What's Wrong with America?

I think this may be a (the?) key failing in the US system of governance.

(1) In the charters given by governments to corporations, there is no legally enforceable requirement for social responsibility. The only (primary, major?) real such requirement imposed upon corporations is the fiduciary duty to the (monetary) owners —the stockholders— of the company.

In the constitutive relationship —a relationship that is established/created by the (Constitution of) the US federal government— by states to the economic corporations that are co-generated by state governments (as authorized by the federal government) jointly with the collectivity of the legal-financial founders of the corporation, the only burden placed on the new entity ("corporations are legal persons") by its state-"parent" is the fiduciary duty to the individual founders and to their financial successors. Even though the State-given charter constitutes the corporation as a kind of public entity (its particular private character specified and enforced by a public government) no serious public responsibility is established to balance the legitimation by public entity.

This is why "it’s all about the money" everywhere in America! The State —federal and state, as the legal progenitor of corporations— fails in all its (social) responsibilities to its citizens by failing to institute those social responsibilities upon its children, the corporations to which it gives birth.

Corporate influence over government would probably develop even in the (hypothetical) case where finance is not the predominant reality of corporate formation. But in a capitalist society, the primary receptacle and conveyance of the power to which charter/(legitimation) by the State provides corporations access is the money that defines fiduciary duty.

(2) . . . More deeply [or at a deeper level], the fact that the myth of the insular individual, rather than the peninsular individual, is at the root of the US Constitution is itself probably the "source" of this failure to impose social responsibility on newly-born corporations. (The fantasy that individuals create wealth is a component of the insular individual myth.) (3) Connected with this, of course, is the commitment to the secular religion of the invisible hand, that has been accepted as the core social justification for prioritization of the capitalist "free" market economy over social-responsibility regulation by government, and over all possible social bond-based (communal) modes of organization of the economy.

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