of antibiotics and hormones, to treat
food with hazardous radiation, to modify crops genetically without adequate
testing, to patent life forms and traditional remedies, and to promote
"killer" seeds that make farmers forever dependent on corporate suppliers
must be brought under control. This should be done by national laws to the
extent possible and by new international controls under the UN or similar
body.
6. Agencies of the United Nations need to be prevented from operating in
secrecy in behalf of multinational corporations. On the world scene, global
corporationsError! Bookmark not defined. (including global bankers and
financial companies) dominate international agencies unrestrained by
democratic safeguards. At the World Bank, IMF, and WTO the walls of secrecy
should be removed, independent outside experts should be used, and the
policy-makers and advisory groups should include balanced representation of
the interests involved, not dominated by the global corporations. The World
Bank should include experts not beholden to the financial community; e.g.,
economists from labor organizations, consumer groups, and the academic
world, as well as environmental organizations and experts from the countries
involved in their development programs, and the same should apply to the
IMF. The WTO should include balanced representation of consumers as well as
producers, and judges on its tribunals should be independent scientific
experts who can distinguish legitimate environmental concerns from mere
pretexts, especially in the matter of food safety.
7. Reform of the IMF must include keeping it out of politics. The enormous
leverage of the IMF over democratic institutions in borrowing countries was
made plain in South Korea's presidential elections, as the Fund insisted
that all presidential candidates endorse the IMF bailout agreement.
8. Every available influence should be brought to bear by the UN, World
Bank, IMF, etc., to prevent multinational corporations (in league with
repressive governments) from driving local inhabitants off their land by
pollution from poisons such as cyanide used in mining, by oil spills into
water supplies, and by using violence against those who protest. There have
been many instances, including Shell in Nigeria, BHP (Australia's largest
company) in Papua New Guinea, Gemala Industries of Indonesia in occupied
East Timor, DuPont in Goa, mining companies in the Philippines, and many
others.
9. Regional trade agreements such as NAFTA and global agreements such as
GATT should not be ratified without enforceable protections of the
environment and workers rights. Prime examples of this need are the
corporations that set up polluting factories in Mexico near the US border
and get away with firing any employee who joins a union. Often police and
armed forces of the host nation are used to coerce employees.
10. Steps should be taken by national and international authorities to stop
the bidding war in which corporations extract subsidies, tax abatements, and
exemption from environmental and human rights requirements in a competition
among localities for the placement of corporate activities.
11. The "revolving door" for individuals who shuttle back and forth between
government positions and corporate lobbying needs to be abolished. In the US
former government administrators and congressmen become lobbyists and many
make as much as a million dollars annually. Some, like Henry Kissinger, form
consulting firms that lobby without disclosing the names of corporations for
whom they work.
12. Corporations should be prohibited from financing front organizations
such as"think tanks" and purported grassroots organizations to advocate
corporate interests, or at least their role should be publicly revealed.
13. Corporations should not be allowed to sponsor US presidential debates as
Anheuser-Busch, U.S. Airways and 3Com did in 2000. After the original
organizer, the League of Women Voters opened the debates to a third party
candidate in 1980, the two major parties set up a Commission on Presidential
Debates (run out of a political consulting firm's office in Washington,
D.C.) that has set rules effectively excluding third party candidates.
14. People should be provided information on how to organize to deal with
local issues--how to deal with Walmart moving into a small town, or a
corporate polluter nearby, cleaning up a polluted neighborhood, or how to
oppose large developments that destroy a community's lifestyle.
15. People who wish to do so should be encouraged to develop and put into
practice local economies, beginning with local food economies, to shorten
the distance between producers and consumers, to make the connections
between the two more direct, and to make this local economic activity a
benefit to the local community.
PROPOSALS ON WHICH WE MAY ALL AGREE
16.There should be a democratically chosen body on a global level to act as
an umpire to enforce rules of the economic game.
17. Restore the "mixed system" in which private businesses, producer
cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, and government agencies all played
their part. This has largely been destroyed in the US and other countries
where it used to flourish. Preserve it wherever it survives.
18. Corporations should be prohibited from donating to political parties or
campaigns.
19. Political campaigns should be publicly financed to replace bribery by
means of campaign finance.
20. Lobbying should be strictly limited by forbidding anything of value
being offered to public officials.
21. Make corporate officers personally responsible for violating laws.
22. Make corporations report to the public, as well as shareholders, on
their undertakings and plans that affect workers, consumers, and the
environment.
23. In regard to the terms and length of copyrights on "intellectual
property" the right balance needs to be achieved to provide inducement for
creative work without locking it out of the public domain for an
unreasonably long period. The same applies to patented inventions. In the US
entertainment companies like Disney were successful in lobbying to extend
the duration of copyright far beyond the lifetimes of the creators.
24. There should be a body such as the "Environmental Council" proposed by
Earth Action to make binding decisions to protect the planet, perhaps by
transforming an already existing UN institution, with its actions subject to
approval by the General Assembly, combined with an expanded environmental
role for the World Court.
25. All nations need to agree to implement simultaneously a range of
measures to re-regulate global markets and corporations in order to restore
genuine democracy, environmental protection, and peace around the world.
This is because no nation nor group of nations alone can control global
capital nor implement vital economic, social or environmental policies that
might incur market or corporate displeasure. A method for breaking this
impasse is proposed by the International Simultaneous Policy Organization
(ISPO), whose website is www.simpol.org.
PROPOSALS WORTH CONSIDERING FOR POSSIBLE AGREEMENT
26. If there is no other way to overcome the favored status US courts have
given to corporations, it would have to be accomplished by constitutional
amendment, making the limitations and responsibilities of corporations so
clear the courts could not interpret them away.
27. Public officials should be prevented from holding secret meetings with
heads of corporations and financial institutions, as at the Council on
Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg, and the Trilateral Commission.
28. Businesses should be encouraged to use energy and resources efficiently
without paying subsidies. In the efficient energy use chapter of Jim Bell's
book he cites numerous large corporation who have invested in energy and
resource use efficiency measures "and in every case their return on
investment was better than their investments in their product lines."
29. As proposed by Jim Bell, governments should use experts from economics
and accounting to determine the true cost of various goods, and then pass
laws to include externalities, such as environmental damage, normally
neglected in retail prices. Possible questions: Does this method create a
huge bureaucracy of accountants to figure the true costs and lawyers to
dispute them? Who gets the price increase? Does it become excess profit for
the corporations? Does the government tax it away and use the proceeds to
offset pollution and hazardous waste? If so, how do we prevent it being
frittered away in litigation as is being done regarding the SuperFund taxes
that were supposed to clean up toxic waste? What about the effect of these
higher prices on GDP? National production is conventionally measured by
market prices, so wouldn't the damage to environment and humans now be
counted as an increase in GDP?
30. The obverse of true cost pricing is "The Neuman Proposal," which would
have the government pay individuals to reduce their travel by car or plane
in order to decrease emission of greenhouse gasses that contribute to global
climate change. This raises questions of the possibility of enactment, the
accuracy and administrative cost of determining these subsidies, and the
possibility of fraud or misuse.
31. Limit the size that corporations can attain or their ability to merge to
reduce competition. Of the world's 100 largest economic entities, 51 are now
corporations and 49 are countries according to the Institute for Policy
Studies. The world's top 200 corporations account for over a quarter of
economic activity on the globe while employing less than one percent of its
workforce.
32. Remove the "limited liability" of corporations (Inc., LLC, Ltd., SA, NV,
GmbH), making the liability of corporations real and full, so it will have
an impact on the shareholders and will guide them to more responsible
actions. Limited liability without responsibility has caused much of the
trouble we see today.
33. Make corporations report to the public, as well as shareholders, on
their undertakings and plans that affect workers, consumers, and the
environment.
34. Some people propose that capitalism be abolished. Richard Moore opined
"that if we put the necessary democratic and environmental constraints on
market economics, then we will have abolished capitalism." Others would go
further to replace markets and private investment entirely.
35. Localized economic control should replace multinational corporate
control. If there is local economic control, then democracy may continue as
a healthy form of government. Locally elected leaders may come together as
the democratic representatives in a confederation.
36. There should be a large international peace-keeping force under the
control of the U.N. or some other agency that ensures equitable distribution
of natural resources and peace, after all weapons of mass destruction have
been destroyed.
37. Large numbers of people should reduce using energy sufficiently to let
the power brokers know who really is in control.
38. People could stop eating beef. Just in Central America alone 35 million
people are now either landless or own too little land to support themselves
while the transnational corporations have continued to drive the locals away
and clear forest to raise beef cattle (1992 figures).
_______________________________________________

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes
me to tremble for the safety of my country. ... corporations have been
enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money
power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the
prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and
the Republic is destroyed."
Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864
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With kindest regards,

Barry Carter
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2319 Balm
Baker City, Oregon 97814
Phone: 541-523-3357
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We must either let the Law of Love rule us through and through or not at all. Love among ourselves based on hatred of others breaks down under the slightest pressure. The fact is such love is never real love. It is an armed peace. And so it will be in this great movement in the West against war. War will only be stopped when the conscience of mankind has become sufficiently elevated to recognize the undisputed supremacy of the Law of Love in all the walks of life. Some say this will never come to pass. I shall retain the faith till the end of my earthly existence that this shall come to pass . . .
--Mahatma Gandhi--