More Action You Can Take on behalf of 'Social Threefolding': support the Sunshine Standards for Corporate Reporting to Stakeholders

If you want to go right to action on social threefolding, and don't want to read more about it, scroll down to the blue paragraph in this post.

One of the puzzles in striving for a creative society – one in which culture, economy and state are relatively independent of one another and thus able to check, balance and reform each other continually (see my first post, What is Social Threefolding) – is how best to restrain the tendency of economic life to merge corruptly with the processes of government.

One important aspect of a solution to this puzzle has been developed by Ralph Estes, who is director of the Stakeholder Alliance, an organization representing various groups with a combined membership, the Alliance says, of over five million persons. Estes was a senior accountant with Arthur Anderson & Co., and is an emeritus professor of accounting at American University. According to the Common Dreams News Center he was some years ago “on a short list to be chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission,” the federal agency that, among other things, requires public companies to disclose corporate financial and other information to the public, so that buyers of stocks, bonds and other securities have a trustworthy factual basis for their buying decisions. Estes is the author of a dictionary of accounting and numerous other books on such subjects as enterprise zones, taxes, and corporate reform possibilities. This September will see publication of his latest book, Taking Back the Corporation.

Estes and the Stakeholder Alliance have been working to get legislatures to impose and corporations to adopt the Sunshine Standards for Corporate Reporting to Stakeholders. The Sunshine Standards were developed over many years through the efforts of many groups, and incorporate and improve upon numerous earlier efforts working in the same direction. The point of the Sunshine Standards is to greatly increase transparancy and information available to the public about behavior of mid-sized to large corporations. Estes is particularly concerned that information (much more than just financial information) relevant to all the ‘stakeholders’ -- employees, consumers and the community -- be required of companies. The idea is that such info, regularly and reliably produced by independent auditors, would embarrass companies into more socially responsible behavior that would serve significantly broader interests than those of shareholders alone.

If you want to take action on this right now,

1. You could propose this Stakeholder Alliance draft ordinance to your city council, or send a copy to your senators and representative (get their email addresses and phone numbers by clicking here) and tell them you support it and the Sunshine Standards for Corporate Reporting to Stakeholders.

2. Or support the Stakeholder Alliance in other ways.

Why will such actions further the ‘social threefolding’ process?

1) There seems little doubt that the additional transparency Estes is working for would reduce the frequency and depth of corrupt fusions between big business and government. And 2) the somewhat more cooperative economic life that would emerge through applying the Sunshine Standards would produce somewhat fewer economic agents competing aggressively to fuse corruptly with the political process in order to obtain illegitimate economic advantages.

It’s true that Estes speaks of how the increased accountability and transparency imposed by the Sunshine Standards would enhance the competitiveness of economic life, but when transparency embarrasses corporations into serving all their stakeholders, rather than just the ‘bottomline’ of shareholder profits, by definition that will give corporations a significantly more cooperative profile in the world. Corporations will take a big step toward serving the broad public interest.

The greatly increased transparency that will induce corporations to be far more accountable to workers, customers, communities, and the environment -- the more cooperative corporate behavior that would come into being through embarrassment caused by the Sunshine Standards -- would not be like the counterfeit sort of ‘brotherliness’ found in state-run centralized command economies, where ‘cooperation’ really means a dead and passive collectivism in which nobody is responsible for anything. Under the Sunshine Standards individual accountability would of course still rule economic life, and enhanced cooperation would emerge in that context and would therefore be authentic, unlike what happens under bureaucratic state centralism.

And although Estes speaks affirmatively of markets, the stakeholder ethos could in fact be a step toward the longer term possibility of finding ways of non-coercively transcending markets without depriving consumers of multiple sources for products or reducing prosperity or quality.

So for reasons 1) and 2) mentioned four paragraphs above, a cooperative, transparent, non-centralized economy might turn out to be the sort most compatible with maintaining the relative independence of society’s economic and political systems, which independence is one of the key goals of social threefolding. The opposite is often taken for granted – namely that the more competitive an economic system, the more it will be independent vis-à-vis the state. But as explained above, some kinds of economic competition clearly lead to corrupt fusions of economic interests with the political process.