rtwngAvngr
Senior Member
- Jan 5, 2004
- 15,755
- 513
- 48
- Banned
- #1
http://www.beyttikkun.org/Justice.htm
That's why we at TIKKUN have developed the Social Responsibility Amendment (SRA) to the US Constitution. The SRA says this: Every corporation doing business within the US (whether located here or abroad) with annual income of over $20 million must receive a new corporate charter every twenty years, and these new charters will only be granted to corporations who can prove a history of social responsibility as measured by an Ethical Impact Report. which will measure the company's sensitivity to the needs of the environment, the community, and its employees. The Ethical Impact Report will be compiled by 3 different constituencies: the corporation itself, the workers (under conditions of confidentiality), and relevant community organizations around the world who wish to present their case about the social responsibility of the corporation.
To prevent a huge government bureaucracy making these decisions, the SRA will create a new system of Social Responsibility Grand Juries (SRGJ) composed of 25 citizens whose task would be to read the Ethical Impact Reports and receive oral testimony from the corporation, employees, and relevant community organizations--and then assess what they had learned.
If an SRGJ decided that the corporation should not be granted a charter renewal, it would then move to stage two: what to do with corporate resources. The SRGJ would listen both to corporate management, which could present a plan for how it was going to significantly alter its behavior in order to become more socially responsible, and it could hear testimony from other for-profit or non-profit groups that could propose how they might run the same corporation with more socially responsible policies.
The SRGJ would then decide to either award the corporate charter to another group, and with it the assets of the corporation in question, or to put the corporation on probation for three years.
If it gave the corporation a three year probation, the SRGJ would reconvene three years later to determine if the changes had in fact taken place, in which case it could restore the charter for the next 17 years (thus making up the full 20,) or it could determine that the corporation had failed to adequately implement significant changes, and award the corporate charter to some other management group.
Grand jurors would be selected by lot from the population, but balanced in order to guarantee racial, religious, spiritual, gender and economic diversity. Jurors would be paid (by a corporations charter renewal fee), would have subpoena power and could impose contempt citations and prison sentences upon corporate leaders for up to two years if they found that the corporate leaders were withholding vital information or otherwise attempting to disrupt or distort the evaluation process (for example, by trying to restrain the testimony of workers or community groups who had negative things to say).. They would be assisted in obtaining information on corporate behavior by a corps of Social Responsibility agents which operated much like todays public defenders office, except with funding written into the amendment and not subject to electoral shifts.
The SRA moves away from the old demonizing of corporate leadership and instead recognizes them as another group caught in the dynamics of the capitalist market--and provides them with a way of explaining to corporate stockholders why the corporation must become more ecologically and socially responsible ("because otherwise we will lose our corporate ownership, a far greater risk than the costs of this social responsibility"). And by introducing the notion of an Ethical Impact Report, the SRA challenges market notions of how to judge efficiency.