Steps towards democratising corporate political influence | Shahid Bolsen

The truth is that the only way that you're going to actually improve the situation is through small measures, is through what appear and what feel like inadequate measures. This is the only way forward, small steps, through incremental progress. So, like, if we're talking about trying to put a check on corporate power or if we're talking about trying to have accountability or we're talking about the democratization of corporate power, the democratization private sector influence. If we're talking about measures to impose accountability on the private sector, this is a very long term project and there is not going to be a single event that will make that happen because power in the private sector is not going away. There's always going be rich, there's always going to be poor, there's always going to be exploitation, there's always going to be workers, there's always going to be consumers, there's always going to be profiteering, there's always gonna be corruption.

All these things will always exist. What you have to try to do is not think that I have to solve the problem of the existence of corruption, the existence of exploitation. You that's that's an unsolvable problem because this is part of the human condition. Anyone who is serious about political change or social change should be primarily concerned with sort of the ripple effect that you can cause and snowball effect that you can cause by something small that you do. Because the small change that you make, the small measure that you take can affect the development of a system.

If you interfere in a system by by imposing or intruding upon that system with something that is not organic to the system, then it will develop differently. So, for example, just brainstorming. If we're talking about corporations and the money that they spend, the billions of dollars that they spend on political lobbying and campaign funding to get what they want out of Washington, to get policies that they want, and That's just on the national level, if you talk about on the on the state level, it's another issue. The amount of money that they spend to lobby state governments and to bribe and to coerce and to extort state governments, local governments. But on the national level, spend billions of dollars.

Even one company can spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually to influence policy to buy the loyalty and obedience of elected officials. Now, why should those companies be able to spend that money with no independent oversight? Why couldn't you create a committee, say, each company. I mean, create a sort of a protocol for corporations for the oversight of corporate political spending. And then each corporation, each company would be obliged or would be requested to submit to a committee.

A committee that would be made up of say shareholders of that company, workers from that company, and consumers who are their primary demographic customer base. And then anytime that that company wants to allocate funds for a campaign contribution or for political lobbying, that would have to be submitted to the committee for approval. They would discuss it, they would debate it, and determine whether or not the company should make that contribution, should make that donation. And then you could also take that further where whereby the the committee could actually recommend that company should support this and support that. If they weren't going to anyway, like you could you could have the the committee could say there's this bill in the congress about such and such and we have done a survey of your customer base, and this customer base largely supports this bill.

We would like you to support this bill with the power that you have as a corporation and as a, you know, multimillion dollar campaign contributor, donor. We would like you to use your corporate lobbyists to support this legislation even though this legislation has nothing to do with your company. But it has something to do with your company because your customers care about this issue. You see what I mean? So you could have a committee for every company, for every major company, for every major corporation, a committee that would oversee their political spending.

That would be a step in democratizing corporate influence in the political sphere. It's a relatively small step, but it changes the whole discussion in a way. It adds an something into the discussion that simply isn't there right now, which is these major companies owe some degree of responsibility to all of their stakeholders including their customers, including their workers, that they owe some accountability to them, some responsibility to them to use their power, to use their massive financial and practical power that they have in society, that they they have a responsibility to use that in a way that reflects the values, the will, and the aspirations of all of their stakeholders, not only their shareholders. This isn't something that's even in the discussion now really. The population should be able to make demands of these companies to use their power in a way that reflects their own values, the values of their customer base.

Even if those are issues that don't that don't directly affect the company. So it's not just about ethical practices within the company and ethical supply chain and and that kind of thing, but actually about, you know, these are these are things that that your customers care about. So therefore, as a company, you should care about them even if it doesn't affect your bottom line because it can affect your bottom line. You can create influence groups of consumers and those that that consumer group or that influence group would be comprised of people who are drawn from the core demographic group that constitutes a company's customer base. So say it's middle class, middle aged women with children.

Maybe that's their customer base. Maybe it's college age people who are interested in technology. Maybe, you know, whatever. Every company does their market research and they know exactly who their customer base is. They know minute details, but that's what all the big data gathering and collection is about actually, so that they can target their advertising to the specific customer base that will be the most likely to be interested in their products and their services and become loyal customers to them.

That's what all the big data collection is about. So advertising is based on market research to identify demographic groups that are the most likely to support this or that company. So you use that same data to identify those company's customer base and then you organize that demographic. You organize that demographic as an influence group to target that company or any other company that has the same customer base demographic. To say for example, the influence group can have can can have demands of of a company.

They can say we wanna know, we want more transparency about your profit margin. For example, we wanna know that you only spent $5 making this bag. Why are you selling it for a thousand dollars? We wanna know why there's such a massive disparity between the amount of money, the salary of the CEO versus the salary of the lowest paid employee. We wanna know why.

We wanna know what the disparity is. We wanna know how much how many more times more the CEO makes than the lowest paid entry level employee. If if the if the CEO or the or any executive is making 10 times more, 20 times more, a 100 times more, 200 times more than an entry level employee. We would like to know why and maybe we don't find that acceptable. And then because that that influence group would be constituted of people who represent their customer base, they could potentially have influence.

You could say what are the bonuses being given to executives, in what amount and why and how that's justified and so on. Versus why you are laying off workers or what your plans are to replace workers with AI or what are your plans to replace workers with automation and so The whole point is just to create a dialogue where there isn't a dialogue now, where there's only dictation coming from the corporations and be and we just take it as if we have no say. But every time you buy their goods, every time you frequent their shops, every time you do anything with them, you're making a political contribution to them. You are empowering them. I mean, you can't really we can't really complain about the power that corporations have because we gave it to them.

We gave them that power. And every time we patronize their businesses, we're giving them more power. But but we're not asking for anything in return. I mean, you can say, well, you're getting in return the product that you buy, but then then then that becomes the question of what about the profit margin. The thing that I'm buying is clearly not worth what you're charging for it.

The thing that you're the thing that you're selling me cost you a fraction of the price to make? And how much of that profit margin actually just goes to bloated inflated executive salaries and bonuses? We want transparency. We want a report, you know. And we're not demanding that and we have every right to demand that.

And if we just start demanding that and if we organize in a way to demand that, it changes the the entire discourse and it can cause a ripple effect and a snow snowball effect that can potentially over time change the dynamic, the power dynamic between the public and corporate power. It sounds minor. It sounds inadequate to say, let's start a committee. There's no other way to do it. You have to do it in small steps.

And before you know it, those small steps will have taken you very far.