How to Curb Corporate Power

Scarcely a week goes by without another surge in the ongoing corporate crime wave--a large drug company misleads doctors about heart attack risks in order to sell more pills, an insurance company manipulates its earnings by billions through complicated offshore reinsurance dealings, major banks are under investigation for illegally charging minority borrowers higher loan rates or helping a dictator stash his ill-gotten gains.

These particular stories, unlike many other business crimes and frauds, made the news and sometimes even drew Congressional hearings. But Congress has produced no corrective legislation since the narrow-gauged Sarbanes-Oxley law of 2002, inspired by the Enron scandal. Rather, the major accomplishments of the legislative season so far have been laws from the wish list of the behemoth corporations, who annually shell out tens of millions of dollars for lobbying--a bankruptcy "reform" bill for a credit card industry that reported $30 billion in profits last year, a class-action-lawsuit "reform" bill for the insurance companies and the Chamber of Commerce (now the biggest lobbyist in Washington) and an "energy" bill with generous taxpayer subsidies for oil and gas companies like ExxonMobil, which in 2004 already reported the world's biggest-ever annual profit for a single company: $25.3 billion.

What can be done? Lots. Those looking for ideas would do well to pick up The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy, a new book sponsored by Citizen Works, which I founded, whose authors, Lee Drutman and Charlie Cray, propose that we frame a vigorous movement around a number of immediate and long-term shifts of power away from giant corporations to strengthen a citizen-sovereign democracy.

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