Are credit unions corporations? Not in the technical legal sense, but in the way they see their role in society as they grow?
A critic of many aspects of corporate activity is writer Jared Brock. His posts cover many segments of endeavor, but always come back to an institution’s impact on individual lives.
Here are some of his recent assertions:
The entire point of multinational corporations is to shatter local resilience and self-reliance, disconnecting people from land and place and generational skillsets, creating a system of utter corporate dependence.
But as you can see, much of our shopping is human-scale and relational.
If you’ve ever been to a corporate “community event” or witnessed a corporate-created “grassroots campaign,” you know exactly what I mean. Everything’s a bit sanitized and clean and proper and nice and… off.
That’s because corporations aren’t relational — they’re transactional.
They can’t give freely and creatively.
Their legal fiduciary reason for existence is to take.
And human beings can smell it from a mile away.
People create culture → Corporations kill culture.
A question for credit unions: Given his critique, do mergers of financially sound and long serving credit unions promote cooperative culture? Or are they examples of the transformation to a corporate mindset?