THE CORPORATION

1. Should corporations be entitled to the same legal rights as individuals? Where should be the line drawn?

Being entitle to rights implies the fact of having certain responsibilities in order to actually be entitled to them. Individuals legal rights include life, freedom, property, free trade among others, and the obligation these imply are: respect for other’s life, act in trade under fair conditions and actions that don’t trespass or affect other rights. Corporations as parts of a society, I think, are entitled to the same rights; they should be allowed as the video said to be freely formed, to be owners of assets, to sue and to freely involve themselves in trading activities. In the basic idea of the definition of each right, corporations for being important agents in the development of the current economical and for their ability to create growth for countries and individuals; should have the same rights as individuals. But a line should be drawn in the obligations corporations have.
Corporations’ actions have a bigger impact, as they involve many citizens as employees, and other companies, they need to take into account not only their profit interests but also the correct development of activities in order no to harm any other member in the society.

2. How can we ensure corporations are held accountable for their actions?

As corporations’ objective is to grow and have more profits, they simply keep carrying out their business without looking the impacts those have, or not even caring over what they need to step in to achieve these goals. They have been accused of the children and third world employees’ exploitation, the environmental pollution and frauds to the government. But the most worrying thing about thiese accusations, is that they get out of those by paying, how can policies about nonpolluting or any other aspect, can be applied if corporations can pay a “commission” for not acting according to them?.
The possible ways to make them accountable for their actions are being trade for money, and until laws get to a point of shutting down business or imposing temporary closures as “scolding” for their actions, or until the economical system stop depending on them, problems will keep persisting.


3. Should individuals bear any responsibility for the actions of a corporation? If so, to what degree?

Corporations are just artificial legal structures, so there is a tendency to attribute their actions to the people conforming it: CEOs, employees, legal representatives and others. There might be some cases like legal sues, where they as representatives of the company, should give explanations or proofs of the taken actions, accordingly to the corporation perspective and way of acting.
People from outside the company tend to blame individuals for the impact the corporation’s activities have for example on the environment, in an economic crisis or a lay off, but to me they are just following rules. Enterprises have well defined structures, with procedures, tasks descriptions and courses of action, so an individual part of a corporation can not be blamed for following those; maybe if he could, his choice would be different.


4. What are the benefits of the corporate firm? Could an alternative model offer these as well?
The corporate firm offers several benefits, some of them are:
- Serve the public, by using revenues in social investments and community welfare
- Build business across the world generating employment and investments
- Change the way we live thanks to the comfort and better conditions products give us
These benefits can be given thanks to their high incomes and high reach, regarding different communities around the world, being the main actor in the current economic system, and maybe being only replaced for the governments. Governments can also have high incomes, resulting from taxes, to be invested for the society benefit, but their scope is not global and sometimes is not equally distributed.

References

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=H3m5lq9FHDo&p=FA50FBC214A6CE87&index=5&playnext=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vorWknUybY&feature=related

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