The Corporation: The pathological pursuit of power
http://www.electricshadows.com.au/film/2401055480

What is a corporation?
It is one form of business ownership, a group of people working together to
a group of objectives. The modern corporation has grown out of the
industrial revolution. Its all about productivity, getting more produce per
man hour.
150 years ago the business corporation was a relatively insignificant
institution, but today it is all invasive.
Corporations were originally associations of people who were chartered by
the state to perform a particular function, like build a bridge. There were
very few chartered corporations in early US history and the ones that
existed had clear stipulations in their state issued charters,  how long
they could operate, the amount of capitalisation, what they made or did or
maintained (a turnpike or whatever)  and they didn't do anything else, they
own or couldn't  own another corporation, their shareholders were liable
etc. In both law and the culture, the corporation was considered a
subordinate entity that was considered a gift from the people to serve a
public good.

The civil war and the industrial revolution created enormous growth in
corporations and so there was an explosion of railroads which got large
federal subsidies of land, banking, heavy manufacturing. And corporate
lawyers, a century and a half ago, realised they needed more powers to
operate and wanted to remove some of the constraints that had historically
been placed on the corporate form.

The 14th amendment was passed at the end of the civil war to give equal
rights to black people and therefore it said, no state can deprive any
person of life liberty or property without due process of law and that was
intended to prevent the states from taking away life, liberty or property
from black people as they had done for so much of US history.

What happened was that corporations come into court, and corporate lawyers
are very clever,  and they say, "Oh, you can't deprive a person of life,
liberty or property? We are a person - a corporation is a person" - and the
Supreme Court goes along with that. And what was particularly grotesque
about this was that the 14th amendment was passed to protect newly freed
slaves.

So for instance, between between 1890 and 1910 there were 307 cases brought
before the court under the 14th amendment - 288 of these brought by
corporations, and 19 by African Americans. 600,000 people were killed to get
rights for people and then with strokes of the pen over the next 30 years
judges applied those rights to capital and property, while  stripping them
from people.

The corporation - a legal person
What type of person is the corporation? These are special kinds of persons
which are designed by law to be concerned only for their stockholders and
not so much for the stakeholders, like the community or the workforce or
whatever.

The great problem is that they aren't like the rest of us. They have no soul
to save, and they have no body to incarcerate. They really only have one
interest, the bottom line, how to make as much money as they can. Of course
they make a profit and that's a good thing, it gives them the incentive to
make capitalism work, incentive to make the things that we need and that's
what other systems lack. The problem comes in the profit motivation because
with these people there is no such thing as enough.

The publicly traded corporation has been structured by a series of legal
decisions to have a peculiar and disturbing characteristic. It is required
by law to place the financial interests of its owners above competing
interests. In fact the corporation is legally bound to put its bottom line
ahead of everything else, even the public good.

That's not a law of nature, its a judicial decision. So they are concerned
only with short-term profit of their stockholders who are very highly
concentrated. Close to half the stock is owned by about 1% of the population
and the bottom 80% of the population hold about 4% of the stock. Being on
the stock market, being a public company is great in many ways but it
doesn't allow any time for reflection, it has to maximise its profits and
therefore everything is legitimate in the pursuit of that goal - everything,
not explicit but everything.

Externalising of costs
The corporation tends to be more profitable to the extent it can get others
to pay its bills for its impact on society. The term for this is called
externalities. There are real problems in this area.

Running a business is a tough proposition. There are costs to be minimised
at every turn and at some point the corporation says, "Let's let somebody
else deal with that, let's let somebody else supply the military power to
the middle east to protect the oil at its source, let's let somebody else
build the roads that we can drive these automobiles on, let's let somebody
else have those problems". And that's where externalities come from, that
notion of letting somebody else deal with that - " I have all I can handle
myself".

The corporation is an externalising machine the same way a shark is a
killing machine. Each one is designed in a very efficient way to accomplish
particular objectives. In the achievement of those objectives there isn't
any question of malevolence or of will. The enterprise has within it, and
the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it to do those
functions for which it was designed. So the the pressure is on the
corporation to deliver results now, and to externalise any costs that an
unwary or uncaring public will allow it to to externalise.

The science of exploitation
To determine the kind of personality that drives the corporation to behave
like an externalising machine, we can analyse it like a psychiatrist would a
patient. We can even formulate a diagnosis on the basis of typical case
histories, of harm inflicted on others, selected from a universe of
corporate activity.

* Callous unconcern for the feelings of others
* Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships
* Harm to human health
* Reckless disregard for the safety of others, harm to animals
* Deceitfulness and repeated lying and conning others for profit
* Incapacity to experience guilt
* Harm to environment
* Failure to conform to social norms with respect to to lawful behaviours,
ie obey the law if its cost effective, business decisions based on economics
* Unaccountable to nobody except itself - the biosphere is in decline, all
the animals are in decline through pollution and loss of habitat.

Diagnosis - the corporation bears all the marks of a psychopath who bears no
responsibility for its actions.

Can any and every product be made sustainability? Not every product eg
landmines.
Some products ought not be made at all.
Unless we can make products sustainably perhaps we don't have a place in
this world. The way of the corporation is the way of the plunderer,
plundering something that belongs to every creature on earth. The day must
come when plundering is not allowed.

The largest, the wealthiest, the most powerful, the most pervasive, the most
influential is the institution of business and industry - the corporation -
which also is the current present day industry of destruction.

It must change.

carole
www.conspiracee.com
www.cellsalts.net