Throughout our history, people have been lured to America by their desire for wealth. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his early 1800s critique, Democracy in America, suggested that early immigrants were drawn as much by the prospect of wealth in the New World as by freedom of religion. “Rags to riches” stories remain a powerful motivation for masses of people whose prospects for riches elsewhere are slim to none. Even among Americans, particularly the middle class, many aspire to join the ranks of the affluent. Those who have given up on other means spend their vacations in high-stakes casinos or regularly “invest” in multimillion-dollar lotteries. Ranked high on their list of inalienable rights is the right to pursue wealth. The pursuit of wealth is a powerful sedative that numbs the “better angels” of our minds to the widespread economic exploitation of others.

Advocates of social justice are routinely labeled socialists, for doing nothing more than proclaiming the ideals of our forebearers and the truths of our founding documents. The American Declaration of Independence begins with a clear statement of the inherent and equal rights of all people, not only to life and liberty, but also to the pursuit of happiness. The opportunities of those born into poverty and discrimination obviously are not equal to the opportunities of those born into wealth and privilege. The Constitution charges the government with “promoting the general welfare” but does not give the government responsibility for promoting the accumulation of wealth. A capitalist economy, without the clear guidance and restraint of government, will ensure neither the general welfare nor the equal rights of all to the pursuit of happiness.

Yet many Americans seem to believe it’s somehow un-American to proclaim that all people have basic economic rights – including the right to enough food, clothing, shelter, and health care to meet their basic human needs. We seem to believe the economic sacrifices would be too great if we were to return to our “better history” of compassion, social justice, and mutual respect. So we retreat instead to our “darker history” of discrimination, exploitation, and global imperialism. In our pursuit of greater wealth, we are held hostage by our “darker angels.”

We are also held hostage by the corporate interests that dominate our economy. Business corporations are created for the specific purposes of assembling and perpetuating the accumulation of large amounts of capital. Corporations operate under charters granted by state governments – by representatives of the public, under the presumption that incorporation will somehow further public interests as well. Corporations do not have a right to accumulate capital – it is a privilege granted by the public to further the interests of the public.

The accumulation of capital brings with it the accumulation of economic and political powers. These powers can be used in ways clearly contrary to public interests. The public mandates of corporate charters were deemed necessary because large businesses have the power to corrupt both the competitiveness of markets and the representativeness of governments. Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson both warned of the political dangers of corporate power in the late 1700s. Abraham Lincoln spoke of corporations as a growing threat to the country in the 1800s. Theodore Roosevelt “busted” the corporate trusts of the early 1900s. Dwight Eisenhower warned of the growing political and economic power of the military-industrial complex in the 1950s.

Over and over again, Americans have been warned of the threat of growing corporate power, to little avail. The stock market “bubble” of the 1990s and the financial “house of cards” of the 2000s provide ample evidence that corporate interests have once again gained control of our economy. Even more threatening, corporate interests have also gained control of our government. The massive military buildup of the 1980s, a time of easing global tensions; the continued economic deregulation of the 1990s and 2000s, times of speculative excesses and financial irresponsibility; and the massive government bailout of 2008, without government oversight or accountability, all provide compelling evidence of corporate political power.

Yet the American people continue to act as if corporate interests are somehow the same as our national interests. “As General Motors goes, so goes the nation,” still seems to ring true to many Americans. Unfortunately, Americans have been led to believe that restraints on corporate corruption and greed would somehow restrain their own ability to pursue their legitimate self-interests. Many people work for large corporations or have retired from large corporations and are unwilling to support anything that might threaten their jobs or retirement benefits. Others have their life’s savings invested in corporate stock and are unwilling to support anything that might reduce returns on those investments. Others simply believe that the overall economy is dependent on corporate businesses and are unwilling to support anything that might slow economic growth.

Certainly, corporations are important to the U.S. economy but not nearly as important as we have been led to believe. Most people do not work for corporations, at least not large corporations. Admittedly, only about 7 to 10 percent of Americans are self-employed, and another 12 to 14 percent are employed by government, including those who work in public education. About half of all Americans work for “small businesses” with fewer than fifty employees, most of which are corporations. However, small corporate businesses operate much like individual proprietorships. This leaves around 30 percent of the American workforce employed by medium and large businesses, many of which are publicly traded corporations. Large publicly traded corporations can do only what they were created to do; they accumulate wealth for their stockholders by maximizing profits and growth.

America’s largest corporations – the Fortune 500 – employed about 20 percent of the American workforce in 1980, but this had dropped to only 7 percent of the workforce by the late 1990s. They have continued to cut U.S. employees as they export jobs to lower-wage countries. They are cutting still more workers during the current economic recession. Each year, American jobs become less dependent on large corporations. In addition, many middle-class workers are losing the value of corporate stock in their individual retirement accounts (IRAs) as their corporate employers struggle to survive. While about half of all Americans own corporate stocks or mutual funds, about 85 percent of all corporate stock is owned by the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans.

Our preoccupation with the pursuit of wealth has made us vulnerable to the corporate propaganda that equates corporate interests with national interests. As a consequence, it has become un-American to support anything that might restrain corporate profits or growth. We have allowed our lust for wealth to turn us into hostages of large corporate entities. The only logical restraint to continued corporate exploitation is “We the People” – the people who grant and can also revoke the charters of corporations.

A betrayal of capitalism. “The idea that the markets are always right was mad.” This was the reaction of French prime minister Nicolas Sarkozy to the meltdown in global financial markets in 2008. He blamed the financial crisis on a betrayal of the “spirit of capitalism.” He argued that capitalist economies should never have been allowed to function without strict government oversight and regulation. He was right. It remains to be seen whether capitalism can survive the betrayal.

During its early stages, the discipline of economics was called the political economy. Classical economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Karl Marx were clearly concerned as much with philosophy and politics as with what we now call economics. They had clear ideas about whether economic choices were good or bad for nations and right or wrong for humanity, although they obviously did not always agree.

Over time, however, academic economists sought to distance themselves from the social and ethical consequences of industrial development. They retreated to scientific empiricism. Neoclassical economists want to be real scientists, not social scientists. They began relying on the observable and measurable choices of consumers and producers. When consumers chose one product over another, economists could observe and quantify the conditions of their choices.

Consumers’ preferences, as revealed by their choices, also were accepted as being inherently right and good, or at least economists left such matters to the philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists. Philosophy and politics had no place in the new economics, other than in dealing with “market failures,” which they thought to be few. Market failures included only those instances, such as pollution and exploitation, where some of the economic costs and benefits were not reflected in market prices. The “spirit of capitalism” had been betrayed long before the financial meltdown of 2008.

Economic systems have acquired their names – capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism – from their sources of dominant economic power or authority. Under socialism, workers – those who make up the vast majority of society – are the dominant source of economic power. Communism focuses the socialist power of workers on decisions at the community level. The word fascism is derived from the Latin word for “bundle,” and economic power is centralized in strong national governments. In capitalist economies, those who possess capital have dominant economic power or authority. Today’s capitalists are those who own shares in corporations that own the buildings, equipment, technology, and other means of production.

The early capitalists were wealthy individuals – those whom Marx called the bourgeois. They were a class of people distinct from the working class or proletariat. The long struggle between socialism and capitalism has been a class struggle between those who do the work and those who control the means of production. During the early days, corporate decisions were dominated by wealthy individuals, such as Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Mellon. They had the capacity, if not always the inclination, to express their individual social and ethical values, good or bad, in the decisions of their corporations. Today, however, the most powerful among those who control the means of production are not individual capitalists but corporations. Capitalism has been allowed to degenerate into “corporatism.”

Today’s largest corporations are fundamentally different from the large corporations of the past. Most are not owned by a few wealthy family members, friends, or business associates but instead by thousands, perhaps millions, of unrelated individuals scattered all around the globe. Many of today’s capitalists are not particularly wealthy. They may work for the corporations in which they own shares or may own shares in corporate competitors. About two-thirds of the shares of today’s large corporations are held by mutual funds, pension funds, and other institutional investors. Most individuals with money in these funds don’t even know which corporations their money is invested in at any given time. The only shared value of investors in today’s large publicly traded corporations is the common desire to accumulate wealth.

If corporations owned by families or a few committed shareholders want to forgo economic opportunities that compromise their personal values and ethics, they are quite capable of doing so. In such corporations, stockholders can express their collective social and ethical values in the corporations’ decisions. If they want to make long-term investments at the expense of short-run profits, they are free to do so. In a large publicly traded corporation, however, a drop in stock value means the chief executive’s job is in jeopardy, regardless of the long-run consequences for the company.

Certainly there are still some real capitalists left – perhaps Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch, and T. Boone Pickens would qualify. These people control their capital. However, most corporate executives manage capital that is controlled by the corporations they manage. Managers who fail to generate profits and enhance stock values may leave the firm with a “golden parachute,” but they soon will be gone. A corporation is a legal entity separate from the people who formed it or now own it, a distinct “legal person” dedicated to doing what it was created to do. The dominant power and authority in today’s U.S. economy is held by corporations, not by the capitalists who own or manage them.

Even the wealthy shareholders today are not capitalists in that they do not control the corporations in which they own shares. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans account for close to half of all corporate stock ownership, but they don’t control the corporations in which they own stock. Even the wealthiest individuals have little ability to influence the management of the large corporations; their only real leverage is their ability to buy or sell shares. Corporate stockholders are too numerous, diverse, and transient to express their personal social or ethical values through the corporations in which they own shares. Consequently, today’s large corporations are driven by the myopic motive of maximizing economic returns for their stockholders – the only value that today’s corporate investors seem to hold in common. We no longer have capitalism in America; we have corporatism. Today’s corporations have no sense of good or bad, right or wrong; the spirit of capitalism has been betrayed for the sake of corporate profits and growth.

Sarkozy was right. We should not expect today’s corporatist economy to function without strict government oversight and regulation. Only real people – natural people, not merely legal people – are capable of forming and expressing social and ethical values. Lacking such values, an economy cannot logically be expected to function for the good of society, regardless of the rationalizations of today’s neoclassical economists. Only We the People, working through government, can restore the soul and spirit of capitalism.

Is capitalism sustainable? The financial collapse of 2008 was heralded around the world as the “end of capitalism as we know it.” Perhaps the economic lessons of the Great Depression will allow us to avoid a total collapse this time. However, even the wisest of government policies and programs cannot restore capitalism’s crumbling ecological and social foundation. The survival of capitalism will require fundamental and systemic change in what it means to be a capitalist nation. Capitalism, unbridled and unrestrained by social and ethical values, is simply not sustainable.

Serious questions were raised during the 1930s regarding whether capitalism was fatally flawed. The economy had failed to recover on its own during a time of low employment and falling prices. Investors became so pessimistic they would not make the investments needed to create new jobs, regardless of how low interest rates fell. Without jobs, consumers had no money to buy things, thus justifying their reluctance to invest their money in producing things. The economy then became caught in a downward spiral. Eventually, national governments reluctantly intervened by borrowing money and hiring workers when private investors were unwilling to do so. Capitalism survived but has since been allowed to repeat many of its earlier mistakes. Once again, capitalism is confronted with questions of sustainability.

Today, the questions of sustainability are far more fundamental than whether the government should regulate financial markets or provide jobs when private investors won’t. The sustainability of capitalism, or any economic system, depends on its ability to meet the needs of the present without compromising opportunities for the future. The inability of capitalism to meet the basic needs of millions of people today is a direct consequence of the failure of capitalist economies to address the basic questions of sustainability in the past.

Throughout human history, capitalist economies have been driven by the relentless pursuit of economic growth. The underlying assumption has been that individual human wants are insatiable; more is always better, and we can never get enough. Capitalists have been able to exploit the willingness of workers to work more, earn more, and consume more because they have never felt they had enough.

Capitalism has two potentially fatal flaws. First, unrestrained capitalism inevitably leads to a widening gap between the rich and the poor, as wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. Even when the “rising tide raises all boats,” it raises the investors’ boats more than the workers’. Growing social disparity eventually destroys the stability and productivity of the society within which the economy functions. Capitalist economies have predictably degenerated into economic chaos, if not revolution, any time they have been allowed to function without adequate government regulations to protect the poor and weak from the rich and powerful. Marx was right: Unbridled capitalism is not socially sustainable.

Second, unrestrained capitalism inevitably degrades and depletes the natural and human resources it relies on for its productivity. Everything of economic value is derived from either natural or human resources – from water, minerals, oil, workers, managers, inventors, innovators. Both nature and society are finite and limited in their ability to produce things of economic value. A common economic fallacy is that technology is capable of offsetting the continuing loss of basic resources. This line of thought goes as follows: As natural and human resources become scarce, rising prices will provide economic incentives to develop technologies that will allow resources to be used more efficiently. For example, as fossil energy is depleted, rising energy prices will provide incentives to develop alternative energy sources and to use fossil energy more efficiently. Thus, human ingenuity will reduce and eventually remove all limits to economic growth.

This fallacy arises from two basic misconceptions. First, technology without the resources of nature and society can produce nothing of economic value. Imagine today’s U.S. economy without fossil energy and you will begin to understand the interdependence – not independence – of technology and nature. How useful would today’s automotive technologies be without petroleum-based plastics, gasoline, or diesel fuel? What use would computer technology be without computer chips or fiber optic lines? In addition, technology depends as much on society as on nature – technology is created by people. How creative would people be in a world with no society to civilize, socialize, and educate the new technologists? Technology is interdependent with society.

Second, both nature and society are dynamic systems, and the time required to adjust to new threats or demands is far longer than any logical economic planning horizon. The economy provides incentives to invest only for the benefit of the individual investor. The economic planning horizon of most corporations in measured in years, perhaps even decades, but certainly not generations. Today’s corporate managers are concerned about the impact of rising energy costs on next quarter’s stock prices, not the impact of fossil energy depletion on the future of humanity. They are less concerned about global climate change because the expected economic impacts are beyond their corporate planning horizons. Most are not concerned at all with economic inequity because most haven’t yet made the connection between the society and the economy. It will take decades, if not centuries, to mitigate or adjust to today’s environmental and social mistakes. If we wait for the economy to provide adequate incentives to address today’s environmental and social problems, we will have waited too long.

Capitalism was conceived during a time when the resources of nature seemed inexhaustible and human society seemed invincible. We know now that a sustainable economy must renew and regenerate as least as much as it extracts and exploits. We know we ultimately must rely on solar energy – wind, water, photovoltaic cells … – to renew whatever energy our economy extracts from nature. We also know we must continue to rely on society to prevent the economic exploitation of people. We now know that we must invest in nature and society to ensure economic sustainability. We also know that unbridled capitalism provides powerful incentives to extract and exploit but provides too little incentive to renew and regenerate.

Can we create a sustainable capitalist economy? Yes. But we must first challenge the basic economic assumption that more is always better. Obviously we need some basic level of food, clothing, and shelter. However, once our basic material needs are met, we need relationships to make our lives better – friends, family, community – and we need a sense of social equity and justice. We also need to feel a sense of rightness and goodness in our relationships, with each other and with the earth. We are physical, social, and ethical beings. Happiness requires balance and harmony among the three.

To sustain our capitalist economy, we must be willing to work together, through government, to protect society and nature from economic exploitation. We already know how to begin this process. We were on the right track with the social and environmental policies of the 1960s and 1970s. Admittedly, many of the specific government programs didn’t work as intended, but the basic intentions and approaches to ensuring social and environmental integrity were sound. We can never expect to get everything right the first time; we will just have to try again and keep trying until we get it right. We now have compelling evidence that government must protect society and nature from economic exploitation. We just need to find the courage to act on what we know.

Perhaps most important, we must be willing to pay the higher economic costs of an economy based on social and ecological renewal and regeneration rather than extraction and exploitation. And yes, the economic costs will be higher – but also affordable and necessary. We already have the means of creating a sustainable economy; we lack only the common commitment to do so. We will not make that commitment until we abandon the pursuit of wealth and return to the pursuit of happiness.

The neglected principles of democracy. The 2008 presidential candidates raised and spent more than $1 billion, about $8.50 per voter, in the presidential election. Obviously, each person who voted didn’t contribute $8.50 to support their candidate. Some contributed millions while others contributed nothing. Americans did not participate equally in determining the outcome of the election, or even in deciding which candidates appeared on the ballots, in any sense other than each casting no more than one vote.

The most fundamental principle of democracy is that all people are of equal inherent worth and thus have equal rights, including the right to participate in making the rules by which all agree to be governed. The democratic government of the United States was founded upon this principle. Our government has been exemplary, though far from perfect, in protecting at least most of the rights spelled out in our Constitution. However, the inherent right of all people to an equal voice in the political affairs of the nation has been sorely neglected.

Throughout American history, the wealthy have had more political influence than the poor. The U.S. Supreme Court confirmed this inequity in 1976 when it affirmed that spending money to influence elections represents “constitutionally protected free speech.” With this decision, the person who can afford $1,000 was granted 100 times as much influence over political processes as the person who can only afford to spend $10. Two years later, the Supreme Court affirmed that corporations have a constitutional right to make political contributions, allowing the corporate concentration of economic power to be wielded as political power. In addition, the political power of corporations is not limited to campaign contributions: They lobby our lawmakers, advise and coerce our regulators, shape public opinion on political matters, and essentially dictate the economic policies of the United States.

When wealthy individuals support various political causes, they may or may not be motivated by the public good. Corporations, on the other hand, are legally committed to serving the interests of their stockholders, not the good of the public in general. They are not real people and thus have no innate sense of social or ethical responsibility. Anything corporations do that serves the public good must be justified to their investors as a means of enhancing the stockholders’ wealth. Individuals are capable of pure altruism and patriotism; corporations are not.

Regardless of whether wealth is individual or corporate, the people of the United States in general have been denied their basic democratic right to have an equal voice in making the rules by which all must abide. Over time, corporations have replaced wealthy individuals as the dominant source of political as well as economic power. Perhaps most important, corporations now have the political power to block any laws that might limit their political powers. We are losing our democracy in America; we are drifting toward “corpocracy,” if not already there.

Corpocracy seems an appropriate word for a government that is dominated by corporate power. The word democracy has its roots in the Greek words demos, meaning “common people,” and cracy, meaning “rule” or “strength.” Plutocracy comes from plutos – rich people – and aristocracy comes from aristos – high-class people. Corp is a common abbreviation for corporation. Following the pattern of the other Greek words, corpos would mean “corporate people,” and corpocracy “corporate rule.” Since the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently ruled that corporations are “legal people,” with the same political rights as “real people,” the U.S. government might accurately be called a corpocracy – which, by the way, rhymes with hypocrisy.

The gradual transformation from democracy to corpocracy is not so much a matter of intent or design as public neglect. Democracies require constant attention from the people, particularly when coupled with capitalist economies. Economic value accrues to individuals, not to society as a whole. Thus, anything done solely for the benefit of others – or for society in general – is of no economic value. For-profit corporations are capitalists. Certainly corporate investments and employment create benefits for society as well as individuals, but societal good is not their motivation.

Anytime the government collects taxes for purely public or social purposes, the economic opportunities of corporations are diminished. Corporate taxes paid to government reduce dollars available for dividends or investments. Investors could have spent their dividends or capital gains to stimulate the economy. Government restraints on corporate exploitation of natural resources or workers are seen as wasteful government interference in the economy. Anything that ensures the economic rights of all people to adequate food, shelter, and health care reduces incentives for greater economic productivity.

The primary responsibility of government is to do those things that are necessary for the benefit of society in general, but for which economic incentives are inadequate or nonexistent – meaning things that have relatively little or no economic value. As a result, the most important things governments do for the common good of “real people” are invariably opposed by “corporate people.” In a pure corpocracy, the only legitimate function of government would be to ensure the individual’s right to private property – meaning the right to acquire and accumulate wealth.

The Constitution is our only defense against the rising power of corpocracy in America. The only sure way to roll back more than 100 years of Supreme Court rulings is to amend the Constitution. The U.S. Constitution was designed to be amended from time to time – to be a living document. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “As [the human mind] becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.” The erosion of the American democracy has been too long neglected. It’s time to reclaim our democracy from corpocracy, before it’s too late.

Is our democracy sustainable? Barack Obama has repeatedly been accused by his opponents of being a socialist. These accusations are reminiscent of the words of Karl Marx, who began his Communist Manifesto with the words, “A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism.” However, the specter that is haunting America today is not socialism or communism but instead is corporatism. The political power in a democracy ultimately must reside in the common people. In the United States, corporate influence now permeates all aspects of government – executive, legislative, and judicial – as our democracy degenerates into corpocracy.

In a corpocracy there will be nothing to restrain corporations in their relentless pursuit of economic growth. All government restraints to extraction and exploitation of nature and society will have been systematically removed. This is not the irrational fear of some radical socialist; this is simply what we have seen happen over the past few decades. Laws protecting the natural environment and ensuring social welfare have been systematically dismantled or ignored while financial markets have been “freed” from government regulation, all in the name of economic growth.

Corporatists also seek to remove economic boundaries among nations, as national trade policies tend to restrain their exploitation of “every corner of the earth.” This is not the ranting of some nineteenth-century Marxist; this is simply an observation of what is currently happening. American markets have been flooded with imports from low-wage countries, notably China and India. The economies of “less-developed” countries, such as Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, have been highjacked by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. They are forced to produce and export agricultural commodities and manufactured products to pay off their debts, rather than focus on the needs of their own people. Furthermore, is there any real doubt that our so-called strategic interests in the Middle East – Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia – are economic interests in Middle East oil?

In a corpocracy there is no capacity for self-restraint. For-profit corporations are chartered for the purpose of accumulating capital; that is all they are capable of doing, and they shouldn’t be expected to do anything more or less. Corporations are legal entities that are distinct or separate from their owners and managers. Nonprofit corporations, many with social and ecological purposes, also participate in political processes. However, once the members of a nonprofit corporation lose control of their leadership, as in the case of many large nonprofits today, the members lose their individual voice in those political processes.

Each person must be afforded an equal voice in the political process if a democracy is to function effectively. Admittedly, the U.S. government was designed to be a representative democracy, in which individuals’ voices must be expressed through the decisions of their elected representatives. Some scholars contend that representatives have little responsibility to listen to their constituents but instead should do whatever they feel is best for the state or nation as a whole. Regardless, representative democracy leaves the nation vulnerable to corpocracy. For a representative democracy to work effectively, the people must elect and support representatives who will act in the best interest of the nation, not for their individual interests. The less direct the connection between elected officials and their constituents, the greater the risk that government itself will become a corporation – an entity separated from its members. Such a “democracy” is not sustainable.

In the United States, we still have the institutional structure in place to create a sustainable society and economy. However, we must respect the natural hierarchy of sustainability. Society is a part of nature, and the economy is a part of society. Thus, the laws of nature must be respected by society, and the laws of society must be respected by the economy. Nature’s laws can be violated by society, and society’s laws can be violated by the economy, but not without the violators suffering the eventual consequences. A sustainable economy must function for the overall good of society, and a sustainable society must function for the good of nature.

To sustain our democracy, our legal statutes must be rooted in the laws of nature, including the laws of human nature, and the economy must function within the bounds defined by those legal statues. In our democracy, our interpretations of the laws of nature and natural law are expressed in the form of rights and responsibilities in the U.S. Constitution. They are “self-evident truths,” as defined in the Declaration of Independence – including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They also are reflected in the preamble to the Constitution, which gives our government the responsibility to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” The initial Bill of Rights and later constitutional amendments also define basic rights and responsibilities of all citizens.

To sustain our democracy, we must not only reaffirm our basic constitutional rights but also assert our rights to live in a sustainable society. Fortunately, our Constitution was meant be amended as we become “more enlightened” – in the words of Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Paine wrote, “The best constitution that could now be devised … may be far short of that excellence which a few years may afford.” Yet only seventeen amendments have been added since the original Bill of Rights, and only one, largely technical, amendment has been approved since 1971.

To sustain our democracy, all people must be afforded sufficient food, clothing, housing, health care, and education – and a sufficiently clean and healthful environment – to meet their physical and mental needs. To ensure equality of opportunity, both within and across generations, both nature and society must be protected from economic exploitation and degradation. With an amendment ensuring equal rights for those of present and future generations, every law and regulation would be required to stand the test of sustainability – to meet the needs of the present without compromising opportunities for the future.

Unfortunately, corporate influence in our political processes today would preclude any serious efforts by the American people to proclaim their constitutional rights to a sustainable democracy. Therefore, the first new constitutional amendment for sustainability must be: Corporations, not being natural persons, have no right to participate in any way in the process of amending the Constitution. The privileges of corporations are distinct from the rights of natural persons.

A sustainable democracy would not be socialism or communism, although it would require an active role for government in establishing and enforcing the bounds within which the economy must function. Within such bounds, capitalism can function sustainably. Without such bounds, neither our economy nor our democracy is sustainable.