Corporate Accountability FA10

Shortcomings of Capitalism and Corporate Accountability

Capitalism is an economic system of many contradictions. It is based on class and competition and its main goal is profit. It revolves around individual property rights, the private ownership of the means of production as well as of the products produced. It also promotes minimal government intervention and regulation. It is a system that has created wealth, progress, opportunities and is the system that has worked for most economies around the world. Conversely, the dominant members of a capitalist society, the power elite, are powerful and influential on many levels. This makes it hard to define to whom they are accountable. Corporate accountability is all the laws and regulations governing corporations regarding criminal or unethical practices by the members of a corporation regardless of their hierarchy. Examples of these practices can be fraud, damage to the environment, exploitation of labor and resource and much more. Many organizations and social activist groups advocate for the enforceability of this corporate accountability.

Social Activist Groups

CorpWatch

Created in 1996, Corp Watch is a non-profit organization that attempts to discover and expose corporate misbehavior and promote corporate accountability and a higher level of transparency of corporate action. Through investigative journalism and distribution of information, the organization attempts to spread knowledge of corporate behavior in all major industries.

In September 2007 CorpWatch launched the Wiki project Crocodyl.org, in partnership with the Center for Corporate Policy and the Corporate Research Project. Besides providing informative reports of corporations and industries, CorpWatch also attempts to empower the general public by providing guidelines on how to do research of corporate behavior and through easy access to a variety of data bases.

Goals of CorpWatch

Going hand in hand with William Domhoff’s description of corporate power and influence in his book Who Rules America?, CorpWatch believes that “corporate power and influence eclipses even the democratic political process itself as they exert disproportional influence on public policy they deem detrimental to their narrow self-interest” [1].

Therefore, CorpWatch intends to “expose multinational corporations that profit from war, fraud, environmental, human rights and other abuses, and to provide critical information to foster a more informed public and an effective democracy” (http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11314). Since CorpWatch shares the belief that private corporations, in particular since the last two decades, where several companies have become larger than entire nation’s economies, have a tremendous impact on the people’s lives everywhere in the world. However, “few mechanisms currently exist to hold them accountable for those actions” [1]. Therefore, CorpWatch intends to embody one additional resource and mechanism that regularly reports on corporate behavior and accountability. In particular, the organization ends each year with an annual report, highlighting once again the most important events and corporate actions over the last year in order to inform the public and provide them with resources and insight.