CORPORATIONS ARE NOT HUMANS : NOT EVEN CLOSE ---Episode 18

                         CORPORATIONS PLAY BY DIFFERENT RULES

   The publicly traded, limited liability corporation is capitalism's institutional form of choice because it allows the virtually unlimited concentration of power with minimal public accountability or legal liability. Actual shareholders, the real owners, rarely have any role in corporate affairs and bear no personal liability beyond the value of their investments. Directors and officers are protected from financial liability for acts of negligence or commission by the corporation's massive legal resources and company paid insurance 
policies. The same criminal act that would result in a stiff prison sentence, or even execution, if committed by an individual, brings a corporation only a fine --- usually inconsequential in relation to corporate assets and likely less than what it gained by committing the infraction. The prosecution of corporate executives for illegal corporate acts is extremely(and I mean extremely) rare. It is with good reason that William M. Dugger chracterizes the corporation as organized irresponsibility. 

   Few real people can begin to match the political resources that a large corporation ( Not even Mr. Gates or Mr. Buffett or the Sheik of Araby can match Exxon/Mobil or Walmart or British Petroleum or Dow Chemical or Monsanto and on and on .)  is able to amass in its behalf. Corporations may lack the right to vote, but that is a minor inconvenience, given their ability to mobilize hundreds of thousands of votes from among their workers, suppliers, dealers, customers, and the public, and to package millions of dollars in political contributions. 
   Left to their devices, corporations colonize markets and defeat the very mechanisms that theory tells us make the market work in the public interest. The limited liability, publicly traded corporation may be the favored institution of capitalism, but it is not a market institution. To the contrary, it is aggressively antimarket, because it works tirelessly to erode the essential conditions of the market's social efficiency.
   It is fully appropriate, therefore, that citizens view corporations with the same skepticism as did the early American settlers, granting corporate charters judiciously only to serve well-defined public purposes, setting clear rules for corporate function, holding corporations fully accountable for their actions, and barring them from political participation of any kind. 
   The owners and managers of corporations have the full rights of any citizen ---in their capacity as human being citizens ---to participate in defining public goals and policies. However, corporations are not people. They are alien to the ways of life, blind to the complex nonmaterial needs of human societies, and have no proper role in the political processes by which real people define the public interest and set standards for corporate conduct. 
   A corporate charter represents a privilege---not a right---that is granted by a government subject to the will of its people in return for the acceptance of corresponding obligations. It is up to the people who make up the electorate---not the fictitious persona of the corporation --- to define these privileges and obligations. We are learning through harsh experience that the survival of democracy depends on holding firmly to this principle. Democratic pluralism faces a paradox . During times of change, societies need to mobilize the full creative potential of their citizens in a way that can be achieved only under democratic pluralism. Yet it is in such stressful times that democratic pluralism seems least adequate and most susceptible to the certainty offered by the simplistic appeals of ideological demagogues. Instead of offering direction, democratic pluralism calls on people to find their own direction with a view to the good of the whole. Instead of certainty, it nurtures variety to the point of apparent chaos. These are its weaknesses, but also its genius. Democratic pluralism provides a framework within which each citizen contributes what he or she can toward addressing---in the context of family, community, and nation --- the countless changing needs faced by complex, dynamic human societies. Gradually, through a diffuse and chaotic social learning process, the lessons from countless innovations are distilled into changes in  local, national, and ultimately global institutions and policies.