The big corporations and the centimillionaires and billionaires have taken daily control of our work, our pay, our housing, our health, our pension funds, our bank and savings deposits, our public lands, our airwaves, our elections and our very government. It's as if American democracy has been bombed. These realities have not been lost on toxics activists, who have come to understand that the dumping of toxic materials into their communities is part of the toxic economy which is, in turn, part of the same problem as their community's economic decline, and that all these problems are related to the nature of corporations. Corporations cannot care about particular places. They cannot even care about human health.
Corporate managers can only care about short-term financial gain.
Corporations must make decisions that will return a profit to investors. That is all they are set up to do under the law. If they did otherwise, they would be sued for breach of fiduciary trust by their shareholders. Until the American people re-assert their control over corporations and give them a different purpose in life, corporations will continue to destroy communities and places, economically and ecologically. It is not the nuclear confrontation between east and west, between the Soviet Union and the United States, that we once feared.