Post by unlawflcombatnt on Feb 24, 2008 6:25:37 GMT -6
from USA Today (2004):
Corporations as psychopaths
By Lyn Millner
March 28, 2004
"Nearly everything we do involves a corporation — what we eat, where we work, what we wear, how we get where we're going. It's the dominant institution of our time.
Yet few of us question how it became so powerful and what its power might lead to. Recent scandals have prompted scrutiny of specific corporations and their officers, but not of the institution itself....
In The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Joel Bakan puts the corporation on the analyst's couch and determines that it is deeply flawed. Bakan is not an analyst; he's a professor of law at the University of British Columbia.
In the eyes of the law, a corporation is a person. And what a person. It is required by law to put its self-interest above all else and to maximize wealth for its shareholders. (Bakan's analysis concerns publicly traded Anglo-American corporations.)
Consider it the business equivalent of the dinner guest who talks about himself all night, steals food off your plate, kicks you under the table, shows no concern for your well-being and then sticks you with the tab.
Or he could be perfectly polite and wonderful. It would depend on whether he has anything to gain from that. Because the corporation is a psychopath, Bakan says. Or, at least, it has the capacity to be one.
Bakan asks and attempts to answer the questions people normally want to know about any governing institution. What is it? How did it get to be the way it is? Is it too powerful? Should we impose checks on it? If so, how?
Bakan makes clear that "the people who run corporations are, for the most part, good people. (But) the money they manage and invest is not theirs. They can no sooner use it to heal the sick, save the environment or feed the poor than they can to buy themselves villas in Tuscany."
While many corporations do good in the world, their legal structure allows, and even invites, enormous potential for doing harm, he writes.
A corporation "tends to be more profitable to the extent it can make other people pay the bills for its impact on society," says Robert Monks, businessman and corporate governance adviser. The economic term for these costs is "externalities." They may take the form of pollution, harm to workers, consumer deaths, etc. In Monks' words, the corporation is a "doom machine."
Corporations don't control everything, Bakan writes. The public sphere protects the things most of us deem too vital to be privatized {ndash} like water, firefighters and natural reserves. That's changing though, he says. In one town in Bolivia, the water system was privatized. People were charged for the water they collected from their own wells. Even rainwater was off limits.
In the USA, marketers manipulate children to pump up sales of everything from dolls to cars to financial services. If you read no other part, read Chapter 5, which shows how corporate exploitation is seeping into areas you may have assumed were sacred.
Bakan does such a good job of creating awareness that it can't help but be a call to action. But what kinds of action? Who or what can rein in the corporation? The market? Government? Citizens? This is where opinions diverge.
Some say the market will take care of itself. If investors don't like what a company stands for, they won't invest in it. Bakan says market "democracy" is skewed toward those with more money. Many corporations insist they can be trusted to do right. Bakan comes down in favor of strengthening government regulation, saying that although corporations may promise to be more socially responsible, it isn't in their makeup...."
Corporations as psychopaths
By Lyn Millner
March 28, 2004
"Nearly everything we do involves a corporation — what we eat, where we work, what we wear, how we get where we're going. It's the dominant institution of our time.
Yet few of us question how it became so powerful and what its power might lead to. Recent scandals have prompted scrutiny of specific corporations and their officers, but not of the institution itself....
In The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Joel Bakan puts the corporation on the analyst's couch and determines that it is deeply flawed. Bakan is not an analyst; he's a professor of law at the University of British Columbia.
In the eyes of the law, a corporation is a person. And what a person. It is required by law to put its self-interest above all else and to maximize wealth for its shareholders. (Bakan's analysis concerns publicly traded Anglo-American corporations.)
Consider it the business equivalent of the dinner guest who talks about himself all night, steals food off your plate, kicks you under the table, shows no concern for your well-being and then sticks you with the tab.
Or he could be perfectly polite and wonderful. It would depend on whether he has anything to gain from that. Because the corporation is a psychopath, Bakan says. Or, at least, it has the capacity to be one.
Bakan asks and attempts to answer the questions people normally want to know about any governing institution. What is it? How did it get to be the way it is? Is it too powerful? Should we impose checks on it? If so, how?
Bakan makes clear that "the people who run corporations are, for the most part, good people. (But) the money they manage and invest is not theirs. They can no sooner use it to heal the sick, save the environment or feed the poor than they can to buy themselves villas in Tuscany."
While many corporations do good in the world, their legal structure allows, and even invites, enormous potential for doing harm, he writes.
A corporation "tends to be more profitable to the extent it can make other people pay the bills for its impact on society," says Robert Monks, businessman and corporate governance adviser. The economic term for these costs is "externalities." They may take the form of pollution, harm to workers, consumer deaths, etc. In Monks' words, the corporation is a "doom machine."
Corporations don't control everything, Bakan writes. The public sphere protects the things most of us deem too vital to be privatized {ndash} like water, firefighters and natural reserves. That's changing though, he says. In one town in Bolivia, the water system was privatized. People were charged for the water they collected from their own wells. Even rainwater was off limits.
In the USA, marketers manipulate children to pump up sales of everything from dolls to cars to financial services. If you read no other part, read Chapter 5, which shows how corporate exploitation is seeping into areas you may have assumed were sacred.
Bakan does such a good job of creating awareness that it can't help but be a call to action. But what kinds of action? Who or what can rein in the corporation? The market? Government? Citizens? This is where opinions diverge.
Some say the market will take care of itself. If investors don't like what a company stands for, they won't invest in it. Bakan says market "democracy" is skewed toward those with more money. Many corporations insist they can be trusted to do right. Bakan comes down in favor of strengthening government regulation, saying that although corporations may promise to be more socially responsible, it isn't in their makeup...."