EDITOR'S NOTE:

Jim Hightower's new book, "There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos," was published last Fall by HarperCollins. It's on sale for $23.00 plus shipping from the Project USA bookstore. Call 1-800-888-9999 to order. Here's an excerpt from Chapter One: "CorporateWorld! They get the goldmine, we get the shaft."

What is this thing called the "corporation" and why is it here?

It is time to put this basic question back into political play. It is not mentioned in the standard textbooks of American history, but practically all of our nation's Founders were appropriately anti-corporate, and at the time of the Continental Congress, only about 40 of these suspect corporate critters had been allowed to form in our land, and those were kept on a very short leash.

Like powdered wigs and boiled beef, the corporation is a British invention, essentially created by the Crown as a legal vessel to amass the capital needed to exploit the wealth of its American and Canadian colonies. Operating on the principle that it takes a dime to make a buck, the corporation was a paper structure devised to collect the dimes from English investors, organize the looting in the colonies, and return the dollars to said investors.

Who's In Charge Here?

Looting was nothing new, but this "joint stock" connivance was a devilishly radical social departure. For the first time, ownership of an enterprise was separated from responsibility.

If an individual person loots, pollutes, or otherwise behaves illegally, he or she is individually accountable to the community for those actions--that is, you can have your sorry ass hauled into court, be fined, be put out of business, be tossed in the slammer, or all of the above.

But the corporation is a legal fiction that lets the investors who own the business skate whenever the business behaves badly (read: steals, kills, poisons, pillages, corrupts, and so on) avoiding actual responsibility for illegal actions done in their name, even when such actions profit them mightily. Not only can these aloof owners have their cake and eat it, too, they can also eat yours and laugh all the way to the bank.

Ralph Nader told me about a tense and telling moment at the annual stockholders' meeting of General Motors in 1996. A lone stockholder gained recognition to speak and pose a question. Noting that there was an American flag on display, and observing that GM has eliminated some 73,000 U.S. jobs while creating the exact same number in low-wage countries in the past decade, the stockholder asked politely if CEO John Smith and all members of the board would rise and join him in the simple gesture of pledging allegiance to the flag.

There was some embarrassed tittering among the board members, a scurrying of legal counsels back and forth behind the podium, a bit of hemming and hawing by the CEO, but the bottom line was no, they would not. Reporters were there with their TV monitors and their computer Power Books recording the moment, but not one whisper of this revealing exchange made the news.

If We Had A Hammer

One strong hammer our democracy needs to have is a corporate charter with teeth. Just as the larger community specifies what it expects of poor welfare mothers, so must we again set strict terms for much more generous privileges bestowed on these haughty creaters of the state, including making corporate board members and managers individually responsible for malfeasance and re-establishing term limits on each corporation's charter.

This ain't gonna be easy, to say the least... [But] as powerful as the corporation seems, remember this: No building is too tall for even the smallest of dogs to lift its leg on.