Corporations and the Public Interest

[FreakinDJ]

When people talk about "the market" they usually confuse two totally different things. One is the enterprise economy of small-scale business. The other is the corporate economy of hulking bureaucratic institutions.

Most of us love markets in the former sense. We love farmers’ markets, flea markets, New York-style street fairs, and classified ads. When we go to Washington, DC, we generally don’t eat in government cafeterias. We head over to the neat little restaurants in DuPont Circle or Adams Morgan – a "market" experience. When I was in Warsaw not long after the fall of the communist regime, the new outdoor markets really did feel like seedlings breaking through the concrete.

These are the kinds of markets the founders of the United States had in mind when they drafted the Constitution. The corporation in its modern form did not exist when the basic concepts of our economic and political structures were wrought. The founders omitted it from the elegant scheme of checks and balances by which they hoped to hold institutional power under control. (Jefferson was particularly wary of the dangers of centralized economic power.)

..snip...

Passing the Bucks

Market ideology today conveniently sweeps these distinctions under the rug. At a very basic level, it has become a form of cosmological buck-passing that blames abstract "market forces" for the behavior of individuals. The corporation is the institutionalized form of this shirking of responsibility. The primary purpose of the corporate form is to insulate a certain class of people from responsibility for actions taken on their behalf.



http://www.context.org/iclib/ic41/rowe/

Good read


I'm not a socialist nor Anti-Corporation or Anti-Capitalism. I just believe Unbridled Capitalism run amuck can destroy a perfectly good Democracy

[applegrove]

1. Some good facts in this.

[bbgrunt]

2. yup. k and r!

[PatrickforO]

3. Well I am a socialist, or at least a Social Democrat.

This is a very good article. The type of charter they are talking about that forces corporations to be good citizens still exists in the form of 'B' or benevolent corporations. Some 950 companies around the world had taken this step as of 2014. In addition millions of small companies exist.

You know, Social Democrats don't mind at all if people earn a profit. They don't mind if some people earn more than others. What they want, though, is companies to understand that the workers, the customers, the community and the world itself are just as important as profits, and must be taken into consideration as a form of good corporate citizenship.

[840high]

4. kick

[pampango]

5. Great article. Thanks for posting it, FreakinDJ. More excerpts:

This was true of the early corporations generally. Their charters asserted that they existed first and foremost to serve the public. That was their reason for being.

In fact, the first corporations in the Anglo-American tradition had nothing to do with profits. Much as it might cause free market fundamentalists to squirm, the original corporations were actually regulatory agencies, such as guilds, or local governments such as townships. (In New England, when you drive from one town into another you pass a sign that announces the year in which the town you are entering was "incorporated.&quot

Thus US Steel and Standard Oil and the like were born on a wave of what might be called today "liberal permissiveness." Several decades later, the Supreme Court completed the coup by declaring, with little basis in law or history, that the Fourteenth Amendment applied equally to corporations, making them legal "persons" with all the Constitutional rights and privileges of human beings.

The important point is that the free incorporation laws tore up the original bargain that was the basis of the corporate form. Corporations no longer had to serve the public. They could do anything they wanted. But they still enjoyed the extraordinary exemption from individual responsibility that they had obtained historically only because they would serve the public.

Then, the Supreme Court decision had the truly ironic effect of turning all human citizens, white as well as black, into second class citizens. Corporations enjoy all the Constitutional protections of human beings, plus exemptions from responsibility that humans don’t enjoy. Plus, of course, they can live forever, which humans can’t do either.