Challenging Corporate Power on a Number of Fronts
Corporations did not always have such a firm grip on power and wield such commanding influence over our lives. Even though the problems of corporate dominance may seem insurmountable, we can proceed toward countering their power and grip over all of society by building a widespread movement of citizens tackling the problem from many angles, ultimately reasserting citizen authority over corporations.

There is a huge array of potential solutions, and a variety of strategic approaches that can be used, including legislative fixes, legal challenges, community empowerment and direct limits of corporations. Some are already being used in one place or another; others have yet to be tried. None of these is the magic bullet to suddenly fix the problem of abusive corporate power. These approaches vary in size and scope and their usefulness and appropriateness will vary from community to community, and from issue to issue. For example, in some places citizens can pursue legislative strategies. Under other circumstances, it may be necessary to begin with an educational program to lay the groundwork before mounting a fundamental challenge to entrenched corporate interests. In fact, all of these approaches should include an educational component and focused outreach to new people and groups. A successful national movement to curb abusive corporate power will include efforts on many fronts and will operate on the local, state and national levels all at once. We need organized citizens to educate one another and mobilize a multi-faceted, coordinated campaign to make substantial steps forward.

ILLEGITIMATE LEGAL RIGHTS
Ultimately, we need to reclaim the very concepts with which democracy was originally conceived; corporations only have the rights that we as citizens allow them to have; they should exist to provide the public good. Citizen participation, not the maximization of corporate profit, is the fundamental essence of democracy.

Corporations have not always had a firm grip on the rights of people while managing to escape the responsibilities of citizenship. At the center of the illegitimate corporate claim to the rights of people is the notion of corporate personhood, based on the 1886 case Santa Clara v Southern Pacific Railroad. While 100 plus years of corporate legal theory is based on the corporations-as-people assumption, remember that the Supreme Court has never ruled on corporate personhood. American citizens have never voted on corporate personhood and congress has never passed legislation about corporate personhood. We have truly been bamboozled. The struggle to reclaim citizen authority over corporations and strip the illegitimate corporate claims to constitutional rights and protections of people will require years, perhaps decades of work. It will necessarily involve both local and national campaigns as well as legal and legislative battles. Although revoking corporate personhood may ultimately require a constitutional amendment, there are significant steps we can take before we are strong enough to mount a campaign of that magnitude. (See Box entitled Abolishing Corporate Personhood for an example of a local approach.)

Another approach is to challenge specific corporate rights. One of the many rights that corporations claim is that of free speech, which, among other things, allows them to make campaign contributions. This "right" was affirmed in the 1976 case Buckley v. Valeo which stated that money is a form of free speech and corporations, as people, have the right to use speech (i.e. money) to influence candidates and elections. Finding a way to legally challenge this assumption may be a key step to significantly reduce corporate influence of politics as well as educate the public about corporate personhood.

Corporate access to First Amendment rights is also being challenged on another front. Marc Kasky, an activist in California, alleges that Nike is deceiving consumers in a PR campaign to convince the public that it has cleaned up its subcontractors' sweatshop labor practices. It is against California law for corporations to intentionally deceive people so Kasky is suing Nike, Inc. Nike isn't saying it didn't lie, but rather is arguing that corporations have the same free speech rights as individual citizens and therefore can lie just like regular folks. The California Supreme Court disagreed, and now the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether Nike can use the First Amendment to protect its "right to lie. " This controversy is an excellent opportunity to educate the public about corporate claims to constitutional rights and re-examine the assumptions of corporate personhood. A decision is expected in late July 2003. See www.reclaimdemocracy.org for more information.

Corporate Crime and Punishment
A double standard plagues our criminal justice system. While corporations have the legal rights of people, they escape many of the responsibilities and consequences of citizenship. Burglars, car thieves and drug users typically are aggressively prosecuted and serve years in jail. Corporate law violations cost society at least $2 trillion dollars and often go unpunished. When corporate crimes like toxic pollution, food and drug violations, fraud, bribery, illegal agreements, and wrongful death of community members and employees are prosecuted, the resulting fines are generally insufficient and can be written off as the cost of doing business. Individuals convicted of criminal activity can have their rights taken away from them and often have difficulties getting a job. Corporations with repeated criminal activity usually suffer no such difficulties, not even when it comes to getting government contracts . Threats of imprisonment are meaningless against corporations because, while the law has created the fiction that corporations are persons, there is no way to imprison a fictional person.

Another problem is the sheer power of large corporations versus the government. Both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission (the two agencies responsible for prosecuting corporate crime) are woefully under-funded and unfocused when it comes to unraveling complicated corporate crime. But plenty of resources are devoted to street crime. The lack of much initiative against corporate crime at the federal level has in some cases caused some politically ambitious attorneys general in a few states to take aggressive action . In order to force corporations to change their behavior we need to punish them as institutions, not just individual executives. One attempt to crack down on corporate crime is the Corporate Three Strikes Act currently being pursued in California (see box entitled Corporate Three Strikes).

Another approach is to change the system design or incentives that motivate executives to commit crimes in the interest of maximizing profits. One model of this approach has been suggested by attorney Robert Hinkley, who calls his approach the Code for Social Responsibility (see box entitled Code for Corporate Responsibility).

CORPORATE THREE STRIKES The courts have long held that corporations may be dissolved or denied permission to do business if they violate the law. Usually it is the responsibility of the Attorney General to initiate charter revocation proceedings against criminal corporations, an action that is sometimes used against small corporations, but rarely used against the larger corporations. Californians are seeking to enact state legislation in the Corporate Three Strikes Act, which would require California to take legal action to put out of business in the state any corporation that has three "major violations" in a ten-year period. In this case, a "major violation" is defined as an intentional or grossly negligent violation of existing law that results in a death, or in a fine, damages or settlement of over a million dollars. After Enron, the Corporate Three Strikes Act is an excellent example of how we can be tougher on corporate crime and assert our authority over corporations. See www.corporate3strikes.org for more information.

THE CODE FOR CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY Robert Hinkley was a corporate securities attorney for 23 before years he realized that "many of the social ills created by corporations stem directly from corporate law…[which] actually inhibits executives and corporations from being socially responsible." His beef is with the state laws that say the only purpose of a corporation is to maximize profits and make as much money as possible for the shareholders. Hinkley says, "corporate law thus casts ethical and social concerns as irrelevant, or as a stumbling block to the corporation's fundamental mandate." The implications of the "profit-only" focus are apparent in crumbling job security, disintegrating communities and the devastated ecosystems that surround us. Hinkley's suggestion is simple: adjust state corporate legal codes which define the purpose of corporations to expand their realm of responsibility. This would fundamentally restructure the priorities of the corporate world to better align them with the values of the citizenry. This change is captured in these 28 words that can be inserted into state corporate laws: …but not at the expense of the environment, human rights, the public safety, the communities in which the corporation operates or the dignity of its employees. The Code was introduced in the California Senate on February 19, 2003. See the Citizen Works web site, or www.c4cr.org for more information.

CULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS
Corporations are invading our lives from all angles through a cascading assault of sponsorships and advertisements, an all-encompassing web of product placements and branding. Our sports stadiums and museums garishly broadcast the names of corporations ; our symphonies and public works are only made possible through their "generous" sponsorship. Even our schools, universities, and places of worship now increasingly bear the marks and mindsets of corporations. We no longer relate to each other as citizens, but as consumers, our identities somehow defined by the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, even the soft drinks we prefer. Corporate values have permeated our culture, through and through.

We can challenge the corporate co-optation of our culture, both through individual actions and coordinated campaigns. For example, 11 years ago, Adbusters started Buy Nothing Day on the busiest shopping day of the year, the day after Thanksgiving, as a simple yet powerful way to challenge our over-consuming culture. Citizens participate in a variety of ways by stepping out of the insanity of consumer work-spend-work-spend fray for 24 hours to organize symbolic and educational actions.

In the same vein, in 2002 Citizen Works launched an annual event, Big Business Day, as a vehicle to demonstrate opposition to corporate driven culture and corporate power. Each year, communities across the country organize teach-ins, rallies, protests, parades and other media events to illustrate a local aspect of the problem of corporate power. Big Business Day is helping to build the movement to challenge corporate power by educating and activating concerned citizens, and raising awareness about corporate power among the general public.

Citizens also find other ways to locally challenge the infiltration of corporatism into their communities. Some communities are running campaigns against Channel One, a mandatory T.V. program shown to eight million students in 12,000 schools across the country. The program contains a mix of ads, news and other programming. Critics contend that the content of Channel One forces children to watch commercial advertising, wastes school time, promotes violent entertainment, wastes money and promotes television instead of reading. See www.commericalalert.org for more information.

On a larger scale, campaigns targeting corporations nationally or internationally have proven to be an effective tool to both educate the public and initiate change within specific companies and industries. Thanks to the vision and hard work of anti-sweatshop and other activists, companies with well-known brands like Nike, the Gap, Starbucks, Coca-Cola and other large retailers have been forced to address growing public concern over the content of and conditions under which their products are made overseas . Similarly, stores like Wal-Mart and Home Depot have had to respond to citizen protest about their unethical labor and environmental practices . We can also include a message of challenging corporate power while running winning local sustainability campaigns to stop damaging corporate development projects. Both types of campaigns are opportunities to educate the broader public about the need to fundamentally change the role of corporations in our democracy .

The turning point that ushered in the modern campaign finance reform era was the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) in 1971. This act, along with a slew of amendments in 1972 after the Watergate scandal, represented an effort to address the damaging conflicts of interests created when big corporate money elects public officials. Among other things, it enacted spending caps, limited the amount an individual could contribute to a federal candidate to $1000, and established the Federal Election Commission to enforce the regulations.

This system was never given a fair chance, though, because in 1976 the Supreme Court ruled in Buckley v. Valeo (see Legal Rights section) that the key provisions were unconstitutional . This decision was monumental and laid the foundation for the unjust and disastrous system we are faced with today.

The next campaign finance reform victory came in March of 2002, when after years of proposals and compromises and in the wake of the Enron scandal, the Congress passed into law the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill. While proponents of reform celebrated, most of them recognized it as a compromise and a modest step forward. The laws' two major provisions are a ban on soft money (money donated to parties that is not subject to contribution limits or disclosure), contributions to national parties, and restrictions on the timeframe within which interest groups are allowed to air ads. But many of the key provisions of the initial bill drafted in 1996 did not make it into the final version of the law. These include bans on PACs (Political Action Committees), voluntary spending limits in exchange for free broadcast time, and a mandate for Senate candidates to raise 60 percent of their funds in their home state. Some critics even say that the law has the potential to further cripple the system with its increase in the hard money (money donated directly to candidates) limit from $1000 to $2000 . While McCain-Feingold was on the whole an important victory for the CFR movement, we must consider it a step towards more fundamental change, not a final destination.

In addition to publicly financed elections, Mark Green , a longtime expert on campaign finance reform and author of Selling Out, lays out the following additional steps, essential to a clean system:
· Overturn Buckley v. Valeo: take away the corporate claim to free speech rights.
· Restructure the Federal Election Commission: make it nonpartisan instead of bipartisan, increase staff and budget, take it off the 'honor system' by mandating audits, and empower it to review laws regularly.
· Allot free broadcast time and mailings to qualified candidates.

Getting corporate money out of electoral politics is only one of the reforms necessary if we are to eliminate immense corporate influence of government. Corporations manipulate our democratic process with an army of lobbyists, scores of unelected and appointed high-ranking government officials, and by demanding massive industrial subsides. The following are some important steps to counter this influence beyond CFR:
· To balance the loud voice of the corporate interests that often dominate Washington, the federal government could create a "Consumer Protection Agency" to advocate for consumer interests, investigate, develop facts, participate in federal agency proceedings, challenge agencies that neglect to enforce statutes passed by Congress, and present consumer interests to legislators, regulators and courts .
· The "revolving door" between business and government should be closed. Public officials should be required to recuse themselves for 3 years from any investigation, enforcement action, or rule-making involving a former employer or client.
· We can also drastically cut the subsidies, giveaways, and huge bailouts that only benefit corporations at the expense of taxpayers . Good Jobs First (www.goodjobsfirst) helps groups that want to fight local giveaways to corporations.

ECONOMIC POWER
Economic power can be measured in different ways, including market size and control. Many giant corporations use their superior size and cross-sectoral integration to stifle competition within their market sector . As we have seen, corporations have become so big that they are, as economies, larger than dozens of nations . They are able to wield tremendous amounts of influence and power to shape domestic and international economic policy, consumer choice, and aspects of cultural life.

A single corporation is able to integrate operations across many sectors, stifling competition and access to markets. For example, Clear Channel, a firm that controls 1,200 radio stations in the United States, owns concert promotion firms and many concert venues across the country. Clear Channel uses its radio stations to promote its concerts, and some independent concert promoters claim they are denied access to airtime for paid advertisements and some bands produced by competing promoters do not get airtime either . This illustrates how companies involved in many phases of production or delivery of a particular service can leverage their power in one market to exert influence over another.

For Clear Channel, as for Enron, corporate misconduct has been enabled by deregulation. Deregulation is part of a broader economic philosophy that is often described as neoliberal, and is based on the idea that free, unregulated markets are the best way to provide equal access to opportunities for growth and progress. What the theorists behind neoliberalism neglect, though, is that the world does not operate in a vacuum free of stresses and complicating influences. We have seen time and time again that markets left unregulated do not in fact allow equality. Rather, they produce increasing inequality and a wild, volatile atmosphere that does not encourage sustained growth, while constantly narrowing consumer choice and making it difficult for smaller and new businesses to startup and sustain . Deregulation assumes that competition will promote efficiency that benefits all, and that government is wasteful because it has no incentives to do better. It should be clear after what energy deregulation did to California that the assertions about increased efficiency and consumer choice have proven false .

There are a number of national and state groups working to reverse the deregulatory tide and advocate for sensible economic policies on the state, national, and international levels. Some of these include Public Citizen www.citizen.org (particularly in the area of energy and water utilitities), United for a Fair Economy www.ufe.org, the Economic Policy Institute www.epinet.org, Institute for Policy Studies www.ipd-dc.org, New Rules Project www.newrules.org, and Campaign for America's Future www.ourfuture.org.

Communities around the country are challenging these neoliberal economic policies and challenging the corporate dominance of local markets in other ways. Community groups have beaten back large corporate box stores like Wal-Mart in a number of towns.

In addition to resisting corporations, communities are working to strengthen local economies through such means as small business associations. Owners of small businesses have begun to organize independent business alliances that aim to highlight the value of supporting local business. These alliances are instrumental in preserving local cultural heritage, integrity in business practices and community involvement, and often set a standard that larger international chain corporations cannot meet. (See box entitled American Independent Business Alliance.)

These fights are also tied in a way to national and international policies . While starting with advocacy on the local level is certainly the best way to protect services in your community, there are many ways that state, national or international policies affect your local struggle. The battle against trade agreements is in many ways a battle to protect local control.

But how do we make the connection?

On a global scale, we are fighting an aggressive push by the corporate-driven international financial institutions to coerce developing nations to relax trade laws, open markets and usher in privatization . This agenda is being driven by taxpayer-funded institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. And we can fight these institutions by taking away their funds. One way is to pressure our elected officials to vote against any funding reauthorization.

The World Bank Bonds Boycott is another way that your community can help deflate these institutions' ability to exert remote decision-making authority over local communities in poor nations. The World Bank pressures governments to cut social spending on vital health and human services, and funds destructive development projects. The Boycott is in effect in several cities, investment firms, and unions internationally .

There are at least as many approaches to solving the problem of corporate dominance as there are components of the problem. Instead of allowing the choice to overwhelm us, we should recognize that these approaches can be complimentary and that a multi-faceted effort is indeed necessary to effectively challenge the complex problem corporate power. Only through a comprehensive and versatile effort of coordinated groups will we engage massive numbers of diverse citizens and build a strong and successful movement.

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Last Updated February 2003