Nova Spivack: Corpocracies

...because corporations are motivated only to maximize shareholder value, they have no incentive to be "responsible persons" in society, and in fact, they have every incentive to try to "externalize" costs by cutting corners, offloading problems and waste onto the public, and cheating if they can get away with it. So rather than obeying laws and being good citizens out of some sense of morality or ethics, they do so only if and when the risk of getting caught is greater than the chance of getting away with it.

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It's strange that America is both the champion of Democracy and Capitalism -- because while these two systems support one another, corporations are anything but democratic in structure!

-- Nova Spivack, Should Corporations be Democracies?, Minding the Planet weblog