Ownership: A company is owned by its shareholders and controlled by directors. Directors have a duty to act in the best interests of shareholders' investments and are not permitted to consider any other interests. A corporation is an artificial person permitted to do most things a person can do in terms of business. Corporations regularly make use of legal precedents that originally related only to real people. Under the 1998 Human Rights Act, corporations can claim rights to a fair trial, to privacy, to freedom of expression, and to property.

Who is responsible? Liability and the 'veil' of incorporation: Corporations have 'limited liability', which means shareholders are not responsible for the debts of the company or for civil or criminal offences. This also applies where the shareholder is another company – a parent company is largely protected from responsibility for its subsidiary. Making companies liable for criminal offences such as manslaughter is extremely difficult.

The effects of these unjust current structures: Corporations' economic power, and their lobbying power over governments, makes changing company law very difficult, though lawyers generally refuse to see this power. Companies are in some ways legally obliged to use their power because their sole motive is to protect and enhance their profits.

The corporate mind: The corporation is run as a centrally planned dictatorship. However, there is no dictator: neither shareholders nor directors have ultimate responsibility for the company's actions and purpose. This allows the corporation to plough on regardless, acting single-mindedly in its own best interest.

Corporate psychology – killing from behind a desk: Most people who work for corporations think of themselves as basically decent and good, even where they are involved in planning or authorising actions that lead to death, disease and impoverishment of people, or destruction of the environment. Psychologists speak of the conflict of 'espousal theory and theory in use', a phenomenon I detected in 40 years of privileged access to economic enterprises and described as 'personal aspirations suppressed by institutional arrogance'.

Size: In law large companies are governed by rules originally intended for small ones. Difficulties therefore arise when lawyers are called upon to distinguish between different sizes and types of corporation in defending claims against transnational corporations whose activities extend beyond many national frontiers.

This relies on the long assumed freedom and ability of commercial banks to increase the money supply by issuing credit as debt, which demands compound interest in amounts far beyond the value of savings held. The following paragraphs succinctly summarise the nature of the unjust system within which we live, incorrectly assumed to be unchangeable (from p.11 of Gaian Democracies: redefining globalisation & people power by Roy Madron & John Jopling, Green Books, 2003).

Using a systems approach, we can see that the huge range of unjust and unsustainable impacts [on life in the 21^st century] is not haphazard. The unjust and unsustainable aspects of globalisation stem from the purposes, principles and ideologies of a purposeful human system we have called the 'Global Monetocracy'.

In systems terms, injustice and unsustainability are 'emergent properties' of the system as a whole. As a purposeful human system, the Global Monetocracy is not designed to deliver justice and sustainability. For this reason, we do not attach blame to any specific group or class. Many people, not just the financial and business elites, have prospered immensely in the service of the Global Monetocracy. There are others who defend it ferociously against its many critics. Even so, they are just minor components of a complex system that has evolved over several centuries. To blame them as individuals, or specific groups or classes, is to make a fundamental strategic error. If we want a just and sustainable global system in the future, it is the Global Monetocracy as a whole that must be reconfigured – the totality, not just parts of it.

Our description of today's global system as the Global Monetocracy originates from our identification of its core purpose as a system. Every human system has a purpose that governs the way it works, and this is true of today's form of globalisation. The systemic purpose of the Global Monetocracy is the continuation of money growth in order to maintain the current debt-based money-system.

It is not widely known that almost all the money we use comes into existence, not by governments creating it, but as a result of a bank agreeing to make a loan to a customer at interest. Only about 3% – the notes and coins – is government-made. The other 97% comes into existence as a debt owed by a customer to a bank. We cite authorities such as James Robertson, Richard Douthwaite and Michael Rowbotham to show that the effect of this is that our economies have to grow in order to avoid financial collapse. The debt-money system is thus the driving force behind the Global Monetocracy. The risk of collapse forces governments to give priority to policies that serve the money growth imperative; and in turn, these policies produce the unjust and unsustainable form of globalisation that we have today.

It so happens an innovation in UK law that can now play an important role in such reforms is the creation of Limited Liability Partnerships, currently used by some 7000 enterprises (Antonia Swinson: 'New legal structure that could change the world', Radical Economics, Sep/Oct 2004, p.7). "For the first time anywhere in the world it became possible to form a corporate body ... which had both collective limited liability and mutual, co-operative characteristics of partnerships. ... An LLP makes it possible for all stakeholders in an enterprise – staff, management, investors, suppliers and clients – to be members of an Open Capital Partnership which replaces the usual adversarial contracts of debt- and equity-based models."

These and related ideas are discussed and helpfully expanded in two New Economics Foundation booklets: Stakes not Shares: curbing the power of the corporations, Roger Cowe, 2001; A New Way to Govern: organisation and society after Enron, Shann Turnbull, 2002. And Ulrich Duchrow and Franz Hinkelammert, in diligently researched evidence presented for the World Council of Churches in Property - for people not for profit' (Zed Books, 2004), trace the close association of the accumulated acquisition of property and the disproportionate money shares of the rich at the expense of the poor, wherever structural adjustment programmes are in force.

Monetocracy: Stephen Zarlenga, in The Lost Science of Money (AMI, 2004), makes clear in research based on original sources, that credit and money are creations of law, not of nature. Thus it is no surprise that, in their book Monetary Reform: Making it Happen! (ISPO, 2003) James Robertson and John Bunzl write about a "more pluralistic multi-level-currency era . to include local currencies to meet the need of local communities … and a global currency to meet the need of the world community for a means of transnational exchange. One of the principles is that the profit (or ‘seigniorage’) arising from creating new money in a public currency – such as the pound, euro and dollar, as well as new local currencies and a new global currency – should be public revenue, not private profit. Another is that these public currencies should be created debt-free, not as interest-bearing repayable debt".

The quarterly newsletter from the INTERNATIONAL SIMULTANEOUS POLICY ORGANISATION (ISPO)