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Important Corporate Reform Proposals
Enforce existing laws and punish
corporate lawbreakers:
1. Expand the budget and the staff for prosecuting white-collar crime.
2. Actively enforce the 1934 Securities Exchange Act.
3. Give corporate criminals real jail time.
4. Revoke professional licenses for lawyers and accountants who aid in fraud.
5. Ban firms that commit fraud from receiving government contracts.
6. Expand SEC disclosure standards to include environmental and social issues.
7. Double the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) present budget.
(click here for details)
Improve corporate governance and
strengthen shareholder rights:
1. Make sure that independent boards are actually "independent".
2. Allow cumulative voting for shareholder resolutions and corporate
board elections.
3. Hold boards of directors more accountable for malfeasance and misfeasance.
4. Ban all loans to company insiders.
5. Require that investors are given sufficient governance rights and remedies.
(click here for details)
Pass new legislation:
1. Create a commission for the study of corporate power.
2. Establish full federal funding of elections.
3. Repeal the laws that shield lawyers, accountants and bankers from being sued for collusion in securities fraud and other corporate crimes.
4. Enact legislation to establish Financial Consumer Associations.
5. Create a Federal Bureau of Audits, an independent agency responsible for overseeing and regulating the accounting industry.
6. Close the loophole that allows corporations to avoid paying U.S. taxes
by reincorporating in an offshore tax haven.
7. Mandate strict separation between investment banking, insurance, and
investment advice.
8. Provide real pension protection for workers.
9. Expand corporate whistleblower protections.
10. Close the revolving door between business and government.
11. Expand the scope of the False Claims Act.
12. Make CEOs personally liable for financial fraud.
13. Make meaningful cuts in corporate welfare, including eliminating the
Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC).
14. Strengthen the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to prosecute U.S. companies
and their subsidiaries that bribe public officials in other countries.
15. Place a cap on the ratio of CEO pay to entry-level pay.
16. Eliminate the double standard for stock options, whereby companies
can get a tax write-off for stock options without having to list it as
an expense on their financial statements.
17. Require day-of disclosure for all executive stock sales.
18. Roll back the devastating effects of electricity deregulation by amending
the Federal Power Act.
19. Regulate the trading of derivatives, including energy futures.
20. Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act.
21. Pass the Code for Corporate Citizenship in all 50 states.
(click here for details)
And finally and importantly:
1. Amend the Constitution to define only people as “persons,”
preventing powerful corporations (“artificial persons”), already given
privileges and immunities denied human beings, from usurping rights
designed to protect natural human beings.
(click here for details)
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