Life is one big corporate scam!! !! !

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What do you think of corporations?

Are they a necessary part of our economy or are they raging monsters plundering the earth's resources for profit?

Corporations are a positive part of society, provided certain conditions are met.

First, there must be a minimum wage. Not to guarantee a living wage as much as to ensure that the company pays its employees in real money and not in company scrip or some other self-serving system.

Second, labor must be allowed to organize, and there must be government support for unions.

Third, monopolies must not be allowed. Typically, monopolies can only exist when corporations have government support (as in utility companies or government contractors), or when the control some extremely limited resource. Thus, we need limited anti-trust laws to make sure we can deal with those rare situations.

With these conditions, competition ensures that corporations serve the ends of the people in an increasingly efficient manner. The high growth rate of capitalist economies shows that the model is very effective.

Jeremy

From the title I thought you meant that Life is a product sold by a monopoly with no refunds...

If you don't like corporations, you should get rid of your affordable computer, and most of your clothes, and pretty much anything else you own that's not home-made.

Yes, as long as law are set up to ensure that the rights of people are not infringed upon, corporations are good. They give us affordable quality goods, tons of jobs, bolster the economy, and are often the biggest philanthropists. It is in the best interest of a corporation to help the society in which it exists, and it is in the best interest of the society to allow the corporation to operate.

I am fully aware that we have got to the point that we are totally dependent on corporations. They have wormed their way into society so much that we cannot live without them. However, they are slowly draining the life-blood out of the planet and out of society, until we get to the point where there is "no such thing as society" as quoting Mad Maggie herself. We are no longer seen as humans by the corporate elite, but only as entities that can buy, sell, or work. We are entering an age now where human feelings do not matter anymore - life itself is merely a utility for making profit. This is the corporate age: the faceless, feelingless, even meaningless drive for profit above all else.

As corporations expand overseas to exploit more workers and ravage new lands, the power of governments to control them is failing. The corporate executives acknowledge this and take advantage of it. Nobody can stop them now. Governments don't matter any more, neither does politics - the corporations have got so powerful they can bypass democracy and the will of the common people.

So when you turn on your TV tonight, just think that everyday you watch adverts by corporations to promote not just their product, by the corporate way of life - the idea that your can't live without their product, or the corporation.

You've got it backwards. Modern corporations are the effect, not the cause. The cause, the thing that we're dependent on, is the economy of scale. We have moved from local self-sufficiency to centralized, efficient production and a global trade network, and it's true that there's no going back. Corporations are simply one manifestation of this economic paradigm shift.

Personally, I don't think it's a bad thing at all. Economic growth is at an all-time high. So are life expectancies. Even the poorest people in industrialized societies have televisions and refrigerators, and practically no one is starving.

It's true that small businesses have largely been a casualty of this change, and that's regrettable up to a point, in the same way that it's a little regrettable that the corner bookstore can't compete with Amazon.com. But lamenting this change ignores a crucial point: the reason small businesses can't compete with large corporations is that the corporations are much more efficient, and efficiency is, in general, a good thing for everyone. It means that less energy is being wasted at every step of the production chain, and so people's resources are being devoted more toward the things they want and less toward overhead. This raises the standard of living for everyone.



Do you really believe that? Do you look at the world today and think that we're worse off than we were a couple hundred years ago?



Those two statements are contradictory. Corporations see us as entities that can buy their goods, and therefore our feelings are of paramount concern to them. Consumer corporations are practically obsessed with image. They want people to view them favorably so that we'll buy their goods. They care a great deal about human feelings.

They may care about us from self-interest rather than altruism, but it doesn't matter because the effect is the same: corporations serve the people. As long as there is competition, the people are the ones with the power and the ones who stand to gain the most from the arrangement.

Jeremy

RobertN,

Do you ever think about anything else other than having a communist revolution or Vetivert?

Some corporations are bad, some aren't. As long as there are laws that protect the unions and the people, and the corprtations abide by those laws, there is no problem.

RobertN, are you against people making money?

Lets see - any one of us who has a 401k here owns parts of many corporations, they aren't nearly as sinister as LLPs or LLC's, they actually have fewer rights than an individual (I was learning in my business law class last spring that they actually don't have many of the same rights of a person), and if someone does something f'd up enough the 'corporate veil' can be pierced. We can't call a corporation 'the man' also because, even more true that in partnerships and sole proprietorships, he really is us.

IMO the likeness between a corporation and a person and how groovy or eerie it is is a conversation best left to stoners sitting arround drum circles

You can't seriously believe that.

The thing I like the most about capitalism is that it is indeed possible for the individual to go out and make a name for himself. The individual or family that runs their own small business is the embodiment of the american dream.

However the dream has been diluted by the quest for money and power, and that's what I don't like.

What really bugs me though is the mindless amount of useless crap and novelty items that are passed off as essentials by corporations looking to make a quick buck.

Cellphones that play music and videos, take pictures, and can update your stocks in real time, along with check email and send text messages... Since when do they get off calling it a phone???

Sorry, but if want check stock quotes, I can turn on headline news and watch the crawl on the screen. If I want to take pictures, I'll pull out my trusty 'ole 1977 vintage canon TX SLR and throw in a roll of emulsion. If I want to listen to music or watch a video, I'll put a CD or DVD into my computer. And in the rare event I need to actually make a phone call, I'll use a trusty old land line that won't suffer from garbled voices and drop-outs (unless someone crashes into the telephone pole).

Technology is nice, but the quest to out do someone with something bigger or better, I feel, is taking the human out of humanity.

There was once a time, in my lifetime, and I'm only 25, when we didn't have all these things and we got by just fine with out them.

lol, too true...

Sean, I think we can refrain from the personal comments here.

If you have nothing useful to contribute to the discussion, then go elsewhere. We are discussing corporations, not communist revolutions.

If people here really want to believe that corporations are our friends, then go ahead. But don't come crying to me when you suddenly find your voting rights curbed, freedom of speech taken away, your local forest uprooted and replaced with an oil refinary, your jobs lost and exported abroad, your schools taken over, and the truth suppressed by a self-interested corporate media.

Hell, the way patent laws are going, your entire human genome could become the property of a corporation by 2050. Fancy being owned by a corporation!! !! I bet some of you would love that.

That is what I am getting at. Society is getting more materialistic and that is driven by aggressive marketing by the corporations to sell their products.

Do you have any evidence that this is happening? Both are alive and well here across the pond.



This one's just silly. The last new oil refinery in the U.S. or Europe was built in 1976. And guess who wants to keep refining capacity fixed? That's right, corporations. If anything, you should be complaining about the fact that they're not building any more: that's what keeps gas prices so high.

And I can't speak about the U.K., but here in the States there are more forests now than there were a century ago. You can thank corporations for that, too: use of wood products increases demand for trees. Corporations seek to fill that demand by increasing supply, i.e. planting new forests.



Jobs will go wherever labor is the most cost-effective (that doesn't always mean cheapest). This increases efficiency and is generally a good thing. The funny thing about outsourcing is that a) the jobs "lost" are generally not jobs the local population wants in the first place (which is why it's cheaper to go elsewhere), and b) economic growth in the country that "loses" the jobs tends to be very high, and the unempoyment rate tends to be low. How do you account for this?

There is a problem involved with outsourcing because some countries don't have any labor protection laws and exploitation can take place, but I think it's unfair to place all the blame for this on corporations. You also have to blame the governments that allow those conditions to exist, or even encourage them. Blame your government for not slapping heavy tariffs on trade with those countries. Blame the people who love buying cheap imports. You and I are as much to blame for this state of affairs as the corporations are.



This is a legitimate concern, but trying to blame the media for this is ignoring the fact that they're simply giving the people what they want. The problem is us.



Not going to happen. Any idiot can patent stuff (at least in the U.S. -- we have some really crazy ones), but that doesn't mean anything. One of the criteria for defending a patent is originality, and the human genome has plenty of "prior art" on the record.

The paranoia about genetic patents is misplaced, in my opinion. The purpose of doing that is so that medical companies can defend intellectual property associated with new gene therapy techniques. This is a good thing: money is spent on research and development of those techniques because they hope they can make a profit from it. If they can't defend their product, the profit potential goes way down and the money for research dries up and the thing never gets developed in the first place. Everybody loses if that happens.

RobertN, I don't mean this as a personal attack or anything, but have you thought about taking a macroeconomics class? In my opinion, a lot of your concerns about these issues are based on misconceptions about the way the economy is run. Learning more about how this all works really opened my eyes about a lot of things.

Jeremy