must corporations be entirely evil to be hated?

I don’t get many of the recent defenses of corporate politics that have popped onto these pages as of late. Some people have gone out of their way to, not merely argue against the evils done in the name of corporate greed, but actually portray the corporations in a hyper-benevolent light.

am i the only one who is perplexed by this?

when I look at corporations, I see nothing but conglamorations of people pursuing the greediest path possible. I see damn all else to hell, I’m going for the everloving dollar, in fact a whole bunch of them. I see stunning examples of a philosophy which not only relishes but depends on the deprivation of fellow man.

there is a limited amount of money floating around in the world. the more of it you take, the less someone else has. if i want to sell VCRs, I have to ensure that a large group of people will never make enough money to purchase the very electronic video recorder which they manufacture. if I want to be an elaborate complex multinational corporation, I have to actively subjugate others and intentionally keep their lives miserable.

the worst part of it all is, corporations didn’t used to be like this. they didn’t always used to have their slimy fingers on the controls of the game. it’s only been since the massive deregulation of the early 80s that corporate power has feasted on itself, shitting out leveraged buyouts and corporate mergers left and right.

corporations started out for very simple purposes. for example, it’s 1849 and myself and a bunch of friends want to build a bridge. we incorporate, and this only-recently reified concept of the corporation was given existence. once the bridge was built, kerpow.

the biggest cause of codependence is our recent treatment of corporations as individuals. rights which were meant for human beings were granted to these malevolent maelstroms of greed. suddenly Mobil Corp. has the right to free speech, and since giving money is considered a valid expression of such speech, well there goes our lovely democratic republic. what would mobil like to say? why, “Make us more powerful!”, of course.

corporations are the epitome, the quintessence even, of greed. the unparalleled acme, the holiest of holies, the big macguffin.

and that is why I hate them.

>> there is a limited amount of money floating around in the world. the more of it you take, the less someone else has.

Not true. You obviously do not understand the economy. wealth is created by human activity. If you beleive money is taken from others, please tell me who had it all in the beginning.

I am not even going to bother with the rest of your post. Just suggest you go live in some pleasant place without corporations like Afganistan or Central Africa.

In the beginning wealth didn’t exist because the very idea of wealth did not exist.

For myself I consider a corporation that only exists to follow after the dollar a pointless waste of space.

sailor,

perhaps I should have said ‘a finite amount’. it is a simple matter of fact that the more money I get, the less money other people have. couple that with the fact that economic opportunity really only comes mainly to those with money, and you have hopefully seen my point.

if you haven’t, perhaps it’s because your attitude is too skewed. your “If you don’t like it, go to Russia” response belies either closemindedness or a strong allegience to one side of the issue. one of the basic tenets of the american ethos is the ability to change the system. the constitution may be called an elastic document, but hell, the country which it defines puts those subtle shades of interpretation to shame in its sheer fluidity. As I said in the OP, many of these corporate behaviors are recent developments. Why? Because the country and the system changed. And it is my fervent hope that they change again. Is that Unamercian or Anticapitalist? hardly.

some of the evils i pointed out in the OP are necessary evils. for instance, the inherently limited source of cash. It is inevitable that there will be losers, but that is better than having arcane bartering systems or sheer anarchy, both of which would cause more significant harm. but these evils were brought up specifically because they are excaberated by and sometimes even encouraged by corporate multinationals.

and if you don’t want to bother with the rest of the op, feel free. if something I said angers you or surprises you with my stupidity, you can respond or you can do nothing. I’d rather you respond, but it’s your perogative.

I suppose so. But who wants money? What really matters is wealth. And the fact is that it is rather difficult to (legally) gain wealth without giving wealth to someone else as well.

And just why are you bagging on corporations? I saw no complaint that couldn’t be made of individuals.

theryan, you’re right. those qualities are rather despicable in individual people. the problem with corporations is that they’re so much bigger, exert so much more power, manipulate global policy, and generally are lying brainwashing bottomdollar-rimming precious-resource-squandering and evil to the point of which the average individual can’t even conceive, *** and*** display those very qualities neither of us would like in a co-worker.

why don’t they get called on it? how placated and domesticated are the american people that they refuse to call the big corporations’ respective bluffs? that they willfully reject the truth if and when it’s shown to them? that they buy as a complete reality that which glows from their little cathode-ray tubes, to the point that people confuse X-files plots with the real world moving around outside of them?

and even worse, why is it so hard to try and escape from the far-reaching and ever-clutching talons, the sinewy stands of the whole wide world wide web? why can’t I escape from this addiction to their content and sodas and movies and information and novelty? you can argue all you want that the lifestyle being handed to us is fun and invigorating or whatever, but you also have to admit that anything this hard to escape from probably isn’t doing too much good for you.

and finally, why do They make me use such long and langorous sentences to talk about Them? Bastards!

I have to weigh in the other side of this one. You are taking a fact out of context here. At any given moment there may be an exact amount of money (wealth) in the world. What you seem to imply is that the amount is static. A succesful corporation CREATES money, it does not collect it.

Look at Microsoft, Intel, AOL etc…etc… That is all NEW money.

This is required for a corporation to thrive. Along the way the corporation has the side effect of enriching thousands (if not millions) of individuals. Think of all the families supported by corporations. How would these families survive if the corporation did not put is survival (self-interest) first?

You seem intent on creating facts the way corporations create wealth. This is a MYTH, not a fact.

Economic opportunity (in a free county) comes to those with talent, will, creativity and drive. Money might make it easier, but then nobody promised us life would ever be easy or fair.

If the desire here is to find a Utopian system where everything is cheery and perfect, then no system will ever be acceptable. Corporations are far from perfect, but at the end of the day, they still have a much greater positive impact on the world than negative.

What bluff am I supposed to call them on?

I refer you to:

:slight_smile:

The addiction you need to reconsider is those simplistic and silly notions you have.

Of course your are right about thee “limited amount of money.” People are attacking your because money is unlimited, but the stuff money represents is limited. Money is only valuable because of the scarce resources it represents. If I have a billion dollars then I control a billion dollars worth of steel, timber, food, etc… You are necessarly deprived of the resources I control.
To answer your original question…We life in a very propaganda/media controlled society. People are constantly bombarded with messages that support the current power structures. (ie corporations) Many people come to believe these messages. ie greed is good, the rich are smarter than the poor, bad things happen because people are evil sinners, etc…

As always there is a book to answer you questionin detail
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679720340/o/qid=967313336/sr=2-3/002-9369029-2644819

I’m incorporated. Or more properly, I’m the major stockholder (70%) in our corporation. I have one partner, and one other full time employee (our office manager/secretary), plus occasional part time or contract people. Of the employees of the corporation, I make the most, which is about half the total wages paid by the corporation. (I’m also generating about 85% of the revenue. However, my current partner is new, and we expect that to change shortly.)

We have been in business for about 15 years (only the last 10 under the current corporate structure). I incorporated for the same reasons that drive most to do so: protection of my personal finances from the business, you look more like a ‘legitimate’ business; liability protection, tax advantage, etc.

I think (and apparently my customers do as well) that we provide a good service for our cost. My employees have typically been very loyal, seem to have been very happy, have been good workers, and I think well treated. My current office manager has been with me for 6 years or so, and from what I can tell is extremely happy with her job. I’m certainly happy with it.

Oddly, I don’t consider myself evil. Apparently, you do. Go figure.

I think your world view is much too narrow. Go figure.

Ugly

Not true at all. If I own a gold mine, and make a billion dollars off of it, I have increased the amount of gold in the world by a billion dollars. Money does not represent resources, it represents value. My gold mine increased the value of the resources associated with it by a billion dollars.

Money is simply a tool for quantifying and exchanging value. When people trade, both parties to the trade aim to get something they value more in exchange for something they value less. When you buy a VCR for $200, you do so because you consider the VCR a worthwhile exchange for the $200. The VCR corporation values the $200 it gets from you higher than the VCR itself.

How would all these people survive without these corporations? Well golly, I don’t know, maybe the same way everyone else managed to survive and not die and get food and produce offspring and then finally die.

Why did you start out chewing my rag and telling me that I have it totally wrong and, to top it off, that I have been discreetly finagling facts from my ass, and then finish up by saying, “Okay, so money does work the way you said, but who cares? Life’s not fair, get used to it!” Could you please illuminate further how exactly my ass-fact was wrong? Without contradicting yourself?

If the desire here is to completely misread the exact piece of text which you quoted, then you get an A for effort and a B for delivery. The first sentence of the quote deals with ‘necessary evils’, hardly the earmark of Shangri-La.

As for the fact that corporations have a much greater positive impact, that is complete and utter rubbish. I am not going to start whipping out examples of corporate actions which have screwed local or global communities, as they would simply be selected anecdotal evidence. I hope others follow suit. But I will tell you that I am a firm believer that the smaller the group one’s actions are designed to promote, the more everyone else is screwed. When you have a tiny fraction of the population as members of the board or stockholders, and a huge powerful faceless money machine carrying out that fraction’s will, the decisions and actions are most definitely never in the best interests of everyone else.

You honestly don’t believe that there is a subtle and nasty addiction to pop culture and corporate advertising permeating the populace? Sailor, do you figure that it’s a coincidence that upwards of millions of people all just happen to find Coca-Cola the best drink to drink? Do you think that newsmagazines stopping print on stories critical of these big corporations, because suddenly came a call from the higher-ups at the station owned by Disney, has all been a coincidence? Are you so sincerely fist-headed that any observations which disagree with your own must needs be “simplistic” or “silly”? How about “stupid”, “smeggy”, or “snaggle-toothed”? “Simpering”, “scrotal”, “sycophantic”, “smelly”, “certifiable”? Or maybe even drop the alliteration. “Insipid”. Yeah, that works.

okay, water2j, but then simply take it one step further (farther?). instead of money or value being the limited commoddity, it’s the resources. we do not have infinite gold or diamonds under the crust. so we are right back to where we started: a finite supply of cash.

and RJKUgly, please please allow me to clarify. When I am referring to ‘corporations’, I most certainly am not speaking of you. A main reason that the megacorporations have raised my ire is that they gobble up companies just like yours. This trend toward bigger and more monolithic economic institutions is what scares me.

The type of business that you run has been slurred by my overgeneralization, and I am sorry. But please keep in mind that my vocabulary has limits, and conciseness is not a major skill of mine.

I still hate corporations. The real big ones.

All you spend money on is resources?

Here is a small list of things people spend money on, and yet are not necessarily limited:

Labor
Ideas
Art
Patents
Service
Comfort
Convenience
Saved time
Transportation

it’s not a matter of what you spend the money on. the important fact is from where the money is derived. if you ignore the source of the money, and speak only of where it goes, you are putting the cart somewhat ahead of the horse.

I’ll give you a hint, it has something to do with the hand that rocks the cradle…and Plato’s cave…and a little thing called human nature.

Corporations aren’t intrinsically evil. Their priorities and practices often are. And we are anything but innocent by-standers. That being said, I think a judicious use of resignation is warranted. Blame nature.

Money is not derived solely from resources. Money measures value. A house has more value than the resources from which it was created. A house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright has even more value. Gasoline has value based on the fact that we power cars with it.

I am not putting the cart in front of the horse. Money is a tool of exchange. All things that one person spends money on are the source of money for someone else.

right, but you ARE in fact putting the cart ahead. why? because you are looking at the end result of the exchange, where one the purchaser already has money (no duh), and the purchasee (or rather the purchased-from) has a good of some value.

what we are talking about here is the greater system that the two of them fit into. where did the purchas-er and -ed-from get the money? from a huge global network of resources and money which is a metaphor for those resources. the example you keep bringing up is a special case of that larger fiduciary system, an example which blatantly ignores the have-nots of said system.

as an aside, “A house has more value than the resources from which it was created” is almost completely wrong. why? because the resources of which you speak are only the tangible resources. A house’s value is based upon such things as the labor which went into its construction, the land it is on and the surrounding area, yes even the mental and artistic resources poured into it by F. L. Wright.

why almost completely wrong? because, true, there are intangible and immeasurable factors which go into value. but in the point of fact, that value has a limit. suppose I want a painting, and am willing to pay as much as possible for it. I couldn’t, say, offer more money than is in worldwide circulation, could I? well I could, but not successfully or realistically. the amount of money worldwide may be growing, and more and more resources may be pumped into such money, but there is number one some fixed limit (of which I know nothing) to those resources, and number two at any given time the amount of money is fixed.

third, and slightly off topic, is the fact that you absolutely cannot created more money or wealth or value or whatever the hell you want to call it, without having a substantial amount already.

>> third, and slightly off topic, is the fact that you absolutely cannot created more money or wealth or value or whatever the hell you want to call it, without having a substantial amount already.

Is that so? So if you come and do a job for me that involves only your labor it is worthless and I should not pay you? Will you paint my house for free if I supply the paint?

I had a Nicaraguan guy do some yard work for me. Because it had value for me I paid him to do it and all he contributed was his labor. Was I wrong in paying him?

It seems these threads about how wealth is created, what is money, etc, just go on repeating themselves forever with the only difference that the level of the discussion keeps diminishing (probably as those who know what they are talking about leave in utter boredom).