Redstorm said:

Apparently you don't understand the definition of genocide?

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doom876 said:

fireduck said:

Seriously, I hate blind corporation hate.  Sure, there are manipulative corporations that are run by greed, but I'm willing to bet the decisions that most corporations make are generally fairly sensible and not at all evil.  Yes, when people make a lot of money, they wield a lot of power, and they can use that power to slant the democratic process and spread whatever information or misinformation they please.  But blaming corporations is just a cop out, like blaming the black or the jews.  I ran an LLC (limited liability corporation) for a while...  it was an internet cafe and I guarantee nothing offensive or subversive took place.  If something is going wrong in the world of business, people are to blame, not the company.

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Notice my example with Toyota, and Speedo does the same thing in Pacific countries.

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dude7932288 said:

This nation is less then 5% of the population, yet we consume over 28% of the worlds energy, 27% of the worlds resources, all to support corportations who do nothing but destroy us, and strip us of our identity and choices, brainwashing us to train ourselves into slogan with the small sense of social status we have chosen

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fireduck said:

dude7932288 said:

This nation is less then 5% of the population, yet we consume over 28% of the worlds energy, 27% of the worlds resources, all to support corportations who do nothing but destroy us, and strip us of our identity and choices, brainwashing us to train ourselves into slogan with the small sense of social status we have chosen

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And this is exactly the kind of blind corporation hate I was talking about.  First, why is it corporations fault that we are a consumer nation?  2nd, I don't think our energy use is a problem, just our energy generation methods.  There are plenty of clean ways to make energy, we just need to invest in them.  But it is not the fault of corporations that these energies are not profitable.  Government is failing us, and needs to level the playing field so that clean, more expensive forms of energy can compete in the marketplace until they are profitable on their own.  There is no reason that other countries can't all use just as much energy as we do, if clean methods were used to make it.  Resources are a different matter, but you are blaming international companies for the behavior of a nation.  That is incredibly tunnel visioned.  If they could sell their shit elsewhere, they would.

Then that last part of your mindless dribble is just too far out to attack.  OMG CORPORATIONS ARE BRAINWASHING ME AND TAKING AWAY MY IDENTITY.  Really?  Really?  No, wait Really?  Are you that easy to manipulate?  I'm not.

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fireduck said:

To doom, I agree that exploiting children for cheap labor is a completely despicable act.  But aside from that, a lot of sweatshop information is overstated.  Again, many adults hold jobs at factories making low wages by our standards, but in their country that wage is a livable wage and jobs may be scarce.  I also think that health concerns can be a real issue, any company setting up shop somewhere needs to do everything possible to protect their workers safety.  However even in the states we have coal mine workers breathing in all kinds of bad stuff and they would be pissed at you if you tried to take away their job from them.  The key is that the people who control the conditions should take all reasonable measures to protect worker health, and the people working should want the job.  The wage they are paid is not really relevant (in a good/evil sense) if the other two conditions are being met.  Because of this, I think a lot of sweatshop lore is again, overstated to make it sound more common than it is.  There are bad ones out there still I'm sure, but most large corporations know that you get very bad press if you are found with one of those bad sweatshops.

Actually though, I like the Ben and Jerry's business model where they say no 1 person in a company should make more than 10X anyone else, no matter who is doing what.  I think things would be a lot better if more companies took that kind of hard stance on just what a person is worth compared to another.

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dude7932288 said:

The corporations COULD invest in a cleaner energy generation method, the fact of the matter is that they DON'T. They're ripping our planet to shreds because of greed and profit.

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big corporations are bad for small business', they are essentially an oligopoly, they push competition out of the way and install price floors so that people either pay their price, or pay a similar price for a poorer product. more competition means lower prices, big corporations prevent this. i know what your rebuttal is going to be so i'll further say that in order to compete, one needs a large amount of capital in order to start a competing business, well, all of the capital is going into the pockets of CEO's, so to compete one would need a lot of capital from venture capitalists, who probably wouldn't invest in said business because it's not likely to be profitable anyway, well, at least not as profitable as being share holders in big corporations.

i recently posted this in another thread.

check this out:
Figure 7: CEOs' average pay, production workers' average pay, the S&P 500 Index, corporate profits, and the federal minimum wage, 1990-2005 (all figures adjusted for inflation)


Figure 6: CEOs' pay as a multiple of the average worker's pay


this is theft.

Quote:

If you wonder how such a large gap could develop, the proximate, or most immediate, factor involves the way in which CEOs now are able to rig things so that the board of directors, which they help select -- and which includes some fellow CEOs on whose boards they sit -- gives them the pay they want. The trick is in hiring outside experts, called compensation consultants, who give the process a thin veneer of economic respectability.

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Quote:

Milton Friedman, Nobel economist an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism sought to show that unionization produces higher wages (for the union members) at the expense of fewer jobs, and that, if some industries are unionized while others are not, wages will tend to decline in non-unionized industries.

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Quote:

We need to replace Tobacco  and corn with hemp to suck out CO2 from the air and create a plethera of renewable products such as cloth, fuel, food(seeds and oil, even low THC bud).

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Quote:

Get a government that listens to economists and experts(real ones),

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hen socialize all necesarry resources so we can't be milked(remember, the oil companies were making 40 billion dollar profits, not sales).

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Redstorm said:

I know exactly what it means. A a concentrated market does not inherently lack competition. The only time competition is absent is when there is explicit or implicit price fixing between the companies, both of which are illegal and have been punished severely in the past.

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