Excuse me, but the destructive incentives of international commerce are built into the legal structure of corporations (LLC's). What would YOU do if 1) You were legally required to make profit every three months 2) You had all the rights of an individual person 3) but you had less accountability?

And to top it off, you've been steeped and trained your entire life in the mythology, the rationale, and the practices of domination, conquest, and empire, so that the above three conditions of your social and productive existence make perfect sense to you?

The answer? You would do ANYTHING. It wouldn't matter anymore, because you must, you can, and they'll let you. They'll bring in guns to help you get away with it. They'll kill, poison, kidnap, devastate, defraud tens of millions if necessary. They will, they have, they do.

I think if you keep this straight, then you maintain an outside chance of solving the particular problem under discussion. If not, not.

Good luck.

As you say Andrew:

"Corporations are legal structures created as legal entities to carry out the business - financial - objectives.  Under US law, corporations are a legal person.  What sort of person?  According the psychological assessment measures in the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) used for personality assessment, corporations meet the strict clinical definition of a psychopath.  "Psychopath" is another word for lunatic, or, someone who is legally, criminally insane."

http://www.p-ced.com/projects/ukraine/sumy/

Jeff

Jeff, that's what I'm talking about: institutionalized and sanctioned mass psychopathology.

So, to address the question in the article more directly, I would say: abolish the corporation. Or rewrite the laws that govern it. (But then, what do you need corporations for that regular company structures can't handle?).

But since, without global systemic collapse, neither of these is possible in the short term, due to the psychopathology Jeff mentioned, one is left with the basic and potentially revolutionary demand placed on all business: deliver something qualitatively better, and you can sieze the market. Don't be stupid, and you can keep it. Which is one of many promises of social entrepreneurialism.

Like Bill McKibben said, "The only way to subvert people anymore is to have more fun than they do." Open up opportunities for subversion with goods/services orders of magnitude better than what the blood sucking corporations offer. Which shouldn't actually be that hard, because the irrational pursuit of money makes people stupid.

An example? the hexayurt (http://hexayurt.com), Vinay Gupta's open source autonomous shelter design. Absolutely puts conventional approaches to refugee shelter to shame in terms of cost, beauty, usefulness, livability, durability, adaptability, etc, etc.

More on Rodney's points:

1) You're talking about organizations that are, again, legally required to do things like make decisions strictly based on comparing the costs of doing the right thing to the cost of paying punitive damages.

2) This reminds me of Ward Churchill's "Little Eichmanns"  comment about the people who died on 9/11. Nazi bureaucrats were just decent, efficient Germans doing their job. Coca-Cola employees are as clueless or blind as Coca-Cola's customers about the routine, destructive practices behind the curtains. Here's an organization whose principal product is straight, non-nutritive poison. It blithely drains the ground water of towns in India where it makes its swill and then ships it out, leaving locals to die of illnesses arising from poor sanitation. How do you swallow this stuff, man?

3) Punish organizations for doing what they're legally required to do? That doesn't seem fair to me. We asked for it. This is the nature of the beast, including the international system of exploitation that grew up around it for the last several centuries. This statement of yours seems shot through with denial. As if a major corporation could compete at that level without learning the tricks of the trade. As if the act of corporation can be cleaned up when it is, in fact, fundamentally corrupt and the ultimate embodiment of empire.

Have you read the indispensible _Confessions of an Economic Hit Man_ by John Perkins? What did you think of it in connection with this discussion?

Andrew

Andrew, I've not read Perkins. I know of the content and know that my colleague who delivered his ethical social business model into the public domain 13 years ago, has written about Economic Hit Men. A few weeks ago, I described in a blog how the concept had evolved.

http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=132188

In the links at the end of that blog you'll find references to further impact. The recent discussion on Social Edge may also interest you. We're both there describing corruption in our experience of social enterprise. This includes how a paper we delivered to governmment and how the bare bones of one part of it ended up as an "acheivement" for USAID.

http://www.socialedge.org/discussions/responsibility/who-will-build-a-more-efficient-marketplace

Jeff