Progressive Ponderings: Are Corporations Governable? Part 1

by Joe Mayer

Corporations Versus the People

Who is the economy serving?

• The jobless mired in poverty without hope?
• The homeless through bank foreclosure?
• Those driven to bankruptcy by our lack of a caring health care system?
• The working poor?
• The .5% of us who sacrifice for corporate wars and return home with a badge in place of a career?
• The credit card holders and day-lender clients being squeezed into a debtors’ hole?

One could go on and on. In these cases, ordinary citizens suffer from the “for profit only” business credo. Big money’s greed buries the common good. With the recent recession, our faulty ideals and ailing democracy are painfully defined. Senator Bernie Sanders expressed it accurately stating we’re at a crossroads as to “whether Congress has the ability to regulate Wall Street, or Wall Street will continue to regulate Congress.”

Congress, and especially the Senate, has jumped on multiple opportunities for political theater. Bankers, traders, oil executives, coal CEOs and other overpaid executives, called before various Congressional committees, suffer through blistering attacks of Congressional posturing. The final results: bank and financial services stocks went up the day “reform” passed; the day the “tough” health care “reform” bill passed, the stocks of HMOs, health care insurers, and pharmaceutical manufacturers all rose.

In the corporate world, profit trumps community. Profit trumps the common good. Profit trumps democracy. An institution whose sole purpose is “for profit only” is motivated by self-interest. As the corporate “self-interest” dominates the corporate culture, its motive is mimicked by humans surviving within that culture. “Rugged individualism” and “personal self-interest” become the virtues that lead to success. Monetary success or failure becomes the primary measure of one’s value. Competition for, rather than cooperation in, defines one’s personal worth.

For over two centuries the “free-market” economic system has permeated every corner of our globe. Its greed-framed competition has served a few of us with luxurious living styles, but also condemned two-thirds of humankind into a life of poverty and suffering. But measures of human happiness and fulfillment indicate that cooperation – expressed in love, concern, empathy, justice – produces more interior success and value, more satisfaction and contentment.

We are also now over two centuries into our experiment in governing together, of “we the people” cooperating in solving our needs and wants. Many see this experiment in democracy fading – being trumped by corporate profits – even as we try to export it along with our economic system.

Do we want, and can we survive, being governed by a “self-interested, for-profit-only” economic system? Or must we insist on a more inclusive government “by the people?”