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End Corporate Corruption

1. No country compares to America’s corporations and competiveness. But our Founding Fathers and best Presidents like Lincoln and Eisenhower were concerned about the power of corporations getting out of hand. An unnerving concern: unlimited corporate power will always lead to unlimited corporate corruption.
2. When our country was founded corporations were chartered for a limited time to serve for the good of the public. A corporation would be chartered for the task of building a road, then after a set amount of years it would turn ownership of the road over to the city or state in which it was built.
3. In the 1880s the Supreme Court gave the rights of an individual to corporations. Since then corporate lawyers successfully claimed more and more rights for corporations. The Fourth Amendment right against search and seizure keeps corporations from revealing too much about their accounting practices leading to scandals like Enron. This keeps corporations and transparency separate. Federal agencies must also produce a warrant before they can inspect for environmental or safety issues, giving the companies time to cover their tracks. To even begin to pull the plug on this cesspool of corruption, the first step would be to reverse the decision of allowing corporations the same rights as a human being.
4. The government should make it a point to document people’s hardship which resulted from any corporate corruption, put a face to that wrongdoing. This newfound corporate corruption would be exposed by greatly increasing the funding to the Justice Department corporate crime center and to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
5. Whistleblower protection much be strengthened.
6. Then a company must prove itself worthy of keeping a charter, rather than allowing it to have an unlimited lifespan.
7. American companies which relocate their headquarters to Bermuda, Isle of Man, or other tax havens, while still selling products in America should lose their right to sell goods in the US or at least have higher taxes and tariffs to make up the difference. Too many companies are squeezing money out of the US economy, taking it out of American circulation, only to put it into their own pockets.
8. The countless ways to maneuver around the legal system must be addressed like companies picking and paying someone auditing them as a "consultant".

Christopher Pursley , 26.10.2011, 07:59
Idea status: under consideration

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