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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
In other words- if government did not recognize corporations or work actively to protect their interests, what powers would corporations have?

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
The problem of corporate abuse of power ... but from doing what no citizen would be allowed to do,

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Let's say you're a business and you control the media. You can disseminate any story or outlook you want.

Let's say your workers are getting uppity. You can hire Xe to beat up or kill the ringleaders.

Let's say you want to know what's going on. You can snoop on anyone, any time, any where.

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Are the corporations better suited to wielding this kind of power in the real world, or the imaginary world?

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Absence of government recognition and empowerment does not equal absence of government or freedom from laws against killing, stealing, or invasion of privacy.

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I am interested in exploring a world where corporations had no special status or protections beyond what you and I have. A world where my Lemonade stand, the Coca Cola company, and the boy who hires himself out to mow lawns all play by the same rules.

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if there were govt, govt would take over the corporations, and each giantmart would really be a govt agent, as is true in about 80% of businesses in china

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There IS government, so I don’t know what you mean by this...unless you’re saying if things were ALL governmental as opposed to ALL corporational control.

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Hello,

It seems the lesson being suggested by feedback is that it is neither business nor government which spawns trouble, but rather the accumulation of power in the form of resources. (Since any individual controlling sufficient resources can bring all these evils into being.)

Is there a way to limit the accumulation of power via resources without also altering our entire notion of freedom?

--Anthony



Assured by friends that the signal-to-noise ratio has improved on this forum, I have disabled web filtering.

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Hello,

I am starting this topic to expand on something touched on briefly in a Ron Paul thread.

I want to explore what powers corporations would have in the absence of government recognition and empowerment.

In other words- if government did not recognize corporations or work actively to protect their interests, what powers would corporations have?

--Anthony

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Appalonius ends his poem just as the Argo comes back home to harbor. There's a reason for his decision-the same reason that Eisenstein halts the action of The Battleship Potemkin where he does: what comes next is pretty horrifying. I went on and described the return as well; partly because it is a major part of the myth, but primarily because I find it morally necessary-for me-to show precisely where certain courses of conduct and tricks of thought lead.
The use of force is always an answer to problems. Whether or not it's a satisfactory answer depends on a number of things, not least the personality of the person making the determination.
Force isn't an attractive answer, though. I would not be true to myself or to the people I served with in 1970 if I did not make that realization clear.
-David Drake

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
I'd have also enjoyed seeing the potential flaws of the system more thoroughly probed. (i.e. What happens when your security company goes bad? How are national disasters handled? What happens when someone tries to corner the market and push people around by limiting their choices? What is society's response to terrorism?)

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Is there a way to limit the accumulation of power via resources without also altering our entire notion of freedom?

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Anyhows, the white elephant in the middle of the room you're all pretending not to see, dancing around, is the simple fact that in lieu of a Government to protect them from it, if a Corporation transgressed overmuch on its workers or a community, via abuse, pollution, exploitation, what have you - there WOULD BE VIOLENCE, if the matter could not be resolved, or if the Corporation refused to negotiate and brought in thugs.

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Is there a way to limit the accumulation of power via resources without also altering our entire notion of freedom?

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Originally posted by canttakesky:

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Is there a way to limit the accumulation of power via resources without also altering our entire notion of freedom?

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That is such a good question.

Here is just my opinion on it.

1. Small communities. Like monkeysphere small.

2. A culture with little notion of wealth and land ownership. Like some Native American cultures.

Put the two together, and you have low-tech, anarcho-communist tribal communities where wealth (or lack thereof) is roughly the same for everyone--the kind of community that Derrick Jensen would probably like to live in.

There's been plenty of those throughout history.

Can't Take (my gorram) Sky
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Everything I say is just my opinion, not fact.

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they wouldn't happen naturally though, and you'd have to engineer them, which seems to be against the philosophy that you've espoused.

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If you agree with the premise that such societies have existed before, and you didn't dispute that in any way I can see, then obviously they'd have to somehow happen naturally.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
But if you look at the vast sweep of human history, societies/ economies generally seem to get bigger and bigger as more and more people and resources are integrated into them.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:
I won't actively help along that crash because I know how bad it would be, but I'm so world weary and cynical that hell, at this point I almost just want it to happen already, get it over with. I ultimately feel like we might be better off.

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Small societies existed in the past because that was what was the technology could support. But if you look at the vast sweep of human history, societies/ economies generally seem to get bigger and bigger as more and more people and resources are integrated into them. The only thing that seems to collapse these structures is natural catastrophe: volcanoes or drought.

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Hello Frem,

As for the Mars... wasn't that weapon described as "decidedly unpleasant to operate" or some such?

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Then again, the military of the time was rather stuffy and not much in for innovation.

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The point here being that the citizens acting collectively as a corporation are still the citizens, ergo, the Southern Pacific Railroad is a citizen of the United States

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Originally posted by Wulfenstar:
"My answer is: Not completely, but with the form of government we have: To a degree. Nothing’s perfect, corporations have WAY too much influence in our current government, and government abuses way too much of its power. But either in complete control, or no government, or individuals and corporations having the same "rights"? Not for me. "

Until someone whispers "Apple"...

Then the nerds and hippies have a collective orgasm and riot over who can be the first to give them their money...



"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies"

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Originally posted by canttakesky:

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Originally posted by SignyM:
But if you look at the vast sweep of human history, societies/ economies generally seem to get bigger and bigger as more and more people and resources are integrated into them.

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Are you saying "society," as an entity, has a natural tendency to accumulate wealth, like a "corporation"? And once it has been big, it cannot be made smaller once again except through catastrophic force?

If I am stating your position correctly, then would a "government," as an entity, do the same: accumulate wealth until met with catastrophic force?

If not, why not?

Can't Take (my gorram) Sky
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Everything I say is just my opinion, not fact.

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The kids were all heroic — all but a semi-heroic member of their troupe named Eric. Eric was a whiner, a complainer, a guy who didn't like to go along with whatever the others wanted to do. Usually, he would grudgingly agree to participate, and it would always turn out well, and Eric would be glad he joined in. He was the one thing I really didn't like about the show.

So why, you may wonder, did I leave him in there? Answer: I had to.

As you may know, there are those out there who attempt to influence the content of childrens' television. We call them "parents groups," although many are not comprised of parents, or at least not of folks whose primary interest is as parents. Study them and you'll find a wide array of agendum at work...and I suspect that, in some cases, their stated goals are far from their real goals.

Nevertheless, they all seek to make kidvid more enriching and redeeming, at least by their definitions, and at the time, they had enough clout to cause the networks to yield. Consultants were brought in and we, the folks who were writing cartoons, were ordered to include certain "pro-social" morals in our shows. At the time, the dominant "pro-social" moral was as follows: The group is always right...the complainer is always wrong.

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I don't think it happens as much these days but those of us who do cartoons have been occasionally pressured, in much the same way a guy with a gun pressures you to hand over your wallet, to include certain "social messages" into our work. There's nothing wrong with trying to include a benevolent moral in a cartoon if — and here come a couple of big IFs — it doesn't despoil the entertainment value and it can be done without a condescending, lecturing tone...and especially IF the message is a sound one.

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One time, a writer friend did a script (a pretty good script, I thought) where the climax depended on the hero cutting a rope at a precise moment. The hero, it had been established, was a former Boy Scout...so my friend had the hero whip out his Boy Scout pocket knife and use it to cut the rope.

Well, that couldn't be allowed. Encouraging children to carry knives, even though the Boy Scouts do? You might as well have them packing howitzers and blowing bodies away on the playgrounds of America. There was much arguing and the scene ended up being staged with the rope being cut by the edge of a sharp rock, which was just silly. The rope was being used to lower a car. Given how sturdy it would have to be to do that, it was already stretching reality for it to be cuttable with a pocket knife. A sharp rock was ridiculous.

At times though, the bickering went beyond Broadcast Standards trying to prevent the network from being sued or having its advertisers shrink from advertising. Every so often, someone there got it into their heads that childrens' television could mold the youth of today into the good citizens of tomorrow. That's a questionable premise but let's say it's so. The question then becomes what you teach, how you mold. I found that those who approached the arena with that in mind had some odd ideas of what we should be trying to impart to impressionable viewers. Acts of extreme violence — like carrying a pocket knife — weren't as big a problem as what they called "anti-social behavior" and what I called "having a mind of your own."

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The Board of Governors: This seems a steep price for so small a service: to crush a powerless cripple.
Tan'elKoth: Doubly fools. He does have power. One power: the power to devote himself absolutely to a single goal, to be ruthless with himself and all else in its pursuit. It is the only power he needs - because, unlike the great mass of men, he is aware of this power, and he is willing, even happy, to use it.
- Blade Of Tyshalle

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
I want to explore what powers corporations would have in the absence of government recognition and empowerment.

In other words- if government did not recognize corporations or work actively to protect their interests, what powers would corporations have?

--Anthony

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Admittedly true. My hope is that information technology might allow us to get around the growing pains of the currently existing structures and create potential for different social organizations; small, sustainable, and spontaneous ones.

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it really only ends in one ruling class being ousted by another

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while govts always regulate against it, this regulation is for show, to make the people feel protected, and is no more meaningful than the war on terror. the same govts. are generally out there doing it and encouraging the greedy to do it.

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Knowledge is a wonderful thing, but in this envisioned future we would also need distributed manufacturing which depends ONLY on locally-supplied resources. How does that come about, w/o major loss of life? Once you start thinking about giving up technology, and tracing where these things come from, you will find them inextricably intertwined.

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Nonetheless, the air and water really ARE cleaner than before.

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Originally posted by Fremdfirma:
You know, I hated the ending to V for Vendetta too - cause for a fact in *every* police state goon squad you got at least one rabid wacko who's gonna lose his cool at the "damn hippie-libs" and fire, figuring he can blame someone else, and it's easier to cover it up than bother asking permission, they WOULD have fired, and then been swarmed and ripped limb from limb by an enraged and angry mob, but of course the producers didn't wanna SHOW that, which I felt was a tremendous disservice because that particular dodge is so freakin common that it takes someone like me coming along and saying "Oh yeah, and THEN what?!" for people to realize that when caught out and cornered, the powers that be will *not* meekly ground arms and submit, oh hell no, in fact one reason you NEED to blindside them or subvert them quickly before they realize it is because without an ounce of doubt when things turn desperate they WILL resort to Nuke-Chem-Bio weapons, preferring to destroy the world entire than see it under the control of anyone but them.

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Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Hello,

I am starting this topic to expand on something touched on briefly in a Ron Paul thread.

I want to explore what powers corporations would have in the absence of government recognition and empowerment.

In other words- if government did not recognize corporations or work actively to protect their interests, what powers would corporations have?

--Anthony



Assured by friends that the signal-to-noise ratio has improved on this forum, I have disabled web filtering.

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