Amending the US Constitution to Include Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility (2)
September 2011
In anticipation of July 4, 2011, US Independence Day, the Network of Spiritual Progressives is launching a campaign to add the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment (ESRA) to the U.S. Constitution. This amendment aims to alter the financing of US elections and change the actions of corporations. The promoters of the campaign describe their effort this way: “we go to the core of contemporary selfishness – the way our economic system encourages the pursuit of profit as the highest goal, and we challenge that way of thinking and that way of organizing a society.”
The proposed ESRA amendment would
“prohibit the use of private monies in national elections (removing the need of candidates to raise money from the wealthy and the corporate elites), have elections publicly financed, prohibit media advertisements in the last three months before an election and require those media to give free and equal time to all major candidates. It would also require corporate social and environmental responsibility by requiring that every large corporation get a new corporate charter once every five years, which would only be granted to those corporations that could prove a satisfactory history of environmental and social responsibility to a jury of ordinary citizens. And we, the communities who were affected by the operations of that corporation, including its workers, but including anyone whose environment had been shaped by that corporation’s activities, would be able to provide testimony to that jury about how environmentally and socially responsible that corporation had been. So when we at the NSP say that we want to fight for the survival of the planet, we go to the core of contemporary selfishness – the way our economic system encourages the pursuit of profit as the highest goal, and we challenge that way of thinking and that way of organizing a society.”