This truly is the age of the corporate. Corporations affect the quality of food, water, medicine, savings, news and almost everything else, but ordinary people have little say in controlling and directing them. Governments can raze mountains, divert rivers, clear forests, build asphalt jungles and give massive subsidies to welcome corporations – but they can’t buy loyalty. Corporations have no loyalty to any place, people or community.
We rely on shareholders to impose morality in the global marketplace, but are mistaken, for many corporations have no qualms about operating cartels, rigging interest rates, avoiding tax, selling horsemeat as beef, or ripping off the customer through fuel and energy pricing. Institutionalised abuses enable companies to meet stock market profit expectations, and their own. Profit-related executive pay has grown from 60 times that of the average worker to almost 180 times since the 1990s.
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