This page is for the reader who wants the mechanism, not just the pitch — the constitutional foundation, the seven pillars in full, and who administers it.
A corporation does not exist in nature. It exists because a state created it — granted it limited liability, perpetual existence, and legal personhood, none of which any natural person possesses on their own. That grant was never unconditional. At the founding, a corporate charter was understood as a public compact: privileges extended in exchange for public benefit returned. That understanding was dismantled over the last half-century, deliberately, starting with Milton Friedman's 1970 argument that a corporation's only obligation was to its shareholders.
The premise underneath that argument doesn't hold up. Shareholders don't own the corporation. They own shares — a contractual claim on earnings and a share of governance. The corporation itself, as a legal entity, is owned by no one. It's a state-created institution, chartered by a state, not by the federal government and not by its shareholders. Every corporation operating in the United States made that choice — where to incorporate, under whose terms — and that choice is the acknowledgment.
The framework's central design decision, and the one that gives it its constitutional footing: a corporation never characterizes its own behavior. It discloses facts it's already required to report. The statute applies a fixed methodology to those facts and calculates a score. The corporation doesn't say its supply chain is exploitative or its product causes harm — it reports supplier contract terms and product formulation data it already files with the FDA and EPA. The characterization belongs to the statute, not the company.
This is the same architecture as the tax code itself. You don't characterize your own tax liability — you report income and deductions, and the code calculates what you owe.
A corporation that chooses not to disclose simply doesn't qualify for a reduced rate and pays the standard one. There's no penalty for silence — only no reward for it. Disclosure is voluntary. Its absence is not.
Each pillar is scored from a federal measurement system that already exists — no new disclosure requirement, no new bureaucracy.
CEO-to-median-worker pay, already required disclosure under SEC Rule S-K Item 402(u).
Measured against MIT's Living Wage Calculator, codified into statute by geography.
Parental leave, sick leave, healthcare coverage, measured through existing DOL and BLS reporting.
Emissions and waste, drawn from the EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program.
Tier-one and tier-two supplier labor and environmental standards, verified through CBP enforcement frameworks.
Nutritional and health impact of core products, scored against FDA disclosure data and CDC chronic disease research.
Releases and product content, drawn from the EPA's Toxic Release Inventory and TSCA risk evaluations.
No corporation qualifies for a reduced rate if any applicable pillar falls below its statutory threshold. Strong performance on six pillars doesn't average out a failure on the seventh. The floor is absolute, and no commission has authority to waive it.
This is new machinery, but built to do exactly one thing: calculate a rate from disclosed facts. It doesn't inspect, license, or direct how a business operates. Deliberately narrow, deliberately minimal — and structurally incapable of becoming anything more.
An independent seven-member commission, one per pillar domain, each mapped to the federal agency that already holds the relevant expertise.
No single institution controls how commissioners get there. The Congressional Research Service writes the qualification criteria. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine runs the search and vetting, funded independently, barred permanently from taking money from any agency or corporation the framework scores. The states — through their own governors or legislatures — make the appointment, through a three-round preferential vote among the vetted candidates. If a state's process fails to produce a majority, the National Governors Association's executive committee decides.