CONTROLLING OUR CORPORATIONS: CONTAINMENT VERSUS REHAB

[Demeter]

OpEdNews.com

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_tom_cobb_061018_controlling_our_corp.htm


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October 18, 2006

Controlling Our Corporations: Containment versus Rehab

By Tom Cobb



The New View of Capitalism

Liberals are finally gaining their voice on the problem of corporate capitalism. As corporate power has grown and consolidated over the last 25 years, they have honed their position on this rising concentration of power. By revealing how the granting of corporate privileges has corrupted the workings of both our marketplaces and our politics, a new view of American – and global - capitalism has begun to take hold. This view sees through the claims of conservatives regarding the "free" nature of our markets...Thom Hartmann has exposed the far-reaching influence the legal construct of corporate personhood has on our economy. Marjorie Kelly has written about how the corporate mission of maximizing profits has become so elevated, we can now speak seriously of an economy entirely given over to the "Divine Right of Capital". And Joel Bakan, the author of the "The Corporation", has described the corporate "person" as being a sociopathic personality....All of these perspectives have contributed to a unified view of the corporation. Rather than being a "natural" condition of free markets, the privileges of incorporation are granted by government, and serve as tools by which power is concentrated. Thus it is that corporate capitalism produces the very concentrations of power from which conservatives claim free markets will spare us.

Containment Strategies

ontainment strategies have been a losing game for some time now. Cons get to portray them as both expensive and ineffective, and then lobby for rollbacks and budget cuts. Regulators then become even less effective, thus providing the justification for yet further cuts in regulatory funding.

Rehab Strategies

The alternative to this losing game is a program of rehabilitation. Instead of trying to contain the poor behavior of corporations – behavior that is inherent to their design – we should improve the design of our corporations. In short, we should subject our corporations to a personality makeover. How would we go about doing this? This could most simply be done by restructuring our corporations so that corporate workforces controlled all voting shares.

Under such an ownership arrangement, every decision made by every stakeholder in our economy would be recalibrated, and each recalibration would be for the better. The corporation's mission would not be to maximize profits, but to maximize the interest of workers. Corporate leaders would be dedicated to preserving workers' jobs rather than outsource them. There would be far greater scrutiny of their leadership abilities as well, given how much closer workers are to the action than absentee investors now are. Workers would also make out better as consumers since corporate work forces would be naturally organized to bargain collectively as consumers. And as citizens, corporate workers would heighten their awareness of how our political process is influenced by business interests....With the increased job stability that would arise in a work world where workers enjoyed the right of self-determination in handling business downturns, the need for entitlement and safety-net programs would be reduced. More importantly, because the drivers of economic instability – unstable financial markets, and rising disparities in wealth and income - would be reduced, economic volatility would decline. In short, all the problems we now try to address through regulation and reparations would be alleviated by way of a simple design change. This change would radically alter the motives and means by which we all behave as economic players.

Making the Impossible Happen


HAD TO CUT TO THE BONE--DO READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE, IT'S WORTH IT!

Authors Website: http://outskirtspress.com/cgi/webpage.cgi?ISBN=159800350X

Authors Bio: As the author of "A Real Ownership Society", I advocate for socializing the behavior of our corporations, and democratizing their benefits. By discarding the conventional model of corporate ownership that now relies upon absentee ownership, and replacing it with one based on worker ownership, we can accomplish these ends.

[sweetheart]

1. no replacement for the state

Corporations cannot be reformed, they must seek to transform labour in to capital with ruthless cost efficiency.
It is not their purpose, or fair capability.

Rather, the state must always exert its role as employer of last resort, uptaker of cycles, and provider of spine.

To control corporations, the best solution is to create a federal corporate registry for tax payment. This registry
legally usurps all previous forms of corporate law, and makes the state a 50% silent shareholder in all corporations.
The state will reserve the right to deadlock a corporation and kill it, if need be, but more likely, to guide it as
a 50/50 venture between its owners and the people.

[Demeter]

2. Interesting Proposal

Let's hope things settle so that these ideas can be tried!

[yurbud]

4. what about corporations that falsely claim to be based in Caymen's or

somewhere else?

[Parisle]

3. A few preliminary, stop-gap measures could do wonders,...

---- Don't get me wrong,... I am all for the reexamination of how business should be directed to behave in the American republic,... and a greater degree of public direction is obviously in the cards. But for the immediate time being, we could accomplish quite a lot with a few common-sense & fairness measures, with patriotism as a determinant of the civics-index of how some business decisions are made.

---- Corporate welfare has to stop,... we know that much. Off-shored tax-sheltered corporate entities have to be curtailed. Outsourcing must at least bring with it a steep price in levies against those companies doing so much of it. NAFTA and CAFTA have to be scuttled. Illegal immigrants have to be deported, and stiff penalties exacted from those companies utilizing illegals. And the pervasive GOP-inspired trend towards deregulation must be reversed. These would put the economic structure back to approximately where it was in the 60's,... which was a damned sight better than it is today.

---- Now may not be the time for a wide-open national discussion of "socialism." The proper groundwork hasn't been laid for it, anyway.

[yurbud]

5. corp. welfare like drug r & d shouldn't have strings attached...

they should have a rope or choke collar. Right now, the only thing we get back for our public investment in private enterprise is the right to buy the products, work for the company, and maybe have our boat floated by increased general prosperity.

Instead, any drug developed with public money should have a price cap, oil pumped on public land or discovered with public money or refinery built with public money should have a maximum profit margin.

At the very least, extraction industries should give us something like 50% for non-renewables they take off public lands, and if they log on public lands, we ought to get a significant chunk of those profits.

Frankly, the rule of thumb should be "what would Hugo do?"

[yurbud]

6. how do co-ops do compared to corporations?