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Anarchism, Syndicalism, Labor
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Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism
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Banking, Investment, Finance
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Capital
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Noam Chomsky
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The Commons and the Tragedy
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Consumerism, Materialism
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Corporatism and "Crony Capitalism"
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(Page 8)
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The "Edge"
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The Greens
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KEIRETSU, CHAEBOL
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Liberalism
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Luddites, Luddism, and Neo-Luddism
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The Market
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The Military-Industrial Complex
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Persons
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Persuasion, Manipulation, Advertising, Propaganda
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Plutocracy
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Profit
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"After 23 years as a corporate securities attorney -– advising large corporations on securities offerings and mergers and acquisitions -– I left my position as partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom because I was disturbed by the game. I realized that the many social ills created by corporations stem directly from corporate law. It dawned on me that the law, in its current form, actually inhibits executives and corporations from being socially responsible."
"Now virtually no one any longer believes that U.S. company reports are trustworthy or that American corporate profits are what they are claimed to be. According to a Merrill Lynch survey of fund managers, there has been a 20 percent drop in confidence, to under 40 percent. Abroad, the opinion of American business is worse yet."
"Our current economic system is an aristocracy, according to Marjorie Kelly. Think British rule of the American colonies. It's based on the divine right of kings: The interests of the king are paramount; the aristocracy alone has a say in government.
At the center of the economic aristocracy we have today is the corporation, its authority based on the divine right of capital. Shareholders are king and their interests reign supreme. The aristocracy's primary goal is to pay shareholders as much as possible and pay employees as little as possible. The public good is ignored. ...
Ultimately, we must design a corporate system in which all economic rights are equally protected, not only the rights of shareholders. In keeping with genuine free market principles, we should put wealth in the hands of those who create it, which is employees, and we need a new economic principle that says corporations have a responsibility to the public good. Ironically, our system now discourages public corporations from service to the common welfare. In the future we must require such service. At the very least we must require that the public good not be harmed."
divinerightofcapital.com
The Corporation as Feudal Estate
An excerpt from
The Divine Right of Capital,
published in
Business Ethics, Summer 2001
"Like a feudal estate, a corporation is considered a piece of property, not a human community, so it can be owned and sold by the propertied class."Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm. This is interesting.
"To call the stockholder-centered corporate structure "natural" is reminiscent of the ancient claim that the monarchy was the only "natural" way to structure government.
A truly natural free market would free all groups to compete equally, to have a chance to pursue their own self-interest, to have an opportunity for their voices to be heard and their needs considered. Real free markets are not about enshrining the self-interest of one group alone in law. Privilege like that has no place in a free market."
"You'll never hear it from the financial press, but absentee corporate ownership is insidious. It makes Wall Street a colonial occupying power, maintaining its legitimacy by turning employees into outsiders in their own workplaces.
Historian Edward Said noted, the fundamental tool of an imperialist order is turning the natives into outsiders in their own land. "For the native," he wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "the history of colonial servitude is inaugurated by loss of the locality to the outsider."
Stories are at the heart of how we view the world, Said wrote. For "the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming," defines culture.
"It was Adam Smith who identified what turned out to be the central ethical fault line in Enron. The corporation, he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, was an inherently corrupting business form. The problem was the separation of ownership from control. In partnerships and sole proprietorships, the forms he preferred, the owners ran the business. In contrast, managers hired by the owner -- stockholders ran the corporation. And the owners were too busy to monitor how their money was spent by the managers. So managers were institutionally liable to what Smith called "negligence" and "profusion." Negligence, because the business was not the consuming dedication of their lives, as it is for partners and sole proprietors; it was merely a job. Profusion, because they could reward themselves by lavishing other people's money, which spends so much easier than our own, on fine dinners, handsome equipages, and all manner of other frippery -— and disguise their profusion as business expenses."
"A senior Microsoft Corp. executive told a federal court last week that sharing information with competitors could damage national security and even threaten the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. He later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed."
"... the effort may have backfired. A May 10 report prepared for the Defense Department (by Mitre Corp.) concluded that open source often results in more secure, less expensive applications and that, if anything, its use should be expanded."Plus, it's just plain more American, right?
"...there are two indisputable sides. One, rooted in the corporate "quality movement" of the '80s, might be called Demingism, after its chief proponent, the late W. Edwards Deming. The other side, more prominent this year, could be called Hammerism, after its most eminent spokesman - a mathematician-turned-information-systems-designer-turned-"reengineering"-guru otherwise known as Michael Hammer.
To Hammer, reengineering is "the radical redesign of business processes for dramatic improvement." ... ("When people ask me what I do for a living," Hammer says, "I tell them I'm reversing the Industrial Revolution.") ...
The fiercest advocates of Demingism tend to work in factories and industrial design labs. They follow the model of Japanese management, with its ethic of hivelike humanism. ... Experts, according to Demingism, don't know as much about improving the work as the people who live with it. ... To Deming, anything that ranks or rates people against each other - prizes, gold stars, bonuses, tips, and trophies - is a "force of destruction." The only way to improve your own score in the long run, Deming said, is to improve the game for everybody."
"...Barrington Moore pointed out that criticism of oppressive systems most often targets individual elites who violate approved standards. Criticism of the entire class of elites come less often. ...
What we really need, of course, is action at Moore's third level: questioning whether "kings, capitalists, priests, generals, bureaucrats, etc.," -- or corporations, more to today's point -- "serve any useful social purpose at all."
Ralph Nader junkies form the most moderate end of this effort, bridging the gap between those who want to make corporate capitalism less destructive and those who want to replace it with a fundamentally different system.
Beyond Nader are groups like the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (www.poclad.org). Advocating "the right of the sovereign people to govern themselves," POCLAD aims to reverse decisions by privileged judges over the past century and a half that declared corporations "legal persons" and then gave them even more rights than you and I have."