The Corporation

The Corporation, by Joel Bakan, is probably my favourite political book. As the name implies, it has to do with corporations. And the reason I like it so much is because I think its message is hugely important. So I'm going to explain the book, and maybe you'll agree. Maybe you'll even read it.

Corporations are publicly-traded companies that have no owner, they have shareholders and a CEO that runs the company. Their legal responsibility is to produce profit for the shareholders- if the CEO does anything to reduce profit, he may be fired or sued. Bakan's argument is that corporations are psychopaths, acting only in their own interest. In the movie, The Corporation, they keep an actual checklist of actions that corporations take that correspond to the FBI's list of psychopathic actions.

And it's true. The only time they care about the environment, or their employees, or any of the problems they cause, is when it could damage their sales. If you take a company like The Body Shop, whose whole business practice is based on not using animal-testing and being ethical, and it becomes incorporated, then that company will start to cut corners and maybe test on animals a little. Which it was found guilty of doing. And quite often they don't break their code of ethics, they break the law, for the simple reason is that by doing so, the profit they earn will be greater than the fine.

This is obviously a huge problem as corporations are immensely powerful (more than half of the world's 100 largest economies are corporations) and have a huge, often damaging effect on our lives. Bakan offers a few solutions to this problem. There are two sources of change: consumers, and voters. Yes, it's true that consumers can elect not to buy from companies unless they behave ethically, but not only are corporations still likely to break the law and act damagingly when they can get away with it, but this style of voting with your dollar is flawed. This is because it means that richer people have a greater voice than the poor, and also excludes the companies that we don't buy from (mining, anyone?) or can't stop buying from. The other way is to convince politicians to enact harsher fees on breaking the law and to rephrase the roles of corporations so that profit is not their only goal. This has the problem that lobbyists are an effective and legal way to raise profits, so anti-corporation legislation is hard to pass.

In any case, I feel that if corporations had to bear responsibility for the environmental and social damage they cause, the world would have many less problems than it currently does. So long as corporations destroy the environment, coerce weaker governments into allowing corporations to have their way, and deal with dictatorships (legitimizing those corrupt governments), creating any kind of positive change will be a challenge indeed.

(Oh, and I didn't go to that STAND meeting. Oh well, I'll do my own research.)