The end of Corporations

Imagine your town is crisscrossed by giant trains that travel insanely fast, because the train owners pay their drivers based on speed. The town establishes speed limits, installs flashing lights, brings out police to keep pedestrians off the tracks. Inevitably, the trains continue to crash into people and cars, causing injury and death. How does the town council respond? By repairing crossings and fences.    

This is how society now attempts to regulate corporate behaviour. We wrap regulations around massive corporations, leaving their profit-maximising mandate in the driving seat. When corporations crash through intricately wrought regulations – think mega-banks in 2008 nearly crashing the entire global economy – our response is to repair the regulatory fences.  

It’s time to make the profit-maximising, shareholder-controlled corporation obsolete. In the perilous moment we face, with the crises of the climate emergency and spiralling inequality, the time is up on corporations acting as though serving financial shareholders is their highest duty.