"Corporations are people, my friend." Mitt Romney at Iowa
State Fair
Corporations are obviously not people. But Romney is accurate in the sense that corporations
have hijacked most of the rights of people while evading the responsibilities.
An important part of the social justice agenda is democratizing
corporations. This means we must radically
change the laws so people can be in charge of corporations. We must strip them of corporate personhood
and cut them down to size so democracy can work. People are taking action so democracy can
regulate the size, scope and actions of corporations.
One of the most basic roles of society is to protect the
people from harm. The massive size of
many international corporations makes democratic control over them nearly
impossible.
Corporate crime is widespread. The New York Times, ProPublica and others
have revealed Wall Street giants like JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and
Goldman Sachs have been charged with fraud many times only to get off by paying
hundreds of millions. Professors at
University of Virginia have documented hundreds of corporations which have been
found guilty or pled guilty in federal courts.
Corporate abuse is even more widespread. For example, Corporate Accountability
International named six to its Corporate Hall of Shame, including: Koch
Industries for spending over $50 million to fund climate change denial;
Monsanto for mass producing cancer causing chemicals; Chevron for dumping more
than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon; Exxon Mobil
for being the worst polluter; Blackwater (now Xe) for killing unarmed Iraqi
civilians and hiring paramilitaries; and Halliburton, the nation's leading war
profiteer.
Making corporations responsible to democracy of the people
is challenging considering Wal-Mart, the world's biggest corporation, does more
business itself annually than all but two dozen of the two hundred plus
countries in the world. Without
dramatic changes, how can we expect people in small or even big countries to
force corporations like Wal-Mart, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP, Toyota or
Chevron to live by the same rules all the people have to?
Justice demands we make sure corporations do not harm people. Democracy must require that they operate for
the common good.
In order to cut corporations down to size, the people must strip
corporations of the special artificial legal protections they have created for
themselves.
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