'Evil' Corporations..?

Post #28,701 by Ashton 2/16/02 10:21:42 PM Reply	'Evil' Corporations..? Oddly, I find myself in complete agreement with.. marlowe! in this: indeed a 'Corporation' is not even the map, let alone the territory - it's a random legal construct, meant to facilitate "the common Good (??)" at least - one may suppose that such honorable intentions lie behind the origin. Long long ago. But only People 'do Evil' - yet that idea sucks too, for all the personalized theological freight attached. No two people would try to define it in exact same synonyms. Maybe a better idea might be to spend some time filling out a list of things a Healthy org. Would do, Not do - Tolerate as behavior.. Not tolerate. Positive examples can illustrate. Here's one: Working for a "Nat'l Lab", my fiefdom was somewhere within the overall hierarchy. At one point I noticed that some targets to be exposed to particle beams - brought in by another Nat'l Lab - arrived in sealed (Heliarced!) boxes. No need to go into my rationale, except to say that This NL was a military-sponsored org. Point: I refused to send them beam until I could inspect, determine the er 'fissionable' possibilities of the object(s). They bounced this up to the Director. He understood the nature of my reservations, but also could not 'assuage' these doubts ~~ "what might they willingly risk for er 'Nat'l Security'..?" I was supported. They also had to make some changes before being accommodated at other "spaced out" times. (I don't cite this because.. maybe I was ~ right?? - but because of how easily I might have been countermanded, or simply weaseled around. And that didn't happen.) I believe the same litmus might be applied to various 'creative financing' in the Enron / tip of iceberg, many suspect. All life experience to date tells me: Most US Corps would fail the litmus, such as these Corps are today and.. such as we are. Forget Evilness - go for Integrity and its absence (it doesn't count when, like M$, there's an Integrity Clause in their {choke, retch} Mission Statement. Natch.) IMhO - the US truly Needs some Sterling examples of integrity, if we are to rise from the slime of current ethics-free, TLA meaninglessness and ennui.. where employees are listed as Debits in the Econ spreadsheet. There are just too many Horrible Examples, and more and more people are noticing that the $lime slops over across all life here. It's killing (what's left of) US. Ashton
Post #28,714 by Silverlock 2/17/02 1:43:09 AM Reply	Arguing over definitions again, I think From what I've read, it seems "amoral", rather than "evil" would be a better term. Or, perhaps "sociopathic". Yeah, that's it, sociopathic. Corps are sociopatic almost by defintion. Right and wrong have no bearing on corporate decisions, only profit does. (And no Beep, I'm not talking about mom and pop shops). With this much manure around, there must be a pony somewhere.
Post #28,773 by Ric Locke 2/17/02 9:38:57 PM Reply	No, "Evil" fits First off: I do not agree with nking that the corporation may be evil, even though no one in it does evil. It is quite true that each of the people involved only does a little evil, and the vector sum of all those little evils adds up to a noticeable one. That being said, the things people are being taught to do in business, explicity in MBA programs and by example elsewhere, constitute precisely those little evils whose sum generates horror. The notion that a corporation exists only to make money, and "provide shareholder value", is not only evil -- it's simply wrong, from a philosophical and even a legal standpoint. A corporation cannot exist without willing cooperation from the State -- the Government, if you will. The people who found and operate the corporation want something; that "something" is financial immunity from losses. The essence of a corporation is that its investors cannot lose more than their investment if the corporation fails; it thus differs from other forms of financial organization in that the other forms have no such limitation on liability. This protection is absolutely necessary, because the function of the corporation is to assemble sufficient capital to do something big from the small driblets of capital available to each of its investors; and the bulk of the capital must come from very small contributions, because there aren't enough "rich" people to collect sufficient contributions from. See the work of the Peruvian economist called Hernando de Soto. But the State, the Government, must get something in return for extending this privilege. What it got, for many years, was taxes; the structure necessary for collecting a sufficiency of taxes from umpteen small pools didn't exist, so the corporation, which had that structure as a needed part of its operations, took in money, and the government got a cut. That way the government didn't need the bureaucracy neccessary to collect taxes in penny packets. (It could also fool the people into thinking it was collecting less taxes than it was, because they could point with pride to "soaking the rich corporations" and get plenty of support. The other advantage was, and is, that the Government could tax people it didn't rule; anyone who pays, say, Nestle for a chocolate bar, is supporting the Swiss government.) Nowadays the Government has the bureaucratic structure necessary to collect taxes in small amounts and amalgamate them, so the tax advantages of the corporation are less except for the sleight of hand aspect. But, especially in a government "of the people", it is perfectly reasonable for Government to enact regulations controlling the behavior of the people running corporations, and for the basis of those regulations to be something other than the direct interests of the people involved in the corporation. And that is what we're missing. Something must be done to inform the people running corporations that showing a profit is not the end-all and be-all of the system, and something must be done to slow down the trading system so that it becomes less easy to generate huge fortunes in virtual money by keeping balls in the air. What those things might be, I don't know. [I have some suggestions (-;] But if you focus on "evil corporations" or "rich corporations", you're missing the point. It's the behavior of people we need to address, and letting the existence of the corporation serve as a shield against the consequences of misbehavior does nothing to discourage the misbehavior itself; rather the contrary, in fact. Regards, Ric
Post #28,783 by Ashton 2/17/02 11:00:27 PM Reply	Seconded in spades. Yes, the habit of the 'quantitative' in Murican bizspeak - has come to completely overshadow those nuances of daily behavior which distinguish er humans from calculating machines. Vector-sum is close enough; maybe closer to holographic sum (if we had the foggiest how to Do that ;-). Anyway, your words will do, and I concur: that is the relationship (government tit for tat) needing overhaul.. mindful natch of the problem that - 'govt.' cannot humanize citizens too dense to notice they have become 'calculating machines'. But it can raise incentives toward that end (one hopes). Ashton
Post #28,798 by boxley 2/18/02 10:02:26 AM Reply	Since a corporation by legal definition is an "artificially created legal entity" precludes thenm from being evil. Any artificially created being is amoral not having any theological grounds to be anything else, so a corp cannot be evil it can only be as moral as the people running it. thanx, bill Mike Doogan "Then there's figure skating and ice dancing and snowboarding. The winners are all chosen by judges. That's not sports. That's politics. And curling? If curling is a sport, pork rinds are a health food."

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