Opinion: Why our current system doesn’t serve people or the environment

By Katherine Brann Fredricks

If your brother cares more about money than his relatives, he’s a bad brother.  Corporations are encouraged by law to be bad brothers.  “When government regulations impose significant costs on a corporation, this legal requirement [to maximize profits] directs companies to pursue any lawful, cost-effective means of reducing the cost of compliance.” (Winkler, 2018) 

For two hundred years, corporations have hired the best lawyers in America to maximize profits by reducing regulation.  Corporations are required by law to maximize profits to shareholders. Today fossil fuel companies use dark money to lead the charge. 

Fossil fuel companies are older than many countries and richer than most.  The basis of their wealth is their proven assets – the fossil fuels they haven’t dug up yet.  If they “Leave It In The Ground,” that value goes to zero.

To maximize profits, fossil fuel companies have demonized scientists; spread doubt about science itself; financed entire schools of law and economics to justify putting profits ahead of human rights and environmental health; captured regulatory agencies; financed politicians who favor them; attacked environmental activists and politicians; and stacked America’s courts.

Thomas Jefferson warned against “the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” (Winkler, 2018)

But rich men wrote our Constitution.  Many were stockholders.  The Constitution they wrote aspires to liberty and justice, but women and minorities struggle to claim those rights.  Meanwhile, “throughout American history the nation’s most powerful corporations have persistently mobilized to use the Constitution to fight off unwanted government regulations.” (Winkler, 2018)

The United States Constitution does not mention corporations.  The U.S. Constitution does not directly grant any rights to corporations.  Corporations were never included in “We the people.”

But corporate structures are baked into our Constitution, because America is a colonized country.  The Virginia Company and the Massachusetts Bay company brought colonists to the Americas and served as models for our Constitution.  The American revolution started with the Boston Tea Party – throwing tea belonging to another colonial corporation, the East India Company, into the Atlantic Ocean.

The historical pattern of colonialism is that colonizers maximize profits. The lives, labor and lands of colonized people are sacrificed to bear the cost.  Today, with corporate dark money attacking American democracy, we are all in the sacrifice zone.

I’m a cancer survivor.  I know from bitter personal experience that we cannot have healthy bodies without a healthy environment.  That’s why I volunteer for OCERA: to give Oregon residents the Constitutional protections that corporate lawyers and lobbyists have spent two-hundred years and billions of dollars carving out for corporations.  To make sure that human rights to life and liberty outweigh corporate rights to profit.

Works Cited: We the Corporations by UCLA Law professor Adam Winkler. 

Historical background from: The Scheme by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse with Jennifer Mueller.  I encourage you to read more about it!