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Keith Addison and tvoivozhd exchange.


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*30617 <http://archive.nnytech.net/sgroup/biofuel/30617/1/>2003-12-24 
[biofuel] Mammoth corporations
*

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Date: 2003-12-24
From: Keith Addison
Subject: [biofuel] Mammoth corporations

"Small-scale capitalism works out fine, but as scale increases the 
departure from real capitalism becomes more pronounced---profits are 
privatized, but costs are socialized. The attendant repair and 
maintenance are left to succeeding generations if possible, if not, 
to present low and middle income taxpayers." - "tvoivozhd"

"When democracy goes down before monopoly capitalism the result has 
been a greedy tyranny, preserving all the vices of capitalism and 
extinguishing its virtues."
- Herbert Agar

"If I could wave my hand as the benevolent despot and make a sweeping 
change in the U.S. legal system, I would undo the hundred years of 
court decisions that have given corporations all the rights of 
citizens and relegated all the rest of us living, breathing human 
beings to second-class citizenship." - John Stauber

From Roberto Verzola, secretary-general of the Philippine Greens, on 
another list:

> >Economics, properly defined, is the study of human behaviour in the
> >marketplace. IT is a BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE. Unfortunately, people are too
> >often greedy and the economic models can predict behaviour by reducing
> >humans to a collection of pecuniary interests.
> >
> >So, the problem is not to change economics. The problem is to change
> >people's attitude. When that happens, the economist's models will fail.
> >
> >You can denounce economics all you want, but it is really human behaviour
> >that is the problem. That is what we need to address.
> >
> >Pat
>
> Hi Pat.
> I have a different interpretation: it is true that people are
> occasionally / often greedy in varying degrees. However economists
> idealized this greed and made it the centerpoint of the ideal economic
> agent. Then society created a legal person in the perfect image of
> this idealized economic agent. This legal person is the
> corporation/business firm, the epitome of pure greed. Corporations
> (which I'd count as if they were a separate species) have domesticated
> many humans and forced them to act and think like corporations too.
> This is what we need to address.
> Roberto Verzola

Prehistoric peoples could kill mammoths; how about corporations?
by Roberto Verzola

Most legal systems today recognize the registered business firm as a 
distinct legal person, separate from its stockholders, board of 
directors or employees. In fact, laws would often refer to "natural 
or legal persons". It should therefore be safe to conclude that such 
registered business firms or corporations are persons (ie, 
organisms), but NOT "natural persons", and therefore not humans.

Other social institutions have been created by humans (State, Church, 
etc.), but they have never quite reached the state of life and 
reproductive capacity that corporations attained.

It would be very useful to analyze corporations *as if* they were a 
different species, and then to extract ecological insights from the 
analysis. (By corporations here, I am basically referring to 
registered business firms, or for-profit corporations).

Corporations are born; they grow; they might also die. They can 
reproduce and multiply, using different methods, both asexual and 
sexual. We have bacteria within our bodies as if they were part of 
us; corporations have humans within them. Their genetic programming - 
profit maximization - is much simpler than human genetic programming, 
humans being a bundle of mixed and often conflicting emotions and 
motives. Corporations' computational capabilities for such 
maximization easily exceed most natural persons' capabilities. 
Therefore they easily survive better in the economic competition.

It is profit that keeps corporations alive. They are genetically 
programmed to maximize the flow of profits into their gut. To extract 
profit from their environment, corporations transform everything into 
commodities and then make profits by selling them or renting them 
out. Corporations can transform practically anything into a 
commodity, including corporations and profits themselves.

Today, corporations are the dominant species on the planet. They have 
taken over most social institutions and other niches that humans have 
originally created for themselves. The physical reach of the biggest 
corporations span the entire globe. The term "globalization" can 
mean, without exaggeration, the global rule of corporations.

The non-stop transformation of the natural world - the ecological 
base of human survival - into commodities for profit-making has, in 
fact, become a threat to the survival not only of human beings but of 
many other species.

In the same way that we learned to domesticate plants and animals, 
corporations have learned to domesticate humans. Much of today's 
educational process is a process of corporate domestication, 
reinforced subsequently by corporate-controlled media. Corporations 
have perfected the art of training humans, using carrot-and-stick 
methods, to keep them tame and obedient.

Of course, some humans have remained wild and undomesticated. But 
today, they are outside the mainstream.

Corporations have trained domesticated humans to immobilize, maim, 
kill or otherwise "neutralize" those fellow-humans who have remained 
feral and uncontrolled by corporations. But there's a growing body of 
feral humans who are now trying to learn how to disable, maim or kill 
corporations.

Prehistoric humans knew how to kill the largest beasts of their time; 
modern humans have not yet learned how to kill corporations. 
Individual humans have practically no hope of fighting off a 
determined corporate attack. Most confrontations between corporations 
and communities of humans end up in corporate victory, with humans 
ending up dead, maimed or subdued and domesticated, their human will 
broken.

On those occasions when humans manage a victory, it almost never 
results in the death of the attacking corporation. When corporations 
lose a battle with feral humans, they can simply withdraw for a 
while, split into several persons, combine with another person, 
change their persona, or adopt other survival tricks which they have 
evolved over time. In fact, when entering new and presumably wild 
territory, a corporation would often clone itself and send its clone 
in. Even in the remote possibility that the clone dies from human 
attacks, the mother firm stays unharmed and as powerful as ever.

In prehistoric ages, our ancestors learned how to repel, disable or 
kill an attacking mammoth; the challenge of our age is learning how 
to do the same with corporations.