Let's Get Rid of the Parasitical Participants

I recently came across this pithy explanation of the difference between cooperatives and corporations. It reminded me that I need to pick up a copy of Marjorie Kelly's new book, Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution:

A cooperative’s most essential attribute is the lack of outside investors who neither use nor even need the enterprise but take on ownership interests purely as wealth-extracting rentiers. 

The absence of such potentially parasitical participants, combined with the limited liability and perpetual existence provided under U.S. law to all corporate entities...is truly the so-called “cooperative difference.”

—Don Kreis, in "Cooperatizing Corporate Personhood," a review of John Restakis' Humanizing the Economy, from the Journal of Cooperative Thought and Practice, Summer 2012 (in press).