Corporations are not People

OUR POSITION

Greens want to reduce the economic and political power of large corporations, end corporate personhood and re-design corporations to serve our society, democracy and the environment.

Unelected and unaccountable corporate executives are not merely exercising power in our society — they are ruling us. Greens will reduce corporate powers and privileges, including by stripping them of artificial “personhood” and constitutional protections. The Green Party supports strong and effectively enforced antitrust laws and regulation to counteract the concentration of economic and political power that imposes a severe toll on people, places and the planet.

Greens believe the legal structure of the corporation is obsolete.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.

One point remains unequivocal: our planet cannot afford business as usual any longer. Because corporations have become the dominant economic institution of the planet, we must compel them to serve human and environmental needs, so that our peoples, nations and environment may live long and prosper.

GREEN SOLUTIONS

1. End corporate personhood. A key first step will be federal and state constitutional amendments abolishing the legal fiction of corporate personhood.
2. Federal chartering of corporations that includes comprehensive, strict and enforceable social responsibility requirements.
3. Strengthen the civil justice system to ensure that it holds corporations strictly liable for corporate crime, fraud, violence and malfeasance. This would include revoking the charters of corporations that routinely violate safety, health, environmental protection or other laws.
4. Empower shareholders to stop abuses by the managers they hire through a structure of democratic governance and elections.
5. Enforce existing antitrust laws and support even tougher new ones to curtail the overwhelming economic and political power of large corporations.
6. Increase funding for and strengthen oversight of federal antitrust enforcement.