Re: Corporations

[umberto tosi <utosi@inreach.com>]

Please, Greg...
I don't think anyyone is out to ban corporations. But it seems the media and
large segments of the public have fallen into a slack-jawed, uncritical,
worshipful credulity about corporate giants as sitting at the right hand of
God. Come on. I don't understand your point in saying that Stalikn and Hitler
killed more people than corporations. Surelyy, governments need to be checked.
(Actuallyy, what you said is often used as an argument against the death
penalty, but that's another matter.)  But let's not forget that Germany''s
private sector (and more than a few multinational corporations too) were
willing accomplices to Hitler. Moreover, the disasterous effects of
unscrupulous and unchecked corporations on people and their environments
worldwise, particularly in less developed countries is well documented, as are
the horror storie of workers, including children, in our own countryy's past
before they won certain rights and bargaining power. Many familiar
international brand companies today still seem to have no problem exploiting
child and slave labor in places like China and India,  The list goes on.
Arguing which is worse, corporations or governments, is sophistry.  Yes,
governments, unchecked, have the edge on genocide, but corporations haven't
been the all-good, shining knights who turn profits into prosperity to all, as
their spin doctors, ad agencies, lobbyists and apologists seem to be
successful in having us all believe these days.

Look, automoviles kill many more people than trucks, which, moreover, are very
useful in delivering goods everywhere. So, should we then just allow truckers
to ignore the rules of the road that apply to the rest of us.  Should they
also be allowed to decide on their own levels of investment in safety because
that's what the "free market" dictates, no matter what the social costs?

Most large corporations have little interest in a free market and go out of
their way to rig the game given half the chance. Theyy are no friend of
entrepreneurs.  That doesn't mean they should be barred, or banned, nor
hogtied. I mean, what if you said, in the name of free markets, that football
teams were free to buy off referees? What would happen to the game if refs,
say, overlooked mask-grabbing and knee clipping by one team or another, or by
all football players over 6 foot-4?  But this naive belief that corporations
and their unelected senior executives should run huge sectors of our economy
and, in effect, run local, state and federal elections via soft money
contributions because they have all the rights of an individual has become
dangerous dogma today.




Greg Peisert wrote:

> Ed and Bert;
>
>   If we look at it in the abstract, I don't see corporations any
> differently than government or any other large, powerful entity controlled
> by humans. They all exhibit the same characteristics. I don't think one
> could sustain the claim from any factual evidence that corporations have
> enslaved more people or resulted in more wars or deaths than, say,
> totalitarian or fascist regimes. If you combine just four: Stalin, Hitler,
> Pol Pot and Idi Amin, you've got a pretty good number of enslaved people
> and dead bodies. Indeed, I don't see that corporations at their very worst
> are responsible for that kind of enslavement and carnage.
>
>   Nor do I think the argument can be factually sustained that claims that
> corporations achieve their wealth at the expense of their workers. That is
> certainly not supportable in the sense that they take away the workers'
> material wealth and thereby gain their own. Nor is it true in the sense
> that if the workers went off and did other things, they would in some way
> create an equivalent quantity of wealth, of value for which others
> (customers) willingly exchange value. Within the context of the
> corporation, the efforts of workers are organized (in modern corporations,
> often largely organized by the workers themselves) in such a way that they
> create products or services that are of value to customers. When they stop
> doing that, they go into decline, and if they persist in their failure to
> produce products at a price that customers are ultimately willing to pay,
> they will go out of business.
>
>   It seems to me that we can point to a host of examples of very large,
> publicly traded corporations, that no longer exist. They were not able to
> stay in business by force, by coercion, by subterfuge. When they failed to
> produce products for which the market would trade, they crumbled and fell.
> I suggest that the evidence indicates that large corporations are actually
> far more vulnerable to attack from competitors than most people realize.
> They either keep adding value by creating new and better products for which
> they can trade, or they go out of business. The only exceptions are
> monopolies, and monopolies can only be sustained by government fiat and
> intervention. Even though, for example, I think the DOJ has done some good
> in tempering the arrogance at Microsoft, I do believe that given time (and
> not that much time...perhaps three or four years), Microsoft would have
> found itself slipping rapidly in the face of new competitors, had it
> persisted in its arrogance. We have seen it again and again. People point
> to antitrust actions as bringing down IBM, or at least humbling them.
> Nothing could be further from the truth. What crippled IBM in the 1980's
> was their inability to respond effectively to the burgeoning desktop and
> server market. For corporations, no matter how bad the management or how
> much they may try to maintain themselves by means other than competition in
> the market, in the end, if they don't deliver the products, they will die.
> The only exception is if they are propped up by government support,
> something that should _never_ be done.
>
>   That seems to me to be VERY different from governments, such as many
> African states, which can persist for decades while they wreak havoc on
> their people and misery and poverty reign.
>
>   What I would be interested in knowing is, if we were to ban public
> corporations, just what would happen? What would keep us from sliding into
> decay and becoming another third world country? What would keep us from
> reverting to man's "natural" state of hunger, disease and poverty?
>
> -- Greg