What can we be thinking?

Listening to a lecture I was transcribing for Growth Busters, a non-profit working to help solve our population problems, promote sustainability and environmental justice, I came across the following excerpts, spoken by Erich Pica:

What we are doing, at least with the big multi-national corporations in the United States…We’re exporting a lot of our pollution into developing countries in the hopes of giving them jobs, or providing jobs for their country. We are enslaving them to the same agricultural production practices, whether it’s the introduction of genetically modified uh, crops like corn or, soy or, cotton. And, making it…Basically enslaving them to, uh, developed countries…United States…European companies that have patents on those genes and those seeds. Uh, so, we’re exporting a lot of pollution…Extracting out of them, their lively-hood, their natural resources, their future, essentially to provide for ourselves. And, that is what a lot of the models….A lot of the economic models and development models around the world, whether it’s the World Bank, or IMF, International Monetary Fund…The theories of trade and globalization…That’s what it’s all predicated on.  It’s all predicated on the.. Promoting the wealth of the United States and Europe and developed countries. And, as we‘ve seen, over the last fifty years, it hasn‘t done a whole lot to alleviate poverty, or to alleviate hunger, or to alleviate uh, disease in the rest of the world. Next slide, please, (End)

It should be obvious to anyone that what we're doing in the west to the rest of the world is looting and pilfering.  Not only are we looting other countries,  we are also being looted by the corporations ourselves.

The next excerpt identifies exactly how and why:

I think it’s difficult. I think it’s difficult to get the change that we need working within the system. And, not addressing broader system, system change. In March of this year, we had the Citizen United case which basically gave corporations the right to unlimited speech, free speech through money. You know, we have Supreme Court rulings that define corporations as a person. Corporate Personage. And so, we have ninety years of legal history and legal precedent to where corporations get to gain all the rights of being an individual, yet none of the responsibilities or liabilities afterward. And so, that’s the foundation of our system. The environmental community is, you know, forty years into that debate. You know, in 1970, ‘69; a lot of the major environmental laws were passed. Well, during that same time up to current, we’ve been slowly strengthening environmental laws, but we’ve been slowly losing this fundamental battle with the very entities that we’re trying to regulate. Corporations and Wall Street, uh, you know, the big polluters, the big multi-national corporations of the world. And, they’ve amassed so much power that it is difficult to pass health care reform, climate change, uh, uh, gay and lesbian rights, immigration reform; without consistently hitting this corporate interest…this monied interest, these entrenched interests that are in Washington D.C. and that dominate the economy. And until we solve that, all of us, the, the movement, progressive movement, collectively are gonna to continue to run into road blocks. (End)

Corporations do a lot of good for humanity, at least for some of us.  They provide us with jobs and lively-hoods and a standard of living that the majority of the world population cannot even conceive of.  At the same time, they are slowly squeezing the life out of the environment and have increasingly disproportionate power in our legislature.  No individual can match the economic power that corporations have.  Why on earth would we give such a powerful entity say in our government?   A corporation is not even a living being. For all practicle purposes if the body of a corporation is it's physical assets, its mind is nothing more than a bank of computers.  It inherently lacks compassion, is devoid of emotion and cannot interact with us in a meaningful way.  It is indifferent to its effects on the living, even with input from the living.  What can we be thinking by giving it human rights?