I agree that corporations by themselves have all the attributes of mindless machines. In my opinion, they also have some peculiarities which speak volumes about those who run them.
If we stick to the machine analogy for a moment, we can make some observations:
Corporations are machines with one primary objective - to make a profit. The scheme by which companies profit can be reduced to simplest terms (IMO) where one realizes that both the labor used to make a product and the labor performed to earn wages to buy the product come from the same people (or class of people).
It is the only machine that indiscriminately builds or destroys anything and everything (including itself) to satisfy it's primary objective. A company's biggest liability and opportunity for raising profits (without being especially innovative or aware of the consequences) is to
control it's labor (consumers).
One can logically conclude that:
Many who run corporations are determined to have more than those around them (and have issues that only their therapist can address) that goes far beyond providing for the survival of themselves and their family.
Greed (a common motivation for running a corporation) causes those same people to become desperate and willing to cause the suffering of others to achieve their goals. It also makes them ignorant to the fact that taking advantage of labor to increase profit also takes money from the pockets of consumers - the sources of their profit.
The cycle continues until the only consumers left are others who run corporations and don't see that their behavior is unsustainable.
The one thing that sustains an economy is it's labor. The one thing that
corporations fail to do in it's own interest is preserve labor by sharing it's wealth.
I strongly agree that you can't change the mindset of a corporation by education. It requires the education of an entire culture to understand a fault in the system and prevent people who don't see that fault from hurting others.
Mike
Keith Addison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
You can't change a corporation's mindset by education, nor by any
means other than hurting their bottom line. The humans who work for
them notwithstanding, corporations are not human and do not have
human drives or instincts or inhibitions, their only drive is
profit-growth. Their PR budgets help people to think they're
oh-so-human, but the money's only spent because it helps the bottom
line. You can educate them like Pavlov educated his dogs, via shocks
that hurt their bottom line and rewards that improve it. Unlike dogs,
it doesn't work without the shocks.
Best
Keith
_______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel_sustainablelists.org
Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (50,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
