Kottke has a post about the move The Corporation and accompanying book. A quote from The Corporation:Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a "person" in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employees a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.
Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation's operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath. It makes sense. And of course not all corporations are like that. Corporations that are run purely for a profit motive and that lack any people-oriented culture are mostly like that. Good capitalistic theory says that a corporation HAS to have exclusively a profit orientation. Luckily not everybody's thinking like that. The Kottke article mentions a quote from a book:A business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity. Unless of course if somebody owns that business and they decide that it is. Which they do a lot of the time. A corporation is a convenient way for individuals to covertly act as psychopaths without owning up to any responsibility for it. And of compelling other people to do the dirty work involved, again without responsibility.
[ Organization | 2004-01-30 12:12 | | PermaLink ] More >
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Bad Signal:
A nice Flash presentation narrated by Ben Cohen, founder of Ben&Jerry's, done for TrueMajority.org, in which he explains, using Oreo cookies, the way that the U.S. federal budget is divided up, and how little rearrangement it would take to fund most of America's social programs. Simple and compelling.