The Accountability of Corporations

Dr. Jackson spoke about the accountability of corporations to the public sphere, and how that is different than the accountability experienced by the state.  I don't think this was necessarily the point of his lecture but it got me thinking about corporations and their interactions with the public, particularly now that we are living post-2008.  When the global economy began to crumble, many started to alter their stances on what is owed to the general population by corporations and vice versa.  So my question from Jackson's lecture is what is owed to the public from corporations and are we holding them to that level of accountability?

After 2008 we have all heard the phrase "too big to fail."  What we mean is that a corporation has become so large that it would cost the public far more to see it fail than to bail it out.  In this way, we all in some way accepted the responsibility of the public to ensure the life of many corporations when they were in trouble.  The public owed it to the auto industry to issue loans that would breath new life into several struggling corporations.  It was the only way that relationship would work.  If the public didn't act to save what was by definition not public, then the corporations would stop providing jobs.  The idea that the two "worlds," as Jackson called them, were totally separate quickly unraveled.  Suddenly those worlds were the same.

This scenario played out around the world; many states began to reconsider the idea of separate worlds - one private and and economic, one state-held and public.  Greece had widespread economic struggles; Iceland had difficulty managing investments.  And the United States had huge scandals in the economic sector that were very widespread and discussed in the media.  Even before that during the Enron scandal, we learned how often public funds are tied to the financial management of private corporations.  The Georgia public schools' pension fund lost millions of dollars invested in Enron. [1]

So to me, as we have begun to see that the public is responsible for the mistakes of private corporations, shouldn't private corporations have more accountability to the public?  Yes, retirement accounts have a choice on where to invest, but with the widespread theft and fraudulent practices, I don't know that the public can trust the information it has to make such decisions.  When Jackson spoke about these separate worlds, I immediately thought that that is not the way I have come to see the economic sector interact with the state in the last several years.  And with so many corporations touching multiple economies around the world, they really have become so large that their success is required.  Maybe they owe us more.

1. http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2002/02/11/story4.html?page=all