This is likely to be a longish post so skip to the next one if you don't want to wade through it.
I keep seeing references to corporations as if they are all good or all evil, the basis for our way of life/economy or the basis of our problems with no middle ground between them, so I figured it might be worth exploring what the real problem with them these days is. To me it isn't that they exist, it's that they have too much power and influence and that excess of power concentrated in too few hands hurts the rest of us. I'd feel the same if any small group had too much control over the rest of us, too much power in too few hands with little accountability is always going to lead to a bad result.
We need to go back to the idea of
Corporate Personhood which ironically stemmed from the effort to assure the rights of freed slaves and other disenfranchised people, though the idea of business itself having most of the same rights as people existed before then it had little power so that gave them an "in" by law which they'd lacked before. Up until the 1970's the problem had been growing but was still containable but then things changed.
In 1976 the Supreme Court ruled in a case called
Buckley v. Valeo, better known as money equals speech. This established a new precedent and one which has enabled everything since the 70s, the principle that we can no longer restrain many aspects of corporate actions including into the level of politics because it would be infringing on a "persons" "speech". We can't reform the whole system, elections included, in any meaningful way without infringing on that Supreme Court ruling, or without overturning it.
Corporations are not people. They are artificial entities which represent real people who already have voices and rights of their own, they don't need a second just because they can afford it and money is not speech. If he who has the most shouts the loudest drowning out the rest we end up with what we have today. The problem isn't that they exist, it's that they hold more power and influence than we do and that disparity is growing until we no longer seem to matter.
The results and costs of that excess influence aren't too hard to find if we look. In the 1950s Iran had a popular (to them) leadership which wanted to control their own oil resources so tried to nationalize and get out from under what they saw as unfair deals with foreign powers. The main threat was to oil company profits and to protect those we and the Brits took down that popular leadership and replaced it with the Shah of Iran. THAT sparked the Islamic extremist movement which had little historical power in the nation before then and that's what brought us the hostage crisis of the 70's as well as much of the extremism we've seen since. Blowback was to be expected according to the CIA itself at the time, and they were right. We're still dealing with the cost of the extremism it bred today and I don't see an end to the costs involved anytime soon.
To protect United Fruit Company, mining interests, and others of the sort we took down popular leaderships and/or encouraged dictatorships in Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, and others. To protect oil company profits we've supported tyrants ranging from Saddam to the Shah and perhaps worse. We don't give a damned about the decades long abuses in the Congo or elsewhere but let a profit be put at risk and we'll care about that fast enough. A good case can be made that we support those abuses in the Congo and elsewhere, it's good for business with neither freedom, rights, nor democracy having a thing to do with it. As far as I can tell most of our enemies and conflicts over the last several decades were made in the name of profit.
They write their own laws and regulate their own industries through private meetings with our leaders or through organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council. Now they own the media too, thanks to media consolidation bills supported by both parties over the last few decades they now control the vast majority of everything we see, hear or read, all channeled through a small handful of corporate offices run by the same people who built the mess we're trying to fix these days. If anyone has ever been in an office under new ownership they should understand what that means fast enough. It doesn't take micromanagement or direct control, just an understanding of what it takes to be promoted or to even keep your job. Increase their profits. Good journalism is beside the point next to those profits and over a couple of decades of creeping consolidation most employed in the field are with the program these days out of simple self interest. Those who weren't no longer work there.
The problem is not that corporations exist. It is that they have become "people" under the law, laws which now read money as equal to speech so subject to free speech laws. Immortal, powerful, and rich people who no longer have to worry much about what we think because they control most means of our communications as well as too much of the electoral process. *If* we still have any chance to stop them it's a slim one and shrinking fast. The solution is not to destroy them, it's to reduce them back to a means of accomplishing work as they were intended to be in the first place rather than them being a tool of control and domination. The corporation as intended, as a means of joining forces to accomplish work, that could be a good thing. But, the form it takes today I think is one of the greatest threats we've ever faced as a nation and I don't think we're too far from losing the nation to them. Perhaps for good. Until we change this and make a corporation a means of accomplishing work instead of a tool of domination nothing can or will change.
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