Corporations Reimagined
by Michael Lerner
The Nation magazine, May 22, 2000
Most politicians fear to challenge corporate power, not only
because they need financial support during elections but for a
deeper reason as well. They fear that corporations can always
threaten to move their base of operations, leaving joblessness
and economic devastation in their wake. The various branches of
the progressive movement each seek some minimal restraints on
corporate power. But the history of the environmental movement
demonstrates the problem here: For every victory won-at the expenditure
of huge amounts of energy-there emerge three or four new areas
where unrestrained consumption and the extension of the market
to every corner of the world threaten the planet while developing
new labor markets that pay exploitative wages.
And as the ethos of selfishness and materialism generated
by the market and glorified by the media as "human nature"
increasingly presents itself as "common sense" to the
peoples of the world, resistance seems foolish to many. They decide
that the best they can do is to try to "make it"-even
at the expense of so many others around the world who will never
get their share. While some may take refuge from the values- and
love-corroding aspects of the market by attempting to build ultra-nationalist
or religious fundamentalist communities around a different vision,
most will passively acquiesce, convinced by the pundits' rhetoric
that "there is no alternative."
But there is an alternative: to change the progressive agenda
from its previous focus on "inclusion" (insuring that
those who have not reaped the rewards of the capitalist system
get a fairer portion) to a new focus on "changing the bottom
line." This strategy, which we call "a politics of meaning,"
aims to change the very definition of productivity and efficiency
so that we see institutions as efficient or productive not only
to the extent that they maximize money and power but also to the
extent that they maximize people's capacities to be loving and
caring, ethically and ecologically sensitive and able to respond
to the world not only in terms of how we can use it but also with
awe and wonder.
That's why we at Tikkun have developed the Social Responsibility
Amendment (SRA) to the Constitution. The SRA says this: Every
corporation doing business within the United States (whether located
here or abroad) with annual income of more than $20 million must
receive a new corporate charter every twenty years, and these
new charters will be granted only to corporations that can prove
a history of social responsibility as measured by an Ethical Impact
Report, which will measure the company's sensitivity to the needs
of the environment, the community and its employees. The Ethical
Impact Report will be compiled by three different constituencies:
the corporation itself, the workers (under a requirement of confidentiality)
and relevant community organizations around the world that wish
to present their case about the social responsibility of the corporation.
To prevent a huge and easily manipulable government bureaucracy
from making these decisions, the SRA will create a new system
of Social Responsibility Grand Juries composed of twenty-five
citizens whose task would be to read the Ethical Impact Reports
and receive oral testimony from the corporation, employees and
relevant community organizations.
If an SRGJ decided the corporation should not be granted a
charter renewal, it would then move to stage two: what to do with
corporate resources. The SRGJ would listen to management's plan
for how it would alter its behavior to become more socially responsible,
and it could hear proposals from other for-profit or nonprofit
groups on how they would run the same corporation with more socially
responsible policies. The SRGJ would then decide either to award
the corporate charter to another group, and with it the assets
of the corporation in question, or to put the corporation on probation
for three years.
If it gave the corporation a three-year probation, the SRGJ
would reconvene three years later to determine whether the changes
had in fact taken place, in which case it could restore the charter
for the next seventeen years (thus making up the full twenty),
or it could determine that the corporation had failed to implement
significant changes and award the corporate charter to some other
management group.
Grand jurors would be selected by lot from the population
but balanced in order to guarantee racial, religious, spiritual,
gender and economic diversity. Jurors would be paid (by a corporation's
charter-renewal fee), would have subpoena power and could impose
contempt citations and prison sentences upon corporate leaders
for up to two years if they found that the corporate leaders were
withholding vital information or otherwise attempting to disrupt
or distort the evaluation process (for example, by trying to discourage
testimony of workers or community groups who had negative things
to say). They would be assisted in obtaining information on corporate
behavior by a corps of Social Responsibility Agents, which would
operate much like a public defender's office, except with funding
written into the amendment and not subject to electoral shifts.
The SRA moves away from the old demonization of corporate
leaders and recognizes them as another group caught in the dynamics
of the capitalist market-and provides them with a way of explaining
to their stockholders that the corporation must become more ecologically
and socially responsible or else lose its corporate ownership,
a far greater risk to them than the costs of social responsibility.
And by introducing the notion of an Ethical Impact Report, the
SRA challenges market notions of how to judge efficiency.
No, I don't expect that the SRA will pass our state legislatures
or Congress anytime soon. Just as the Equal Rights Amendment never
passed yet had a monumental impact on public discourse and understanding,
the campaign for the SRA could similarly shift the dimensions
of American political discussion. If liberal and progressive forces
made the SRA a central item on their agenda and talked about it
as the way to create "a new bottom line," we could provide
people with a plausible picture of how it might be possible to
live in a world in which loving and caring could have real social
power.
Here's how to launch the SRA: Use the next few years to involve
all sectors of society in a conversation about what should be
included in the Ethical Impact Report used to judge whether a
corporation is entitled to charter renewal. And popularize the
notion of a "new bottom line." And if we have the courage
to call the SRA a fundamental spiritual challenge to the ethos
of selfishness and materialism, we might soon find that our SRA
campaign is attracting sectors of the population who feel ripped
off by the spiritual deadness and moral decline of our society
but who have never understood the connection between the spiritual
crisis and the dynamics of the market. The SRA could give people
confidence that their own highest values might someday have a
chance to shape social reality. The loss of that kind of hope
leads people to believe there is no alternative. The re-creation
of it is likely to be the first positive outcome of the SRA campaign.
Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, a bimonthly Jewish critique
of politics, culture and society, is rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue
in San Francisco. His new book, Spirit Matters, which details
what law, medicine, education and economic life would look like
if we adopted a "new bottom line," will be published
by Hampton Roads in June.
Corporate watch