Joel Bakan Quotes

I think we've got to look at corporate law. Back in the day when I studied it, there were different constituencies that were to be served, and I think there was a real wrong turn about 20 to 25 years ago when the theory began to be promoted that your highest duty - in fact, some would argue, your only duty - is to maximize shareholder return. I just don't buy it. And it wasn't the original underpinnings of the legal theory of corporate law.

The question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no they do not.

Our laws demand that a corporation have a fiduciary responsibility with shareholders to maximize profits. They are legally required to make as much money as possible, any way possible within 'the law.'

I agree with Peter Drucker that the culture and legal systems of the United Statesare especially favorable to shareholder interests, compared to other interests and compared to most other countries. Indeed, there are many other countries where any good going to public shareholders has a very low priority and almost every other constituency stands higher in line.

I believe that the officers, and, especially, the directors, of corporations should be held personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law.

Why not stakeholder action? There's no economic principal that says that management should be responsive to shareholders, in fact you can read in texts of business economics that they could just as well have a system in which the management is responsible to stakeholders.

There are questions as to whether it should even exist. Who should corporations be responsive to, the management of a corporation? Theoretically they are responsive to the shareholders, but I why not to the so - called stakeholders, the work force and the community? Nothing in economic theory opposes that. Those are social and political decisions.

I think we have to take a look at corporate law. We have to take a look at the incentives that we can perhaps use to encourage more longer term.

There is a steady flow between corporate board rooms and government decision making centers.

Leaders must be reminded that Businesses exist for the service of men.

If our great corporations would more scrupulously observe their legal limitations and duties, they would have less cause to complain of the unlawful limitations of their rights or of violent interference with their operations.

… strong national regulation of interstate corporations

Corporations are people.

Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys — legally enacted game-playing — agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members.

Wherever a legislature has the right to accomplish a certain result, and that result is best attained by means of a corporation, it has the right to create such a corporation

Corporations are not people. That’s why we have different laws governing corporations and governing people.

...it is a government by the corporations, for the corporations.

Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism …. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.

Companies … have a broader mandate than apparently the reformers want to give them in the political sphere. It is not only maximizing profits. It is advancing the economic interests of the corporation in many different ways.

All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law.

Corporations are people, my friend.

Anything that benefits workers, the environment, or the general population is going to reduce their [the corporation’s] profits.

The pendulum of capitalism has swung way too far to only trying to maximize the profit of shareholders rather than many of the traditional other virtues and accomplishments of a company.

It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from Government the privilege of doing business under corporate form, which frees them from individual responsibility, and enables them to call into their enterprises the capital of the public, they shall do so upon absolutely truthful representations as to the value of the property in which the capital is to be invested.

Some of the best lawyers in this country are hired, not to go into court to defend cases, but to advise corporations and business firms how they can get around the law with too great a risk of punishment.