About CounterCorp

CounterCorp seeks to spotlight, curtail, and ultimately prevent the corrosive political,
economic, and social effects that large for-profit corporations have around the world

In the U.S. and most of the Western/industrialized world, the majority of people view instances of corporate crime and abuse as separate and unrelated events, resulting from the actions of a finite number of so-called "bad apples" in those organizations.

The idea that the corporations themselves (i.e., the "barrels") might be rotten — due to the nature of their organizational structure and culture — rarely occurs to them. Instead, corporations are essentially seen as empty vessels that derive their characteristics from the people who manage and work for them.

Thus, both so-called "good" corporations and "bad" ones are touted as being full of good people, with the bad ones just having a few unethical people whose actions unfairly taint the rest of their companies, and the reputation of corporations as a whole.

This view, however, fails to account for the long-standing and widespread pattern of unethical, amoral, and illegal behavior within corporations around the world. Either there are coincidentally a lot of spontaneously rotten apples in corporations, or it is the barrels themselves that are rotten, and causing the apples within them to go bad.

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CounterCorp was founded on the belief that for-profit corporations are inherently anti-social organizations, for the simple reason that they are specifically designed to put the interests of their managers and shareholders ahead of those of their workers and the societies in which they operate, and to limit the responsibility of corporate officers for the actions taken in the name of the corporation.

Although the threat that this poses to the rest of society is generally more manageable when dealing with smaller corporations — which tend to be more tightly integrated into their local communities, and by dint of their size simply have less capacity to cause harm than bigger ones — as greed-driven organizations, it is in the nature of all corporations to be expansionist, and thus there is always the potential threat that small companies will become larger and more dangerous.

As corporations expand and become more profitable, their increasing financial and political power allows (and even encourages) them to become more rapacious and harder to control. That power, coupled with their limited legal liability — which, after all, is the primary reason for incorporation in the first place — effectively becomes a "license to harm" people, communities, and cultures around the world with relative impunity.

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CounterCorp seeks to challenge the widely held notion that human exploitation, environmental destruction, and cultural degradation are the price the world must pay for the alleged "benefits" that these corporate behemoths supposedly provide.

We believe that, if the price tags for corporate goods and services included all of their actual costs — which are usually hidden from, and even subsidized by, the rest of society — the benefits ascribed to corporations by their apologists, cheerleaders, and unwitting ciphers would clearly be outweighed by the harm they cause.

Corporations are created and perpetuated by laws that grant them most of the rights — but few of the responsibilities — normally associated with human beings. Therefore, societies can curtail or even end the predations of these economic monsters simply by changing the laws that govern corporations, so as to effectively manacle, neuter, or lobotomize them.

There can be no genuine democracy or human rights until the legal and financial status of corporations is radically restructured and restricted to extremely limited and broadly beneficial roles that serve the collective interests of society as a whole — rather than the narrow self-interest of a relatively small, wealthy, and powerful elite.