Howie Hawkins on CorporationsGreen Party Challenger for President | |
Greens believe the legal structure of the corporation is obsolete. At present, corporations are designed solely to generate profit. This legal imperative--profit above all else--is damaging our country and our planet in countless ways. We must change the legal design of corporations so that they generate profits, but not at the expense of the environment, human rights, public health, workers, or the communities in which the corporation operates.
The rights established by this Constitution and the laws of the United States of America are exclusively the rights of living, breathing humans, citizens of this country or residing therein. No corporation or other type of association or organization can have the status of a "legal person" and thus cannot derive rights from such status.
ECONOMIC HARDSHIP: We will never reverse extreme and growing economic inequality as long as capitalists exploit workers for profit and extract more unearned income from the economy as rent and interest. Capitalists pay workers a fixed wage and take the rest of the value workers' labor creates as profit. Capitalists take more unearned income as rent and interest in excess of the costs of production due to their exclusive ownership of access to resources, such as land sites, natural resources, intellectual property, and monopolies.
CAPITALIST OLIGARCHY: The central problem of American democracy is that public preferences do not become public policy. The people are way ahead of the politicians, who represent their corporate paymasters more than their voters. We can't have political democracy without economic democracy.