A big dream with practical steps to take to make it happen
How Popular Movements Can Confront Corporate Power and Win
| We excerpt with permission from this article by M. Marx & M. Kelly in YES! Magazine, posted at AlterNet, August 29, 2007, www.alternet.org/workplace/61104. They are part of the Strategic Corporate Initiative, which unifies efforts to curtail corporate power and win a humane, sustainable, and democratic society and economy. |
by Michael Marx and Marjorie Kelly
We solve some serious problems when we make corporations serve the public good. The main components of such a movement already exist: organized labor, environmentalists, religious activists, shareholder activists, students, farmers, consumer advocates, health activists, and community-based organizations.If we are to close the gap in power, our strategies must evolve. We need to dream bigger, to speak with one voice across issue sectors, and to act more strategically. We need to focus less on symptoms and more on the underlying cause.
The streams of many movements must flow together into a single river. The need for unified action impelled a small group of organizations to initiate a Strategic Corporate Initiative (SCI), of which we are a part. The SCI team interviewed dozens of colleagues and progressive business executives to develop a strategy to rein in corporations.
Most extractive industries (fishing, oil, coal, mining, timber) take wealth from the ecological commons while paying only symbolic amounts to governments and leaving behind damaged ecosystems and depleted resources. We need to limit use, assign property rights to trusts or public authorities, and charge market prices to users. We need to celebrate and encourage alternative corporate designs, such as for-benefit corporations, community-owned cooperatives, trusts, and employee-owned companies.
How can we change laws regulating corporate behavior when corporations dominate the political process? The answer is that change begins with the people, not their government. It always has. Civil society organizations and communities can align their interests to produce a wave that government leaders must either surf upon or drown within.
The people control the vital issue of legitimacy, and no system can long stand that loses its legitimacy, as fallen despots of the 20th century have demonstrated. Corporations have already lost much of their moral legitimacy. Business Week in 2002 found that more than four out of five people believed corporations were too powerful. A national poll by Lake, Snell, Perry, and Mermin two years ago concluded that over three-quarters of Americans distrust CEOs and blame them for the loss of jobs. An international poll by Globe Scan recently found corporations far behind NGOs in public trust.
We can advance new frames. For example, "Moral Economy," suggested by Fred Block of the Longview Institute, is a frame that puts the firing of thousands of employees and simultaneous awarding of multimillion-dollar bonuses to executives in a moral context.
Other frameworks like Community and the Commons challenge individualism and self-interest. Community well-being becomes the standard by which business practices are judged, and communities themselves the arbiters of whether standards are met. The Commons represents our shared property and wealth, which is not to be exploited for the selfish benefit of the few.
At the international level, we need regional organizations to come together to agree on overarching priorities. At the national level, we need discussions that forge strategic priorities. At the community level, we need to create a network of municipalities working together to challenge corporate powers, to promote alternative business forms, and to inventory and claim our common wealth assets. Communities can also take the lead in creating public financing of campaigns and in tying procurement and investment policies to corporate social ratings.
The idea is not that people will drop their issues and adopt new ones, but that we can learn to do both at once. We can knit ourselves into a single movement by adopting common frames and by integrating strategic common priorities into existing campaigns.
As individuals, we can relegate our identities as consumers and investors to secondary status, elevating to first place our identities as citizens and members of families and communities, people with a stewardship responsibility for the natural world and with moral obligations to one another. We can stop thinking that the solution is more Democrats in power, and realize it is more democracy.
In 20 years, imagine community self-governance has become the new norm. No longer can companies open new stores in communities where they are unwanted, or play communities off one another to extract illegitimate public subsidies. We value and protect our precious common wealth, from ecological commons like air, water, fisheries, and seeds, to cultural commons like music and science.
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Michael Marx is director of Corporate Ethics International (CEI) in Portland, Oregon. Marjorie Kelly is with the Tellus Institute in Boston and the author of The Divine Right of Capital. Read more about the SCI and read their full report: "Strategic Corporate Initiative: Toward a Global Citizens' Movement to Bring Corporations Back Under Control.".
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Also see: Congressional Committee Votes to Continue Corporate Welfare Scandal
Mauritius Offering Private Sea and Beach Leases
Disparate elements call for a new constitutional convention |
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