I believe transparency can change a great deal.
I have major concerns about the abuse of limited liability.
I ask for more information from multinational corporations, in particular. Today George Monbiot takes the issue further in the Guardian, suggesting that Freedom of Information legislation should be extended to limited liability entities, saying:
Modern government could be interpreted as a device for projecting corporate power. Since the 1980s, in Britain, the US and other nations, the primary mission of governments has been to grant their sponsors in the private sector ever greater access to public money and public life.
There are several means by which they do so: the privatisation and outsourcing of public services; the stuffing of public committees with corporate executives; and the reshaping of laws and regulations to favour big business. In the UK, the Health and Social Care Act extends the corporate domain in ways unimaginable even five years ago.
With these increasing powers come diminishing obligations. Through repeated cycles of deregulation, governments release big business from its duty of care towards both people and the planet. While citizens are subject to ever more control — as the state extends surveillance and restricts our freedom to protest and assemble — companies are subject to ever less.
In this column I will make a proposal that sounds — at first — monstrous, but I hope to persuade you is both reasonable and necessary: that freedom of information laws should be extended to the private sector.
Read the article.
There's a lot of merit in what he says for PLCs, and maybe for all companies with public contracts. But for all companies without limit? I don't know, yet.
But this is a debate to be had.
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Maybe not all the time for all companies as there is such a thing as playing your cards close to your chest. It’s unrealistic to suggest otherwise. Where companies are working with public money however absolute transparency is a necessity. If they don’t like it, they needn’t do it. They could always form a subsidiary company specifically to deal with public works, if transparency was a problem. It’s difficult not to believe that in the cases of Atos and the like of A4E what is hidden behind the respectable cloak of commercial confidentiality is outright theft from the public purse, endorsed by the same politicians who then go on to share in the proceeds. Chris Grayling and Iain Duncan-Smith, I’m looking at you here.
Especially as atos then go-on to [effectively] disqualify people from ill-health and disability benefits based upon a “report” [AKA medical assessment] that is made following an examination NOT by doctors but more likely an occupational health “practitioner”
As for A4E…..never mind the fraud allegations….On 13 March the Skills Funding Agency confirmed it had awarded A4e two such contracts, worth up to £30million….
Hmmmmm….it never rains but it pours money into favoured pockets…..
With FOI laws about to be more restrictive for state information ?
Following the “expensesgate” fiasco, where the people discovered that “do what I say and not what I do” was being literally interpreted.