in equitably distributing the planet’s resources to everyone involved. So what’s new?
As a lefty, I have no problem with the existence of corporations, and even corporate personhood, so long as they are heavily regulated and taxed. They have largely demonstrated they can only be trusted to do what is in their short term economic interest, at the expense of the health and well being of the rest of society. If you give them and inch, they cut off your fingers, so my patchouli-scented Birkenstock will remain firmly on their throat if I have my way. I simply don’t believe their promises of job creation.
It’s been fun.
Aloha
My problem with Citizens United is that it gives corporations the power to spend unlimited funds secretly for political purposes. It is without a doubt one of the stupidest, most partisan jobs of political hackery ever committed by the Supreme Court. As a practical matter, the people who control the purse strings on large corporations, or for that matter medium-sized ones, tend to be the wealthy oligarchs in top management. They determine where the funds go, and of course the funds go to the Republicans in the overwhelming majority of cases. The actual shareholders in the corporation are not consulted, even though it is THEIR money that is being used for these purposes.
The Supreme Court decision, whatever its twisted legal rationale, was clearly conceived as a funding mechanism for the Republican Party by the Supreme Court justices, whose conservative majority are clearly partisan hacks. The legal nature of corporations is just a sideshow.
[quote=“Evil_Captor, post:64, topic:561336”]
The Supreme Court decision, whatever its twisted legal rationale, was clearly conceived as a funding mechanism for the Republican Party by the Supreme Court justices, whose conservative majority are clearly partisan hacks. The legal nature of corporations is just a sideshow.[/QUOTE
I can’t wait for the case that would allow corporations to make political contributions but bar labor unions from making them.
Now that would really do some good.
There is so very much wrong with that sentence.
That would be just gilding on the lily that is the Citizens United decision. The right’s corporate supporters are legion. I know it must annoy you that the left has any large donors at all. I guess you will just have to deal.
Theft of what? From who? You make even less sense than usual.
Of course it’s earned? If I invest in a company, I have an expectation that it will use my investment to grow. I “earn” that income by taking on risk with my money.
That is a function of large organizations in general, not just corporations.
Is it the agenct issue between employees, management and owners/shareholders lefties have a problem with or is it simply that corporations are large accumulations of wealth? If it’s the former, I can understand that as a legitimate problem. Ownership of a corporation is typically widespread and diluted. I may own insignificant shares of some company I have no idea about because it’s in a fund in my 401k.
Management is hired by the shareholders to run the company with the expectation that they will do so in the interests of the shareholders.
Employees (and mangement) often have no ownership stake in the company they work for. They are resources to be utilized and discarded as needed much like the desks and computers.
Is that necessarily a bad system? Depends. Do you as some low-level IT guy or sales rep want to bear legal responsibility for the actions of the company? Do you want to suffer personal financial losses (other than loss of income) or have creditors come after your personal assets if the company goes out of business? Should some guy working in the mail room have equal share in business decisions as the CEO? There are reasons the structure has been set up the way it is.
The only thing worse than the indirect ownership corporations foster is indirect investment. How does one ‘earn’ income by taking a risk in a company when the majority of investments are part of mutual funds which exist primarily to diversify risk. The only risk is systemic, not based on a particular venture, so I have a hard time seeing how that return is ‘earned’.
How do shareholders hire management if they do not even know if they own shares, or they are ‘insignificant’ and not worth the time of the average investor to read proxy statements and vote for board of directors. Wall Street knew exactly what it was doing when it fostered 401Ks and mutual funds. Institutional funds and investment bankers hire management (through the board) and often creditor interests will outweigh equity interests. ‘Ownership’ society my ass…
And corporations often take better care of desks and computers since they are considered assets and not liabilities. That we place higher values on equipment than the people who use them is one of the flaws of the corporate model.
Every member of an organization should bear some responsibility for the actions of that group as long as the association is voluntary. I won’t blame slaves for the actions of their masters, but hired employees, especially management, should bear some responsibility for how they decide to earn their compensation. And the guy in the mailroom should have an equal share in deciding who the CEO should be. If the organization does not care what the guy in the mailroom thinks, then why did they hire him? Why hire someone that does not care about who the CEO is and just wants to pick up his check? (Yes, that is a rhetorical question. I am afraid that I do know the real answer.)
As far as protection of personal assets, that is a harder question. When the majority of those assets were acquired through capital gains, dividend income or direct compensation should they be entitled to protection? And not having that protection does not seem to stop sole proprietors from opening up shop. I would say that having to risk your personal assets would lead to better business decisions. I do feel that sole proprietors and partnerships are better forms of organization because they do create more accountability.
As far as large accumulations of wealth, I just see them as another tool that can be used for good or ill. In the hands of Microsoft, not so much. In the hands of the Gates Foundation, a bit better. And no, the irony is not lost in that the Gates Foundation was funded by Microsoft (more or less.) It would be nice to find a better way to establish foundations of that scale, but I will take philanthropy until then.
Essentially for myself, the only true ‘owners’ of capital (physical or financial) are the users of that capital. If you do not work directly for an enterprise, you have no right of ownership. If one wants to invest in another enterprise, buy their bonds or other debt instruments. If ones only concern is an investment return or income, they should have no ownership stake. If all they want is money, that is all they should receive. But debt holders should be clearly subservient to equity holders which is not currently the case.
But that only covers ownership. Governance is another matter. I would define a business as public or private not as a function of their shareholders but who their clients are. If they actively select who they work for, then I would consider them private - most professional firms fall in this category. If they open a shop or make products available to the general public, then they are public regardless of their investors. Private firms can govern themselves any way they wish as long as their clients are happy. Public firms should be required to have an independent board comprised of representatives of all stakeholders - the community, labor, suppliers, customers, etc.
I take it you don’t have a 401k plan?
Not to my knowledge. I have in the past, and tried to choose only bond funds. I won’t decline matching funds when offered, but I try to mitigate the damage…
Then maybe capital gains shouldn’t be taxed?
I don’t know. All I know is that there is nothing wrong with buying something you think is going to increase in value and then making a profit.
Hey, if you don’t like the way the company is being run, sell off your shares.
The flaw is that people are assholes. It doesn’t matter how you organize them.
Well, the real answer is at the end of the day, the world of my job (just like every employees) typically consists of my boss, my immediate coworkers and my clients. I don’t know that I want the mailroom guy adding his two cents in every decision the CEO or VP of my group makes because quite frankly he isn’t qualified.
But now you are starting to get into specific management issues. How do you tap into the knowledge of a thousand employees without creating utter chaos? Companies are constantly experimenting with different techniques.
Some companies institute things like stock purchase programs to make employees feel a greater sense of ownership in the company. But how do you institute true ownership when the CEO makes hundreds of times a typical employee?
I would say it certainly depends on what the ‘something’ is. Unfortunately that is the main reason people buy stock - and don’t particularly care how or why it increases and how many people are screwed in the process. That they should have greater rights to the return of a company than the people who actually created it, I consider a travesty. It also encourages those creators to not give a crap who gets screwed either, they get their wages regardless.
Again, a major problem with modern investments is that most people don’t know the specifics of their portfolios, and lack the time or inclination to dig to deep as long as the returns are there.
I would suggest that the entire fields of organizational behavior and social psychology would disagree with that statement. Certainly some institutions can encourage one to embrace one’s inner asshole rather than encourage more decent behavior, and that those institutions will then tend to hire those who wish to embrace their inner asshole and make any attempts to modify their behavior seem pointless. Reformers carry on nonetheless.
That is the standard American set of blinders - I didn’t screw over anyone personally today, so I can’t be a bad guy even though I work for a corporation that builds bombs, contracts for child labor, sells faulty products, etc. And we wonder why half the world hates us…
And the issue is not having the mailroom guy add his two cents in to every CEO decision, but to allow him to throw his two cents in on who the CEO is. Everyone does so implicitly - if you don’t like the CEO’s decisions, then don’t work for that firm. But making the choice explicit should encourage greater awareness and responsibility for the results of that decision and remove one of the causes of that set of blinders. And making the choice entirely up to those would be subordinate to the CEO would probably create a different caliber of leadership that recognizes that most people choose to work for specific firms above and beyond a paycheck and deserve more recognition and respect than the fucking furniture.
That should be obvious - only allow the true owners (i.e. employees) have ownership. And a good way to stop the CEO from making hundreds of times a typical employee is to have compensation committees staffed by typical employees, not other CEO or executives. Let them argue to their employees why they should receive hundreds of times more. I imagine CEO pay might start coming down a bit when they have to receive approval from the shop floor, not their golfing buddies.
Granted most of these issues are certainly related to management and governance, and several fields of study are engaged in determining the correlation and possible causation between organizational models and the actions of its members.
With that said, corporations have been proven to be pretty much sociopaths and encourage sociopathic behaviors, but as long as they have good returns, who gives a fuck, right? Hell, economics and finance don’t care about normative issues. And the law says the fiduciary duty is paramount. Everyone is a perfect agent with perfect information. If they make poor decisions and people get hurt, its their own damn fault, so don’t blame me, right?
The whole charade was created so the buck doesnt stop anywhere - it aint the CEOs fault, the board hired him, it aint the boards fault, they were elected by the shareholders, it aint the shareholder’s fault, each investors’ percentage is too insignificant to matter… i could not imagine a more perfect method for making sure some people are allowed to fuck over other people and not be held accountable. But hey its all voluntary and legal, so who cares?
But you do realize that isn’t the reality? Corporations get sued. CEOs and officers get arrested and go to jail. I don’t know where this fantasy comes from that companies just get away with doing whatever they want. Probably too much tv and movies.
The reality is that lawsuits are fairly useless when it comes to changing corporate behavior (cf. Philip Morris v. Williams) . I cannot think a single company that was forced out of business because of losing a lawsuit. Hell, even the tobacco companies are still around. And the number of CEOs sent to jail for corporate crimes is laughable. A few are convicted of fraud for personal misuse or lying about corporate activities, but if the corporation itself is engaged in illegal activities, the CEO usually just resigns to go ‘spend time with the family’, the company pays a fine, takes a hit on the quarterly earnings statement, and then back to business as usual. For every Tyco or Enron, there are a dozen Haliburtons or ExxonMobils that damn well do as they please.
The ‘fantasy’ comes from reading too much business news over the last twenty years, from watching corporate intimidation through SLAPP suits, seeing countless malfeasance settled ‘out of court’, with confidentiality or non-disclosure agreements standard since og-forbid there is actually a permanent public record of anything. TV and movies aren’t interested in most of the activities going on; they are too busy chasing the missing blond of the week and turning her story in the next Lifetime special.
This is an interesting question.
Just t play devil’s advocate, the problem with prohibiting a legal person from speech that you would allow a natural person to engage in is that you’re playing something of a legal shell game. Suppose I use Facebook and a web page get 1000 like-minded people to form the Citizens For Saying Sarah Palin’s An Idiot Coalition, which we incorporate in accordance with the laws of the State of Delaware, and we pool our money to run ads saying Sarah Palin’s an idiot.
If the law prevents CFSSPAIC from running those ads, it is in effect stopping 1,001 people from having their say. On the other hand, if a rich Sarah Palin supporter wants to use his personal money to run ads saying Palin is great, that would be permitted, because he’s a human being, not a corporation. In what way was the freedom of speech and political discourse helped by this distinction? Not at all - if anything, it was harmed.
Consider Kennedy’s opinion in Citizens United: “If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.” At first glance, it’s hard to argue with the logic here; it’s asinine to say that what one person is allowed to say should not be allowed by two people if they happened to create a corporation to make it easier to pay for the airtime.
Prohibiting the corporation I own from buying airtime, but saying it’s okay for ME to buy the airtime, makes it harder for me to have my say. It is absolutely an infringement on my freedom of speech; to be honest, I don’t see how, logically, legislating “You can say X, but you can’t say X using a corporation to help disseminate it” is at all different from legislating “You can say X, but you can’t say X using a newspaper to help disseminate it.”
What you are describing has nothing to do with “the corporate model.” What you’re describing is a feature of the manner in which accounting is done. It has nothing to do with the legal concept of incorporation.
“Afraid”?
What’s wrong with just hiring the guy so he delivers the mail?
Your airy-fairy fantasy of citizens forming corporations to make political ads very nicely makes your point, but has almost nothing to do with reality. The reality is that wealthy conservatives own and/or run corporations to make money. They use that money to advance conservative candidates and causes, most especially those having to do with expanding the reach of corporate power and increasing the wealth of the already wealthy. That is the entirely logical and predictable outcome of Citizens United. Everything else is just after-the-fact rationalization of political hackery, including your devil’s advocacy.
Corporations have a staff of the best connected and highly respected lawyers in the world. You don’t get a sniff of justice when they own everybody in the system. It is rare to win and takes a long time to get “justice”. Check out what happened to the people harmed by the Exxon Valdez. Exxon destroyed the environment and destroyed lives. That is American justice. The best justice that money can buy.
You’ve set up a straw man of the weakest sort. I’m as liberal as they come around here and I am critical of corporations, but I do not for a moment argue that they shouldn’t exist. They should. But modern America abuses the corporate status in just about every way imaginable: for taxes, for politics, for personal gain. And we resist regulating corporations.
Corporations exist primarily for the benefit of shareholders. Yet shareholders have little to no control over corporate salaries, which reward high ranking executives far more than the shareholders are rewarded and when these executives are highly fungible. Corporate boards give them ludicrously lucrative contracts and make them unaccountable to the shareholders. They are also unaccountable to the law. Abuse of corporate status in the insurance industry alone would land dozens of people in prison if done outside the protective cocoon of the corporation (or other insurance entity) and civil juries regularly go to task on the corporations. But if done by individuals these adjusters would be going to prison.
Next, corporations pay about one-fifth the marginal rate on earned income as demonstrated in that other thread. (See my IBM comparison.) That is wonderful for the corporation, but lousy for the working stiff who gets none of those deductions and has to pay five times as much. The country wasn’t founded so that we could be enslaved to corporations and this is hardly equal person hood. If I can buy as many politicians as I need if I am a corporation (except the few who cannot be bought) by promising in kind advertising either directly or indirectly, I really only need to buy a majority along with my fellow US Chamber of Commerce members. Corporations don’t need the vote, politicians are for sale.
Every evil that haunts government also haunts corporations, which are mini governments that are oligarchies that appoint dictators. There are no checks and balances except what the oligarchs and government manage to enforce, which is damn little.
But despite my criticisms of corporations, I would strongly oppose prohibiting corporations, which the OP adopts as its straw position. What society needs from corporations is that they follow the laws, support laws keeping their competitors and themselves honest, and pay their fair share of the taxes. Corporations in modern America do none of these things because conservatives have utterly sold out to these private dictatorial governments and made their advantages of corporate citizenship superior to those of live citizenship. We are second class citizens to corporations, and that is strongly opposed. Real conservatives would also recognize this danger.
Sure, they go to court, they get sentenced. But they don’t go to anything like “prison”, not the prison you got to for stealing cars or selling crack. They go to Club Fed, which is more like a very gated community.