Occupying Corporate Boards and Energy Markets

This panel offers an “Occupiers” perspective and strategy on labor and energy exploitation. The movement confronts a panorama of interconnected economic and ecological arenas of redistribution. More generally, corporate occupation should involve new laws for the selection of boards of directors. This will serve as a lever to move income and wealth from the 99% towards the 1%. A rival conceptualization of the firm lays the basis for alternative corporate governance structures. Occupying the energy industry needs to have as its main objective the destruction of the profit motive itself. More specifically, resource extraction is a starting point for bonanza profits. State accomplishments and betrayals of South America’s indigenous movements is a reference point. In the Pacific Northwest, the region’s first international private transmission cable has been advertised as a way to combat global warming. The project will connect American and Canadian electric grids. A private contractor, Sea Breeze Corporation, obscures the fact that the energy will not only come from green sources, but also from new run-of-river hydroelectric plants that are not catalogued as renewable under State laws. A number of counter strategies for energy are discussed, including a permanent crisis of profitability in the oil and natural gas industries.