Someone sent me a link to this article this morning. What a wonderful summary of what's happened in the distortion of the corporation to its current form of pure anti-American greed. This should be required reading for everyone!
Oh, and do read the whole thing. I wish I could have copied more than just 4 paragraphs of this!!
Corporations and the Public Interest
A look at how the originally purpose behind corporate charters has been lost
by Jonathan Rowe
One of the articles in Business On A Small Planet (IC#41)
Summer 1995, Page 26
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC41/Rowe.htmProfit Machines
It gets even weirder. The modern corporation actually can be incapable of commitment to a community or any other realm of concern that might diminish its profits. Individual entrepreneurs, including the owners of small and family-held corporations, can express their conscience through their enterprise. They can choose to make less money for the sake of a larger good.
The publicly-held corporation, by contrast, generally cannot. Officers are subject to shareholder suits if they do not put shareholders - i.e. profits - first. The corporation becomes a greed machine, an engine of acquisition that is not subject to the urgings of individual conscience and responsibility.
Free market fundamentalists such as Professor Milton Friedman argue that it is wrong in principle to distract the corporation with any such extraneous concerns as conscience or the need to help the society survive. For the corporation to pursue any goal besides the maximization of monetary profit, he says, would disrupt the cosmic market scheme.
If that's true, it means the largest and most powerful "persons" in America are exempt from any standards of individual responsibility and from any obligation to help solve problems in voluntary and nongovernmental ways.