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Is 'Corporate Citizen' an Oxymoron?
theodp writes "Citing expert testimony from a recent House Science Subcommittee hearing on Globalizing Jobs and Technology, The Economic Populist challenges the conventional wisdom that maximizing profits should be a corporation's only responsibility, suggesting it's time for the US to align its corporations to the interests of the nation instead of vice versa. Harvard's Bruce Scott warns that today's global economy is much like the US in the later 19th century, when states competed for funds generated by corporations and thus raced to the bottom as they granted generous terms to unregulated firms. Sound familiar, Pennsylvania? How about you, Michigan?"
the United States of American, is technically a Corporation aswell, so a United States of America Citizen, is also a citizen of a corporation.
However, an "American Citizen" is not.
http://www.jusbelli.com/usofa_is_corp.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVsMUpPgdT0
http://home.iae.nl/users/lightnet/creator/federalgovernment.htm
yadda yadda...
...seem to be based on green power and big unions. Nothing to do with capitalism...
The Army reading list
Africa is a CONTINENT. Not a country.
A corporation is essentially a group of people legally organized to do business. Thus the fact that a corporation's sole responsibilities to follow the law and make money stem from this fact.
Large corporations do engage in large social programs (such as the Ronald McDonald House for families) because they believe (and studies by organizations such as Harvard show) that such philanthropic acts improve the environment in which corporations operate--which help the corporate bottom line. (One reason why many tech companies have contribution matching programs is to make the area in which those tech companies operate better places to live, which help attract better quality workers.)
For anyone to stop and suggest that a corporation must (rather than 'should') engage in social responsibility--and to base that argument in a 'class warfare' style argument that corporations which solely profit seek are somehow evil (forgetting that even philanthropic activities are part of corporate profit seeking) is to suggest the people who created that corporation must engage in activities outside of the reason why they came together in the first place.
In the United States we bristle at the notion that people should be forced to provide services against their will in order to satisfy some notion of a "social good." The last time we forced a subset of our population to do work for what we considered at the time a large-scale social good without providing them compensation, we wound up fighting a Civil War over the issue...