19 Corporations
Austin
Having given greed freer rein, we have gradually super-sized the impulse via the creation of corporations – ‘corporate persons’. These larger-than-life figures roam the cultural landscape leaving us at Lilliputian scale to thread a careful path among them. Not only are they 1,000-fold – or 10,000- or 100,000-fold – larger than individual persons – the original ‘person’ concept – but they are legally bound to pursue self-interest in a way that we would never think of legally binding real individuals, and which no non-sociopath would ever accept. Indeed, we have effectively created gargantuan sociopaths and given them full protection of the law and increasing capacity to shape those laws. 78 Challenging these entities of our own creation is becoming difficult: exercise some moral leadership from within and you risk being denigrated as a ‘whistle-blower’. We have both super-sized and super-empowered self-interest, out of a fundamental belief that the market system can adequately harness the consequences.
Austin (2021) Market-led Sustainability is a ‘Fix that Fails’… (pdf)
Dessler
Out-of-control corporate power is the real cause of climate change
It started with Reagan, who articulated in his inaugural address that “Government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem.” Reagan and his cronies then began diminishing the levers of power of the government. One of the most important things they did was relax antitrust enforcement and oversight of corporate mergers. With this new, lenient stance, the 1980s witnessed a surge in corporate mergers, putting us on the road to the creation of the all-powerful corporate behemoths we live with today.
Along with other deregulation, the power of corporations has been accumulating ever since. It was turbocharged by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which increased political spending by corporations and the wealthy, shifting political power away from the average voter.
This has laid bare the error in Reagan’s position. As the government ceases to regulate markets, the power does not descend to the individual. Rather, the power is grabbed by corporations. Today, a small number of corporations control the information we get about our elections, they control what we pay for lifesaving drugs, they control the food system, they control the housing market, and many other things. Their goal is to extract every penny from consumers while paying their workers as little as possible.
You might say there’s nothing wrong with this! You’d rather have profit-minded corporations running our society rather than the government.
The corporate world doesn’t care if the world ends in 10 years — they care about next quarter or, if they’re really a long-term thinker, a few years. This is how you get out-of-control climate change. If you plan to live more than a decade, or if you have kids, or you just have a soul, then you should care about the long-term future of the world and therefore want to control climate change. Sadly, corporations don’t.