How Corporations Really Reflect Our Demands

Findlay, C., & Warren, T. (Eds.). (2013). Impediments to Trade in Services: Measurements and Policy Implications. Routledge.

It's difficult not to be cynical about how “big business” treats the subject of ethics in today's world. In many corporations, where the

It's difficult not to be cynical about how “big business” treats the subject of ethics in today's world. In many corporations, where the

Through written form and literary techniques, the book feed elaborates on many ideas that Anderson puts forth to the responder, one idea that is evident in the book is the idea of morality using it to show that corporations are in fact evil. Morality is the ability of humanity to distinguish between right and wrong, and once we have lost this capability we symbolically lose the core of our humanity. Anderson influenced by his social context where money is power writes “We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.” The repetition of the word “we” and the high modality used in the

“A corporation is an artificial person separate and distinct from its owners.” Briefly explain this statement.

“Of course, everyone is like, da da da, evil corporations, oh they're so bad, we all say that, and we all know they control everything. I mean, it's not great, because who knows what evil shit they're up to.” (10.6)

There is a vast difference between the cigarette commercials of the 1980's and the anti-tobacco Truth ads of today. We were sold a lie, and now many have paid the price with their health and their life. Should it be the responsibility of the tobacco industry to care for these people who have life threating illnesses caused by their products? Should they also handle the burial of the individuals who die as a result of tobacco usage? In this industry, someone has to look out of the consumers that are not looking out for themselves.

Gerald F. Davis author of The Vanishing American Corporation defines a corporation is a “group of people trying to do business together” (Davis 7). Corporations are easy to create and destroy. In a review of chapter one Corporations around the world on page fourteen cover The Corporation in America. According to the chapter, if shares what was good for General Motors (GM) is what is good for the country, and vice versa meant the health of the economy largest corporations are tied. According to Davis “after WW II, the most major corporations were the economy” (Davis 14).

In chapters 1-5 of 102 Minutes by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, the theme of capitalism over humanity in the North and South towers is examined. For instance, capitalism was put ahead of humanity as the proprietors of the towers reduced stair space to create more rentable space (Dwyer and Flynn 64). With more rentable space, the proprietors could produce larger profits, even though it was against the safety code(Dwyer and Flynn 65). The South tower was evacuated during the 1993 terrorist attack, causing an executive from Cantor Fitzgerald to be livid as it disrupted their business (Dwyer and Flynn 79). Despite the fact that it was the safest option to evacuate the towers, many businesses

“Corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick... they live... they die. We don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.”

A corporation was originally designed to allow for the forming of a group to get a single project done, after which it would be disbanded. At the end of the Civil War, the 14th amendment was passed in order to protect the rights of former slaves. At this point, corporate lawyers worked to define a corporation as a “person,” granting them the right to life, liberty and property. Ever since this distinction was made, corporations have become bigger and bigger, controlling many aspects of the economy and the lives of Americans. Corporations are not good for America because they outsource jobs, they lie and deceive, and they knowingly make and sell products that can harm people and animals, all in order to raise profits.

In the book, The Corporation Joel Bakan presents arguments, that corporations are nothing but institutional pathological psychopaths that are “a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies.” Their main responsibility is maximizing profit for their stockholders and ignoring the means to achieve this goal, portrays them as “psychopathic.” Bakan argues that, corporations are psychopaths, corporate social responsibility is illegal, and that corporations are able to manipulate anyone, even the government.

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, many commentators attempted to analyze the roots of the conflict from a political or economic perspective. Anthropologist Karen Ho, a veteran of Wall Street as well as an academic, attempted to understand the reason that Wall Street behaves the way it does in her 2009 anthropological study of American finance entitled Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street from a cultural perspective. The central paradox with which Ho begins her book is: " the economy experienced not only record corporate profits and the longest rising stock market ever, but also record downsizings," further concentrating the wealth in America (Ho 2009: 1-2). But how can corporations grow richer as the American public as a whole grows poorer? Corporations no longer view themselves as responsible for taking care of their employees, creating good products, or serving their original mission. Instead, the focus is on generating shareholder wealth (Ho 2009:3). Shareholders, not the larger public, have become the symbolic and real focus of firm strategy. The shareholder "symbolized and 'stood in' for the whole of the corporation and became the sole locus of concern and analysis" during the time Ho conducted her study in the late 1990s and continues to this day (Ho 2009:175)

David C. Korten’s book When Corporations Rule the World, analyzes the worlds economic development and argues that our economy is controlled by multinational corporations who’s interest is in profit and money and not in the well-being of society or the economy. Korten believes that the Government does not have enough power because we let the corporations get too big and gain too much wealth. He talks a lot about how these corporations are ruining our economy today and are eventually going to be the reason for human destruction. Korten analyzes the effects of these coporations and predicts a three-fold human crisis being the deepening of poverty, social disintegration, and environmental destruction. Korten believes the answer to hindering this globalization is to limit the power of these corporations and to bring the economy back to small business ownership causing a multilevel system nested economy. This multilevel system aims to be self-reliant, self-managing, and ultimately cause a more stable economy looking out for the rights of the people rather then focusing on profit.

The 2003 Canadian film documentary, The Corporation, is about the modern-day corporation. It critiques that it is considered to be a person, but since it has so many disregards to the human well-being and only cares about making as much money as possible, if it were an actual person it would be considered a psychopath.