CounterCorp seeks to document,
reduce, and ultimately prevent the corrosive
political, economic, and social effects that large
corporations have in the U.S. and around the world

     In the U.S. and most of the Western world, most people view individual instances of corporate crime and abuse as separate and unrelated events, resulting from the actions of a finite number of so-called "bad apple" employees.

     The idea that the corporations themselves — by the very nature of their organizational structure and culture — might be the cause rarely occurs to them. Instead, corporations are seen as essentially "empty vessels" that derive their characteristics from the people who manage and work for them.

      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 larger societies in which they operate.

     This generally presents less of a problem with smaller incorporated companies, which tend to be more tightly integrated into their local communities than larger ones, and usually lack the capacity to cause large-scale harm.

     Unfortunately, it is also in the nature of for-profit corporations to be expansionist, and thus even small companies pose the potential risk of growing bigger, more rapacious, and ultimately more wealthy and powerful — and thus harder to control.

     As corporations expand and become more profitable, the resulting financial and political power — coupled with limited legal liability (which is the primary reason for incorporation in the first place) — effectively becomes a "license to harm" the people, communities, and cultures around the world that are affected by their activities.

     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 alleged benefits ascribed to corporations by their apologists, cheerleaders, and unwitting ciphers would clearly be outweighed by the harm they cause.

     Corporations are created and maintained by laws that grant them most of the rights, but few of the responsibilities, normally associated with human beings. Therefore, we can just as easily curtail or even end the predations of these economic monsters by simply changing those laws — or passing new ones — 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, so as to confine them 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.