MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SKIN A CORPORATE CAT

MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SKIN A CORPORATE CAT
By Andrea Thomas

The best argument in favor of the for-profit business model (FPBM) is that it creates jobs and new project investment. Now, however, it is clear that the unbridled FPBM will ultimately take our economy down, further divide socio-economic classes, further harm our environment and act immorally. It concentrated income into a few elite wealthy people, a status that precipitated both the Great Depression and our recent Great Recession. It made the poor poorer. It allowed environmental nightmares such as the Gulf of Mexico oil leak. It allowed this Great Recession. It promoted greed at any cost as good, turning its back on social responsibility.

The stock casino gambles with our economy using unsustainable business decisions forced by major stockholders for short term profit. By it’s structure, FPBM encourages a multitude of imprudent, immoral and inequality-inducing practices. As we have seen, it is not possible to fully regulate and enforce these practices. We must develop a business model that reduces, rather than increases, the need for regulation and enforcement.

It is time for a major systemic shift from our FPBM, while supporting employment, investment, environmental responsibility, equality and morality. One solution within our grasp is highly incentivizing a non-profit business model (NPBM) for all industries.

The NPBM, exemplified by Mayo Clinic, is systemically more capable of prudent decisions because it is free of imprudent stockholder demands for short-term-gain, which comes at long term operational, socio-economic, environmental and moral cost. The NPBM enables greater focus on sound business practices, wise investment, fair employment compensation, the social responsibility to pay the operation’s full economic cost and morality. It does this because the funds that would, in an FPBM, go to stockholders are instead rolled back into the company for these uses and is free of imprudent, immoral stockholder pressure.

The current NPBM will most certainly require adjustment to fit all industries, but it is ultimately a superior means to reducing destructive, greed-motivated, imprudent and immoral corporate behavior. It negates the stock casino’s involvement in business practices, thereby reducing our vulnerability to its poor decisions. The NPFM should especially be incentivized, and even required, in health and human service industries.

In financial reform legislation, I urge inclusion of major incentives aimed at formation of and conversion to NPBMs.

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