The Best Interests of the Corporation

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/18-9

Published on Tuesday, August 18, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
by Robert C. Hinkley

Every day legal corporate behavior causes much more damage to the commons than corporate illegal behavior. Electricity generators do not break the law when they emit billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year warming the Earth to dangerous levels. No law is broken when automobile manufacturers put out millions of vehicles that contribute to the same problem. Tobacco companies do not break the law when their products kill nearly 5 million people a year. Consumer goods companies are within the law when they buy from third world suppliers who operate sweatshops and use child labor. Employers operate within the law when they pay the minimum, but not a living wage. Manufacturers do not break the law when they threaten communities or leave them for dead when they move their operations overseas.

The problem is not that every once in a while corporation accidentally does something that harms the public interest. Corporate abuse of the commons is a daily ongoing event. At least in theory, those that direct the company have the power to make it stop. It continues as the result of conscious decisions made by company managers.

Think about it. If all modern corporations were good citizens, there would be no corporate abuse of the commons. As corporate damage to the public interest became evident, the directors of the company would simply close or modify the company's operations to eliminate the behavior or product that was causing the damage.

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Greed may cause a few unscrupulous managers to steal from their companies, but it does not cause directors to uniformly cause their companies to continue harming the public interest. At best it is a minor factor in keeping big companies from choosing the good citizen option. If corporate abuse of the commons can be traced back to an emotion (which I don't think it can), it is not greed. It is fear.

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Outside Constitution Hall in Philadelphia in 1787 Benjamin Franklin was asked by a passerby, "What form of government had been decided upon?" He replied. "It's a republic, if you can keep it." These words reflected Franklin's fear that the new government would later become corrupted by those who would abuse the public interest for their own benefit.

Franklin saw a potential weakness in the design of the new government. He was concerned that private wealth might be used to convert elected officials from pursuing the public interest to pursuing the private interests of the wealthy. If that occurred, he feared America would become ruled by a domestic aristocracy little better than the foreign one the American colonists had just defeated.

Franklin's fears have been proved justified. Our government of the people, by the people and for the people has become a government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations. In all important matters the economy and the interests of big business come first. This has occurred without the people (for whose benefit government was designed) even recognizing it let alone agreeing to it.

It is nothing short of a travesty that the people's elected representatives have been converted to become the representatives of big business. We are now ruled by an aristocracy of corporations.

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