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The Corporate Republic
Corporatism: "The organization of a society into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation and exercising some control over persons and activities within their jurisdiction." -- Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.
It's a word, coined in 1890, that's ripe for twenty-first century re-definition. Here's my suggestion:
Corporatism: "A system in which industrial and professional corporations fund and dominate politics, circumvent government and other forms of regulation, expand globally beyond accountability, alter the nature of work, marginalize individuals, and exercise monopolistic control over technology, culture, information and commerce within their jurisdictions."And nearly everything now lies within their jurisdictions.
America is becoming the headquarters of the Corporate Republic, a new kind of political entity that transcends geographic boundaries, and would have sent the original Republic's founders plunging into the Potomac in despair. Corporatism --fueled by the techno-driven global economic boom and the spread of mass-marketing technologies, has become the primary social, cultural and political force in the country, perhaps the world. No single political system is as powerful or pervasive. Increasingly, the big news is about corporatist maneuverings and confrontations.
Everywhere in this new Republic, individualism is on the run. A nation founded on the notion of individual choice, liberty, privacy, and primacy is in danger of being subsumed. All social and political issues -- work, privacy, creativity, individual liberty -- are subordinate to corporatism's sole ideology: economics.
Though America has been the birthplace of modern corporatism, just as it was the primary proving ground for ideas about individual liberty two centuries ago, the Corporate Republic already extends beyond the U.S.
It's a global phenomenon: In the Corporate Republic, Wal-Mart, Bertelsmann, Sony, Disney, Microsoft, AOL Time-Warner and their fellow conglomerates operate internationally, dominating the law, lobbying regulators, setting social policy, acquiring culture itself. Corporatism is the primary contributor to the political system. Corporatism now owns the mainstream media that "cover" the political system, and has acquired most of the companies that control entertainment and popular culture. Corporatist companies like Wal-Mart make small business ownership difficult in many regions, if not impossible. Culture -- from filmmaking and publishing to professional athletics -- becomes Disneyfied, homogenized and sanitized for the widest possible distribution.
To dwell within the Corporate Republic, individuals have to look the other way. The essence of living with corporatism for most people is acceptance and silence -- minding your own business.
The core of individualism, on the other hand, is refusing to mind your own business. This is not, as the essayist John Raulston Saul has written, always a pleasant way of life. "It often consists of being persistently annoying to others," he writes in his l995 book "The Unconscious Civilization," "as well as being stubborn and repetitive." Enlightenment philosopher Friedrick Nicolai also had something relevant to say on this subject: "Criticism is the only helpmate we have which, while disclosing our inadequacies, can at the same time awake us to the desire for greater improvement."
Criticism is different from confrontation. Criticism -- still thriving on the Net, but declining elsewhere -- is the individual's primary weapon, a means to personal affirmation, the most readily available exercise of dignity and legitimacy. But criticism is often linked to culture, and as the latter become corporatized, criticism is on the decline. In the Corporate Republic, comformity and acquiescence are elevated, while criticism and individualism gets punished, marginalized or ignored.
Who hasn't experienced this conflict -- at home, in a classroom, at work? Even in comparatively free communities like this one, non-comformity is bitterly controversial.
One of the hallmarks of the "unconscious civilization" off-line is our failure to grasp how pervasively we have slipped into conformity. Our media embrace "objectivity" -- a marketing ploy invented by publishers in the 1800's to make newspapers less offensive to large blocks of potential consumers. Corporatism is now so ubiquitous we can hardly even see it, even though it affects the food we buy, the restaurants we eat in, the books we can make and read, the movies we can see, the music we can listen to, the software most people buy. The media have turned bland and timid. Though H.L. Mencken brilliantly and savagely spoofed organized religion and politics a half-century ago, it would be nearly impossible to do so now in any public forum outside the Net. Public and political speech itself has become corporatist, aiming not to inspire or provoke but to avoid offense.
The late scholar and writer C.S. Lewis also foresaw this great leveling. In his famous "Screwtape Letters," two devils gleefully correspondent from Hell about the emerging corporatist ethos, "the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social and intellectual."
In fact, in "Screwtape Letters," one of the devils etches out what could be the Corporatist Marketing Manifesto: "Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practice, in a sense, "democracy."
Perhaps it's not surprising that individualism and criticism have retreated mostly to the Internet, with its own peculiar traditions of individualism -- its founders were, to varying degrees, ferociously independent academics, scientists, outsiders and oddballs. But the Net -- a medium of individual, networked expression -- is also under siege in the Corporate Republic, which intends to dominate and acquire the network. Lawsuits and conflicts have erupted all along the Internet Edge as corporatism seeks to extend its reach into cyberspace, one of the few places it failed to get an early and decisive foothold.
More than any other greeting, e-mail to me often begins with the phrase: "I don't always agree with you, but..." It's well-meant, but always strikes me as curious because it's so unwittingly revealing of a society raised on corporatist pablum as a subsitute for dialogue and discussion. Why should people always agree with me, or I with them? Isn't that the very point of a columnist and critic: to provoke discussion, disagreement and thought? If people always agreed with me, what possible purpose would I serve? What point would there be in reading my columns at at all?
But given what passes for public discussion on CNN, MSNBC and newspaper op-ed pages, the greeting is hardly surprising. Outspoken opinion has become shocking (even on Slashdot, hundreds of people actually filter it out), though the founders of the American Republic (not the corporate one) meant it to be one of the cornerstone opportunities of citizens in a democracy.
Just this week, there was what once would have been an unthinkable display of corporatistism suffocating the flow of information, as the ABC television network vanished from the cable systems of Time Warner in eleven different cities after the giant conglomerate failed to reach an agreement with ABC's owners, the Walt Disney company. The spectacle of these two corporate media behemoths at one another's throats, each accusing the other of being "monopolists" -- Time Warner was, in effect, punishing its own customers -- was amazing enough, but the idea that one company could yank programming of an entire network away from millions of Americans -- including those in New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Philadelphia -- over a contract dispute was a landmark display of the consequences of corporatizing media.
One California station manager said the blackout was a "frightening foreshadowing of the implications of the Time Warner-AOL merger." He's right. No company has ever controlled as much synergistic content as the alliance between American Online and Time Warner. But how could he have missed this story until now? There have been frightening examples of corporatism's impact on speech, culture and media for years. Hardly anyone has been paying much attention, but the blacking out of "Who Wants To Be A Millioinnaire?" in different parts of the country finally triggered congressional calls for an inquiry into the AOL/Time-Warner merger.
Online, individuals cling to the myth that they can escape the Corporate Republic, though the synergy and momentum of contemporary politics, culture and commerce suggests otherwise. Just last week, C-Net published a special report on "The AOL-ization" of America, suggesting that the monstrous new company is already homogenizing the Net to a degree Microsoft never dreamed of. "
The truth is that corporatism is so entrenched in the United States and spreading so rapidly throughout the rest of the world that it's hard to envision defeating it, or even holding it at bay for very long.
Individuals have for decades felt powerless in civic affairs and now, it appears, they really are. The image of individuals on hold or lost in corporate phone systems has become a universal, almost poignant experience in 21st century America, a staple of life in a corporatist world. These entities have become masterful liars: they continuously market themselves as responsive and eager to listen while becoming steadily more arrogant and unaccountable.
Except through the act of voting -- which citizens increasingly see as pointless and meaningless, since they have such restricted options to choose between -- or through voluntary personal and recreational activities, citizen participation in civic affairs, the bedrock of American democracy, has been virtually eliminated.
Corporatism has as aggressively moved into the civic system as it has the marketplace. It funds the national political process, having corrupted the campaign finance system even as very idea of regulation of corporate growth has vanished as a civic idea. Corporatism has polluted public policy from gun control to health care to Internet copyright laws.
In recent weeks, the Pinkerton Corporation's entry into the school safety business via its noxious WAVE America.com website--which encourges schoolkids to turn in classmates they perceive as potentially dangerous -- has brought into focus corporatisms' powerful new reality.Civic issues, even the safety and emotional welfare of children, are now being managed for profit.
At a time where government provides mostly an enthusiastic competition to see which party and candidate can do the least, be the most divisive, and propose the fewest fresh ideas and programs, corporatism has moved to fill the void. Corporatists run prisons, schools, hospitals, and contribute a growing amount to dependent universities and research institutions. It no longer even seems odd for publishing and media to be in the hands of a half-dozen international conglomerates, from theme park operators to light-bulb manufacturers,or for the world's largest private security firm to take over school safety for profit.
This is, the natural, inevitable evolution of an era in which government has abandoned its historic obligations to police the power of business; in which technology and marketing permit companies to grow beyond anything previously possible; in which markets race insanely out of control; and in which globalism has put many companies beyond regulatory oversight or moral restraint.
American democracy was based on notions of personal and economic individualism, the very kind of autonomy corporatism is snuffing out. At the beginning of the 21st Century, the core ideology of civilization, it seems, has become economics. If business is good, we are a happy and contented nation. If it isn't, we aren't.
In recent years, the technologically-empowered individuals on the Net have begun challenging the corporatists in the most direct way -- creating the free software and open source movements, creating alternatives to monopolies like Microsoft, challenging industry's efforts to curb the flow of free music and movies.
This new movements are being bitterly resisted -- witness the recording industry's bitter fight over music-downloading on the Internet. These escalating conflicts evoke a "court opinion" written by the writer Robert Heinlein in "Life Line," one of his earliest published stories:
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
Heilein's ruling was eloquent, but fictional. Corporations do have that right, and are exercising it with a vengeance. Tensions between individuals and corporatism can -- and should -- only worsen.
But it will be a complex and unprecedented king of struggle. Without some radical change, individualism is likely to be outgunned by corporatism armies. Individuals resist leaders, spokespeople, and common agendas. By their very nature, they are uncomfortable with the sort of power acquired and deployed by the entities that push them relentlessly to the margins of life.
Online, the trade-off couldn't be more naked or significant. We have all of this personalized and highly individualistic and expressive technology. We can speak more freely than anybody in the world, but who, exactly, is listening?
Next: An ideology of individualism.
hmphf...I never even noticed.
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Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
If people always agreed with me, what possible purpose would I serve?
That is the big question, isn't it? If you didn't spout off everytime some 15 year old broke the law, Andover could lose viewers, which would mean that they couldn't bring in advertisers to try to make up for their incredible stock market losses. Keep bringing in those banner ads, Jon. The Man 0wns your ass.
What point would there be in reading my columns at at all?
This is not merely rhetorical, I assure you. It's something we must struggle with daily. what point is there in reading your articles? More importantly, why do you write them? You sold out long ago, so god only knows what gives you the right to complain. You're a part of the corporate machine. And I think you like it.
*sing* my soma has a first name, it's m-o-n-e-y...
Come on, Jon, people have been saying that the Corporations rule the world for years now. Of course corporations are out to screw us every way they can, that's what they've always done - its called "business" and the goal is to get as much money as possible from consumers, no matter what it takes. Of course, one of the most efficient ways to do this is to buy politians so that legislation favorable to the corporation will be passed. It has gone on as long as there have been organized governments.
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http://gammatron.weblogger.com
People with similar goals have always come together and formed partnerships -- hunter-gatherer bands, villages, cities, countries, treaty organizations, corporations.
One of the many things that characterizes such associations is the giving up of some individual liberties in the interests of group survival and welfare.
Even in a free-wheeling forum such as Slashdot, there are limits to freedom of thought that are enforced by the moderatorial system.
Are we different in kind, or just in degree?
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Computeri non cogitant, ergo non sunt
America is becoming the headquarters of the Corporate Republic, a new kind of political entity that transcends geographic boundaries, and would have sent the original Republic's founders plunging into the Potomac in despair.
Why is it that America has proven to be the ideal breeding ground for the current corporation-driven global economy that has gotten so out of hand? If you look at all of the major issues that come up on /. about 95% of them are birthed in the US. How did the nation which prides itself on its God-given rights to freedom come to end up in such a state?
I think the "American Dream" has a lot to answer for. The dream of gaining wealth and possessions through the mechanisms of capitalism is one of the core national beliefs of Americans, and it pervades every part of their culture. Beneath its hope-filled surface, it subliminally encourages people to put themselves ahead of others, to work against them to better oneself, and to treat every opportunity in life as a means of making more money for yourself.
Undoubtedly this has done a lot of good for America's economy and growth, since the US boasts one of the largest economies in the world. But it has bought about the start of mega-corporations, massive bodies devoted to the gaining of wealth without any kind of conscience. They are the ultimate expression of the American Dream, and are intimitely tied in with the violence of that dream.
Personally I think that the whole notion of the American Dream is one that needs to be abandoned. It has resulted in a society driven by violence towards acquisition and greed, in which the violence of its spirit is mirrored in its gun-obsessed, violent culture and media, and in its interventionalist foreign policy.
Jon Katz vs. Metallica, in a no-holds-barred steel cage match.
What about the pending Microsoft breakup plans? How does this trancend the traditional government?
And if say, Mitsubishi decided to utilize slave labor or sold 'genocide solutions', don't you think they'd be shut-the-fsck-down?
I think this article is all hype, little perspective. I am not very afraid of the US going to war with Wal*Mart. I know that isn't the point, but it is the reality.
It used to be much worse. By my estimation, induhvidualism was at it's nadir and corporatism at it's zenith around the late 1950's. Things broke over the fall of McCarthy, Sputnik and Kennedy's election. Since then, there have been the Hippie & anti-Vietnam movements, and much more.
Sure, corporatism is still struggling, and can inflict considerable damage. But people don't think the same way they used to, and the corps are in decline. Look at how there has been major turnover in corporations fortunes. MS & Cisco didn't exist 20 years ago, and now they've overtaken GM & GE.
Most importantly, people's attitudes have changed. Very few think that corps are particularly well intentioned. So they will always be watched.
Okay I'll take the bait on this, and respond to the article seriously. Jon, why do you not back up what are very convincing arguments at times with fact. While quotes from CS Lewis, Heinlien(sic) and Nickolai are great, there is no proof in any of your arguments.
You never mention the facts about corporate ownership of many public resources(such as the Nigerian oil fields - a bad example I know), or the rampant abuses of the law(like the loggers who cut trees illegally around my house). You provide this great arguments, that are very well reasoned, but without these facts you're nothing more then a Sophist.
Corporatism sounds like an alternate form of democracy where the corporations replace the electoral college and you have to buy a share to become a voting citizen.
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..its not even funny. I mean he talks like a populist, but thinks that Napster is getting the shaft? Oh, and this is a gem:
In fact, in "Screwtape Letters," one of the devils etches out what could be the Corporatist Marketing Manifesto: "Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practice, in a sense, "democracy."
No John, that's American Liberalism you are thinking of...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
/. is a site that shows no matter how greedy a corporation gets, no matter how devious, and underhanded, there will always be a person, or a group of people that will try their hardest to
put out their product for free (beer/speech)
create a way to get around the rules of those corporations they deem "wrong"
compete and win against these corporations with the above mentioned tactics
so seriously Jon, let's not call normal everyday battles that we see, an apocalypse. mkay?
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
> e-mail to me often begins with the phrase: "I don't always agree with you, but..."
> It's well-meant, but always strikes me as curious because it's so unwittingly revealing of a society
> raised on corporatist pablum as a subsitute for dialogue and discussion
well, let me write you I don't always agree with you...
starting a message that way simply means I want to share, to confront my ideas to yours, without wanting to hurt you
the purpose of sharing thoughts is not to offend you but it is to present you something else. If I am ruthless it will not make you change your mind. So I have more chance to you make your point of view evolve if I try to have a mature behaviour towards you.
in other words, beeing polite & having respect is a good thing
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
Also on another note there is are interesting trends in industry, up until the last 6 months most companies were de-merging to improve efficience or at lease trying to build up individual coporate branding within departments, which is in interesting move...
Working for the (other) man
"lobbyists run the country" yadda yadda yadda...it sounds like a lecture from my freshman economics classes (in 1993). No, none of Katz's latest rant is new...it's pretty much on target, but it's not new...
...figure out which side of the fence you want to sit on!
...but let me clarify: you oppose corportations "circumventing government regulation", but you are in favor of consumers doing so? (from yesterday's discussion about teens _stealing_ Metallica's music, using Napster as a conduit) Odd contradiction...
another example - so we'll get all pissed off when someone violates the GPL (circumventing regulation), but we support copyright violations (circumventing regulation) when it comes to consumers stealing music from artists. Hypocrites!
Noam Chomsky Political Texts Online: Noam Chomsky's a professor of linguistics at MIT, and has been writing about the effects of capitalism on democracy for over 20 years.
The Left Business Observer: A hard look at the messages of capitalism's cheerleaders, from an analytical economist's point of view. Plenty of charts and graphs.
Stay Free! Magazine: A zine focusing on commercialism and consumer culture. Slashdot readers will probably enjoy the mean iMac ad parody on the front page.
Francis Hwang
Do domain names matter?
You seem to ignore certain things such as why corporations have the power they do. AOL and Time-Warner didn't just pop out of nowhere with billions of dollars. They became the powerhouses they are because *individuals* wanted the services they had to offer and gave them money for it. If the vast majority of Americans were unhappy with these corporations for a vast period of time there power would dwindle. You complain about how companies such as Wal-Mart can overpower small-business ownership as if it is a terrible thing. You know what? Individuals are making money from that Wal-Mart. Just because some ma and pa store can't succeed doesn't mean that the system is unfair. Just because large corporations such as Wal-Mart are successful doesn't mean they don't also have the right to compete in the market and be as successful as possible.
Also, I must say this is am extraordinarily poorly written article. It has *very* little substance, mostly only opinion backed up by nothing. Come on, I was taught in my high school writing classes to back up my writing with more evidence than was put into this article published by a "professional writer".
Everywhere in this new Republic, individualism is on the run. A nation founded on the notion of individual choice, liberty, privacy, and primacy is in danger of being subsumed. All social and political issues -- work, privacy, creativity, individual liberty -- are subordinate to corporatism's sole ideology: economics.
Care to explain why I can't be creative because Time-Warner can blackout "Who wants to be a Millionaire"? I mean really, this piece is full of buzz-words that have little meaning without specific interpretation/proof.
Of course, it isn't likely to happend...
Fixing copyright
The worst part is there isn't really anything I can think of to halt the spread of corpratism. It's something the majority of people simply have trouble beliving is happening. They are accustomed to distrusting the government but TV is their friend. Katz may not always be right but he's reliably thought provoking.
Dont' Blame Me I Voted For A Ham Sandwich.
What do you mean trout doesn't make good underwear?
I don't always agree with you, but . . . For more on the insideous contol that corporations have on the political process, see Jim Hightower's new book, "If The Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates." Even non-radical ideas are marginalized, and all of the "ins" are deep in the pockets of corporations. The anti-utopian fantasy from Brave New World, Stand on Zanzibar, Mockingbird, Brazil, 1984, etc. is drawing close. Maybe there is hope in the WTO protests and the Microsoft decision.
The thing is that whilst corporations are still based in a country they are vulnerable to the effects of legislation from that country, no matter how big they are. Witness the whole Microsoft trial - the biggest company in the world was not immune to being put on trial for all its vast wealth. And even the most international of corporations is vulnerable through the various treaties that bind countries together, and through the domino effect a successful case against a company can have.
The only way I can see for a corporation to truly have independence from governmental control is for it to be the government. And there are plenty of small countries out there which could be effectively "bought" by a corporation willing to take on its national debt, assets, GNP etc. In this way, the corporation effectively becomes the government, with all the rights to do what governments do - set their own laws and regulations, raise armies, have a foreign policy, create embassies and diplomats and so on.
Think of what an advantage that could be to a company. No matter what other countries may think of them, they are practically immune to interference thanks to their status as a soverign government. They can move all of their assets to their own country and establish distribution channels originating there. In this scenario, the corporation truly does rule.
I'm not sure about the amount of money it would require to do something like this, but given the trend towards giant mergers and acquisitions, it can't be soon before some giant conglomerate has the ability to do something like this for real. The question is, would they?
Should Jon Katz be Fired?
[] Yes
[] Absoloutely
[] Jon Katz sucks
Really, who keeps paying him, and why? Must be for ad traffic (I use a blocker, so it doesn't matter)... I can't think of any other reason.
He probably creates more useless packets than Melissa or I Love You - at least I Love You has a positive message to it, rather than 'The Sanctity of Our World is Crumbling Around Us!!!!!!!', which seems to be the theme of every post Jon Katz has ever made.
Bah!
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Nero had nothing to do with the Holy Roman Empire. He perished in the year 68.
The Holy Roman Empire did not come into existence until Pope Stephen II sealed a pact with Pepin in 754.
This post is well thought out and accurate. Therefore, it cannot reflect the opinions of the SlashDot moderators.
Yes, perhaps corporatism is a bad thing, wielding that kind of control can dampen individual's creativity and selfness, but it's not like it's new, it's merely a different form of how we (people that is) have always yielded to peer pressure and decided that it was easier to let some power from above dictate the framework within which we live our lifes... it's hard work always being an individual, most people are lazy and conformity means having to make fewer decisions.
At least with corporism it is not only possible but not all that hard for new members to join the oligarchy of power.... how many religions got any type of power in the domain of Catholicism (Europe primarily) during the thousand years 500-1500? In any case, the FORM of the powerholders may have shifted, but the fact that there ARE such powerholders has not. You can idealize all you want about individual freedoms and liberties but the fact remains that most people, given a choice, would rather let someone else make the choices.
-B
Old topic.
Karl's followers got carried away.
Good question (why the fear of IDing yourself?). Economists and political scientists say what's new is the size, power and technology the modern company. Corporatism isn't the same as capitalism. What's new is Microsoft, and ABC being owned by Disney, and the latter getting network yanked by Time-Warner and the changes in the nature of work and the economy since the early 90's. Corporatism now is funding politics, which is new, and gets more powerful by the day.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
"Tensions between individuals and corporatism can -- and should -- only worsen."
:) Katz is right, Corporationz 0wn mE.
Why? Why can't things get better? No, fuck that: I'm an optimist. Things WILL get better. And I'll make them. Somehow. If tensions between corporations and individuals increase, then why would either side look to making things better?
Corporations that have specifically repressed me:
Nintendo - Pokémon. The hours, days, weeks, months lost time spent playing these games could better have been used playing other video games. I intend to stop playing Pokémon until my friend gets out of the hospital, then I'm taking my Game Boy Color back.
Coca-Cola - Withdrew funding for the WWF. Not that I ever drank Coke in the first place, but you know how I feel.
Pepsi - Makes Mountain Dew. I suffer lack-of-caffeine withdrawls every other day or so if I forget to drink at least a sixpack. My solution? I will drink Jolt! Then I'll have to drink less to get my fix.
AOL - Put ABC back on TV after yanking it. And I thought they were on my side. (as if anyone in Time Warner has any say it what goes on anymore.) I dunno about this one, I don't think I could live without AIM.
Microsoft - SON OF A BITCH! Why do Visual C++ 6, Visual Basic 6, and Visual Interdev 6, all part of Visual Studio 6, use different text editing conventions?! ARGH! It's so annoying! You know what? There is no solution, unless I go and buy Visual Studio 7 (2000? can't wait
In any case, as cr0bar said on detonate.net: Metallica rocks, lawsuits suck, mp3z rock, thieves suck.
BTW: "Though H.L. Mencken brilliantly and savagely spoofed organized religion and politics a half-century ago, it would be nearly impossible to do so now in any public forum outside the Net." Today, Howard Stern slammed the dead Cardinal O'Connor as being against gay people and against the building of an AIDs specific hospital close to his church (or something, did anyone else listen to that?). Howard Stern is syndicated in how many places? I think that was fairly public.
response.write "More than any other greeting, e-mail to me often begins with the phrase: ""I don't always agree with you, but..."" It's well-meant, but always strikes me as curious because it's so unwittingly revealing of a society raised on corporatist pablum as a subsitute for dialogue and discussion." &Chr(13) REM hello? didn't your mom teach you to be polite? ^^;;
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
[o]_O
I've just got a few points.
First, anyone see that movie "Network?" It's a great flick, centered around Katz' point that we're all sort of changing into this gray, homogenous, muck. And the movie blames it on the media.
Second, maybe someone out there who is a history buff can confirm this, but wasn't the American Revolution spurred by economics?
Third, the Zaibatsu in Japan have been doing this for decades, haven't they?
Fourth, Is it really true that "individualism" leads people to stick their noses in other people's business? That seems like a pretty pro-active individualism. There is another individualism that leads people to become hermits. But, maybe that's not the "good" kind of individualism? For more on this check out that AC post about the American Dream further down, it's a good one. He says the American Dream leads people to try and one-up everyone else, and I agree. Not that I'm not trying too.
Fifth, Katz seems to equate Napster, everyone sharing intellectual property, with the open source movement. I think that's a false analog. The open source movement seeks to share ip that was intended to be shared in the first place, not to be sold (as a first intention).
Over all, this is a good article, but maybe just a tad bit paranoid. Although I agree that these mega mergers are a serious problem, and that we desperately need Campaign Finance Reform. But seriously, does anyone think our souls are in more jeapordy now than they have been for the last half century? For more on CFR, get in touch with Common Cause. www.commoncause.org
OoO
OoO
Please do not publish outside of
Am I the only person who thinks that this article didn't really say *anything*?
Got Rhinos?
Well, it would help if people spoke. Most people, honestly, don't really care about long-term issues/questions/problems, whether they're about freedom, corporate control, or what have you. Historically, there have been three things (that I can think of) that have acted as controls on corporate power: other corporations, activist organizations, and goverment. Relying on corporate-corporate conflicts is, I admit, moronic: companies are, once again, awakening to the idea that if they all cooperate/merge/ally, they can make a bigger buck than by fighting. But activist organizations (ACLU, Common Cause, and so forth) are doing what they can. In some cases (ACLU) that's a lot. In others (Common Cause) it's not so much. But it's interesting that most people, when polled/asked generally have a negative view of the activist groups (usually as troublemakers/pinkos/destroyers of 'family values', etc). And government, spurred on by the fact that less than half the eligible U.S. population bothers to vote anymore, takes the path of least resistance and goes with the corporations.
I've worked for/with/against several politicians in the last few years, and learned something that's pretty obvious but doesn't generally get noticed. If it's a fight between votes and corporate influence/money, votes generally win. A few thousand letters, and a couple hundred phone calls have a big influence on how a legislator will vote, almost always outweighing a corporate lobbyist's contributions and threats. And if they don't, the people can vote the bastard out of office. Isn't democracy beautiful? The problem is, most people don't care. People vote based on their economic self-interest, or based on who looked better in the ten-second ad they saw on t.v. If they vote at all. I suppose/hope that eventually corporations will go too far, and piss a substantial number of people off enough that effective political action becomes possible, but by then it may be too late. So the question becomes how to convince a largely apathetic population to act on a problem whose full implications are further over the time-horizon than they're willing to think about. It's not so much a matter of listening, I think, as a matter of speaking.
sorry for ranting.
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country....corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.
-Abraham Lincoln
Surely you're joking.
1). Representative democracy ain't too bad. Constitutional monarchies are still not that unusual. And the modern world is pretty tolerant of the occasional military junta/dictatorship, as well...
2). Is it justified? If you're asking whether all races are equal, that's a silly question. Statistically, there are observable differences. Why? It's uncertain. Some are cultural. Some are genetic. Some are purely fiscal. You'll find, for instance, that in the US, those of African descent are far more likely to have at least one gene for sickle-cell anemia -- but it make sense, because that same gene also helps against malaria, IIRC. You'll also find that they are somewhat more likely to believe that the CIA is responsible for spreading AIDS in Africa (cultural; propagated by Line PR of KGB, and spread by anti-establishment folks), and disproportionately likely to be professional basketball players (although the probability is still extremely low on an individual basis). They are less likely to desire membership in the KKK, and more likely to join the Nation of Islam. Are you claiming that most folk, if they think about it, consider everybody equal in every aspect?
And would you call affirmative action racism? I certainly would, and indeed find the entire idea disagreeable, but obviously many have found it to be a helpful evil.
3) Arguably, yes, depending on your metric. If, for instance, diplomacy is an issue, I'm almost certainly not your chap given how uncompromising I can be. And it would be silly to claim mental and physical supremacy over the bulk of humanity. The case would be more clear-cut if I were an anencephalitic paraplegic, but that happens not to be the case. So with probability approaching 1 (over 6 billion people)... of course.
Or, for that matter, to claim to understand how everybody thinks.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
ARGHHHH!!!!
"It is more complicated than you think" (The Eighth Networking Truth from RFC 1925)
I seem to remember a film (name slips my shattered mind) in which everyone was hobbled down to the 'average' - dancers who were better had to wear ankle weights, thinkers wore a mind control device to 'dumb-them-down'. Turns out the whole society was being run by 'intelligent' free thinkers who decided what was best for everyone. (Kind of like the Nanny-state philosophy). Of course, all the _real_ free thinkers die in the end. ;-) I'd strongly recommend John Brunner's fiction books 'Shockwave Rider' and 'Stand on Zanzibar' (except for the naff ending) to anyone who is interested in this kind of stuff.
What if the corporations weren't the giants they are today? Would we even be here? Probably not.
The Internet was built by corporate institutions, not induhviduals,so why not let them control what they created?
And on another note, why is "corporatism" bad? People think that capitalists want to squeeze every last penny out of the general population. WRONG. If that was the case, it wouldn't work. Capitalism is symbiotic (sp?). Masses of poor do not help capitalism, but masses of rich do (they can actually feed money to the corporations, where as the poor can't). Capitalism would die a very quick death if it lowered the general wealth of the populus.
- Damnit, I'm dead Jim
If you went to, say, one of the Napster/Metallica threads, cut and paste this story in, how do you think it would be moderated?
Looks suspicously like those "Jews rule the world" posts you see all the time.
Of course, I didn't take time to read the article much, once I saw Katz re-define a term.
Hey, I redefine corporation to mean "fuzzy blue duck" and republic to mean "timex watch" for the 21st century, because everything is so wonderfully post-modern. Now write an article.
"oohhh... I didn't know Schopenhauer was a philosopher!"
This is old news but, still, incredibly important.
This also goes way beyond the small confines of this computing community. Witness the recent large scale protests and riots against the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund in Seattle and DC and recent Mayday demonstrations. Thousands of people have already spoken up about neo-liberalism and free markets destroying the earth and developing nations.
I see the Internet as a means to subvert this growing problem. Check out some of the independent media sites on the web: indymedia. These sites provide alternative coverage of the events that the corporate backed media dismissed as bored youth movements. (one problem on these independent media sites is uninformed zealotry, just like some slashdot commentary. nevertheless, independent and free discussion and communication is always a good thing.)
some more links for info:
a16
50 years is enough
The other new consequence of corporatism..as it dominates the economy and politics..is it just puts pressure on individuals and individualism. The pressure to conform has really worsened. Online, we're fooled a bit because anybody with a computer can spout off (witness any Threads), but I think that distracts people from the fact that in schools, businesses and politics, everybody is under pressure to be inoffensive, tepid and quiet.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
The outcome is predictable. The gov has assumed ultra-Constitutional powers.
The corporations a) defend themselves via purchasing politicians and b) purchase the power seized by the corporations.
The problem ins't power of corps vs govs, it is gov vs people.
We no longer have a limited gov of enumerated powers. The Interstate Commerce clause of the US Constitution supports at least 3/4 of the current gov.
This has been done under the assumption that the gov could improve life for individuals == laws can be used to program an open environment to attain particular ends.
Lawyers must be smarter than me. In a carefully closed environment, with the ability to restart my programs in a known state, inspect the internals of the system, and otherwise test the hell out of it, I can often make small, simple programs work in a few days.
They claim to be able to write 10,000 page laws dealing with an open environment, very complex socio-techno-economic systesm (e.g. health care) and have them work so well they only need revisions every few years.
There are fundamental reasons that limited gov works better than un-limited gov.
Lew
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
Well, that's an easy target. I ask you this - what's worse, the fact that corporate power can influence elections and politicians, or the fact that religious and other kinds of organized zealots are running around that will gladly kill you in your sleep because they believe an obscure passage in their dogmatic literature told them to?
Almost any large-scale form of organization scares me, at one point or another. Why? Because when a lot of people get together and think the same way, they leave little room for dissenters. How else would you explain the fact that probably 70% of the country thinks that the ACLU is a bunch of pedaphile-protecting hippie scum? Is it because corporations and the media have pulled the wool over their eyes, or because they just never sat down and really thought about it?
Don't go blasting the people on top for having some motivation. There are cultural forces at work here a lot more powerful than corporations keeping people in line like sheep, as evident by your 100+ year old quote. I mena, capitalism wasn't even defined, int the modern sense of the word back then. Do you really think that people had the foresight to predict the corporate behemoths to come, or were they merely staring at the reflection of other corrupt institutions and projecting outwards, much like Dante does to the corrupt Popes and the Church in Inferno?
Don't get me wrong, I am not anti-religious, or anti-institutional - I just feel that people should have an understanding of what they're getting into an what the power structure of their organization really means and where its roots are.
lf.o
Ok, so I don't agree with everything he says all the time, but this discussion is obviously of interest to some people, and he has at least started a discussion. Like it or not, promotion of thought is a useful thing to do. Without people like Katz the world would be a much more boring place.
"Rumour - believe all you hear, your world will be more interesting" (paraphrase, John Brunner, HipCrime vocab in "Stand On Zanzibar")
The ACLU wants your freedom to be under the government's control, not yours. Consider their stances on affirmative action and school choice. Of course the government knows what is good for you.
This post is well thought out and accurate. Therefore, it cannot reflect the opinions of the SlashDot moderators.
One huge problem here is that corporations are becoming more and more like government entities, but without any Constitional restrictions on them. The amount of drug testing, background screening, and confidentiality paperwork that I had to go thru to get my current job at a certain large publishing firm was unbelieveable. On top of that, employees here are urged not to do "anything" that would cast the company in a bad light.
So, you say, I'm a worker of the Information Age; just take it elsewhere, right?
Well, the flipside of huge corporations is that they now provide services that the government has in the past, but that they do to a much lesser extent than they used to. At my new place of employment, I have both a 401K AND a retirement plan that will keep me out of Fluffy's can of food when I'm 70...Social Security sure as hell won't. While many states have programs to subsidize commutes, many companies don't participate...mine does. I have real medical, dental, visual, and so forth. I also belong to a
Bar Association society that is practically a guildhouse--I can get cheap supplemental insurance, disability insurance, etc....ever try to live on Welfare or disability payments?
The tiny little dotcoms and startups that I worked at in the past let me dress in pajamas and live in a Dune-like orange spice cloud of drugs if that was my choice....but...which is worth more in the long run, the right to smoke buds and have blue hair or some security for your future?
The choices are ugly and few. The US Government is doing nothing to secure people's futures...in the financial or in the personal sense..."Private Sector" can't be used as a shield to hide behind invasive behavior on a business's part any more...more to the point it shouldnt' be....
Stephenson's "Snow Crash" was right on....not in the technical sense, but in the sense that corporations are slowly becoming mini-nation states.
(Attention, quick shot!)
:-)
Nationalities, countries and national states as we now them are a construct that evolved during the 17th and 18th century and were precedented by families, tribes, Shires and kingdoms and other forms of traditional rule (whoops, this is getting tough, I hope I can make myself understood... My english...). Imho national states and national identities as we know them are based upon common cultural knowledge shared between (*usually* not very) different ethnic entities.
Basically a state or a country are based on some sort of agreement between the people of the given country and the respective group or person in power who wield power based on e.g. charisma, birth, legitimate rule (elections...).
What they all have in common is a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force on ots citizens or others. You do (at this point) not have this with corporations. They also provide a deal: citizens have to obey to the given rules, and in turn receive secutity. Security against external powers, like other countries, and security whithin the community through the set of rules they should obey to. Its a whole different story just how these rules evolved and wether they are legitimate in any way. You could argue that you can find different sets of rules and corporate culture in different corporations.
Now I am therefore not shure if a company could provide all this, thus replacing nationalities. After all multiple companies can exist in the same territory and have to obey to the laws and the government of that territory (to an extent, I mean that`s exactly what John is arguing).
What`s interesting about this idea is that you do not get to choose your nationality, and you also do not get to choose the culture that influences you most. Even If you go abroad later, a lot of cultural influence of the place where you grew up will stay with for you all your life. You do get to choose your place of work (well at least I hope so... to some extent...), and thus you get to choose a certain corporate culture and work environment, which could be positive.
BUT you do not grow up in a corporation, and neither you nor your family spend their entire time in your corporation, which does not make it a real choice in cultures.
The rise of international corporations could actually weaken the national states and there could be a chance there and problem. Apart from many people considering any change a bad thing. But I guess if international corporations rise in power, they will somehow have to provide a greater share of the services that were formerly provided by other, now weaker entities. This is a big problem, because: Why exactly should they do that? Who will make them do it? And corporations get to choose their own members: They do not want just anybody.
OK, I`ll stop here, there`s a lot to think about there. Remeber, I was just typing away, so go ahead and rip it apart
I'm really not sure what to make of this article. It's hardly controversial in this forum to say that corporatism is bad, but to say that it somehow contradicts the dreams of the Founding Fathers indicates that Katz's grasp on American history is tenuous at best.
The Founders were actually split on the subject; after the Revolution, they eventually split into two camps. The Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, had the philosophy of individualism that Katz speaks of; Jefferson wanted America to basically stay an underdeveloped nation of small-scale farmers. The Federalists, on the other hand, wanted to see America develop quickly, and were very supportive of corporate expansion through programs like the founding of the Bank of the United States, America's first central bank. The Federalists included powerful figures such as George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, and they basically controlled the government through the early days of the Republic until they overreached and tried to criminalize criticism of their programs through the Alien and Sedition Acts. (Read American Aurora by Richard Rosenfeld for a great treatment of the tyranny the Federalists tried to impose on us.)
So the tension between corporations and individuals is hardly new -- it's been with us since the founding of the Republic, and it will probably be with us forever. We can, and should, take steps to limit the power corporations hold over the public sphere -- but to claim that somehow America was an idyll of untrammeled individualism until big bad Time Warner came along is to demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of our common history.
-- Jason A. Lefkowitz
Read my blog.
Yes, this has been all said before, but no one listened then either. If you want to go back even further--this is essentially the Mark of the Beast, you know 666. I'm not a fundamentalist freak; I know we've always had the beast with us and always will. That's what inspires a Katz to write what he says, and that's what inspires those who disagree. Yes, same old, same old, but still true! Come on guys get your heads out of your...computers and get a life. We all know Bill Gates needs to get one. If I had his money I'd spend the rest of my life watching fishing shows and reading fishing magazines.
Do not try and bend the Republic. That's impossible. Instead ... only try to realize the truth.
This post is well thought out and accurate. Therefore, it cannot reflect the opinions of the SlashDot moderators.
Sounds like a lot of the cyberpunk writings in novels and shorts stories. Big corps which a few term as mega-corporations. In a few cyberpunk worlds those megacorps have extraterritorality (sp?) like a foreign goverment does in the states. Corpratism sounds a lot like facism. There was a song called "the product" by the band consolidated that talked about some of the ideas above, can anyone quote the song. Sorry for the misc. ramblings writing this while fix the chaos brought on by the "i love you" virus.
The problem with the USA is that it's effectively a popularity contest - in most nations, the leader (Taoiseach, Prime Minsister, Chief Secratary, President) is elected by the politicians - in the USA, it's by the people. So they have to spend a lot of money...so have to get a lot of money...so have to give out a lot of favours, once in office.
Once political contributions are considered bribes, it makes politics a lot cleaner.
The Italian state under Mussolini was the first to be called "facist". This government supported rich people and capitalism and crushed labor unions and any independent political activity. They put all citizens to work for the noble task of making wealthy tycoons richer. I believe they used torture chambers to do this. ... in English, "corporate state"!
Why do I bring this up now? Because another common name for this facist governmental system was "estato corporativo"
If you think that corporate capitalism since WWII history has been less violent than during facist Italy or Germany, just look at the histories of U.S.-backed governments in Indonesia, Chile, El Salvador, S. Korea, Haiti, Iran, etc....
For daily news from a progressive viewpoint Common Dreams
For a huge amount of good political and activist info (I especially recommend the Noam Chomsky archive, which you can find from the main page, and which another poster linked to above) Z-Net.
It's more like Corporatocracy. I guess I can spell that any way I want, since I made up the word.
Under a republic, the people can choose leaders, and can remove a ruler if they so choose.
Under a Corporatococracy, the corporations can see to it that there is never a decent alternative. It is much like Communist Russia. You could vote for whomever you wanted, just as long as they were part of the Communist party.
Under Corporatism, you can kind of choose by what you buy, but anyone who doesn't toe the party line is never allowed to rise to the top.
Why do you think there are so many corporatists against Open Source. It's something that doesn't toe the party line, and something they can't control.
What we really have in the US, is a Corporatocracy giving us the illusion of a Republic while telling people that the US is a Democracy.
BTW Democracy in the United States is a rather new idea. The 1928 US army training manual no 2000-25 reports that Democracy resultis in mobocracy, a communistic attitude toward property, and has an overall result of agitation, discontent, and anarchy.
Others can debate the positives and negatives of all forms of governments, but it is clear that the US thought of Democracy as bad as late as 1932 when that particular section was removed.
The corpratists want everyone to believe that they are choosing the laws, this is why the United States still holds elections, and has court cases involving the constitution. It is basically a sham. Most of congress and of course the Presidency is bought and paid for.
Notice the primary issues in the campaigns. Abortion, gun congrol, campaign reform. Whatever your feelings on these, they are really just being used to make you think that the government is doing something. Nothing will ever be resolved. They don't want it resolved until there are no more people who can be duped by that particular issue. However important you think the issue is on a moral basis, none of them matter anymore from a political standpoint, because as far as anyone with the power to decide is concerned, they are just good ways to keep getting reelected without ever needing to acomplish anything.
Look at both presidential candidates. Both are corpratists. One clams to be 'liberal', the other claims to be 'conservative' but those are only the facades they put on to put forth their corporate agenda.
Do I think there's a conspiracy? Not really. Everyone is just acting with un-enlightened self interest. What gets ME the most money, power whatever. For such things, vast conspiracies are inefficient, when normal greed will suffice for an explanation. Of course there are small conspiacies everywhere. If two or more people are involved it's a conspiracy after all.
Democracy in the United States is an illusion. The corporatism present her controls the government, we have allowed it to spread to the rest of the world.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
And we should also thank fhwang for posting these "Links for further reading."
The dictionary kind of corporatism is a representation scheme: shareholders elect their board of directors, companies elect a sector representative, and the representatives meet in a council to allocate resources. It was one of the the theoretical basis of Fascism (not Nazism, please note!), and was intended to place the control of the economy in the hands of people who would be motivated to "make the trains run on time".
This is echoed in modern times by the heads of companies meeting in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and making decisions about the economy in some particular context, and those NGOs being part of larger government/business organizations. The World Trade Organization is an example of the latter.
The behavior of a corporatist community of businesses is rather close to Jon's definition, but only in the absence of a "policeman". Of course, a wise corporatist community will wish to avoid the state having police powers, and will campaign for the disentanglement of the state from business, specifically from issues like pollution, which they consider would be better dealt with by economic forces.
This campaigning is often mistaken for normal right-wing politics, with slogans like "smaller government", but it is different in nature.
This kind of mimimal government, government without police powers, is not necessarily wanted by people who are not part of that community, which is restricted to the owners or shareholders of the corporations. In a corporatist state, one can vote only in proportion to the number of shares of stock you own...
This is in contrast to the traditional kind of government, which we established to protect us from robbers, murderers, and other governments. In traditional governments, we choose people to protect us. The people who wish us to lack that protection naturally disapprove of this, and argue for different kinds of governments. The corporatist form is just one of these. (Be glad they're not pushing Industrial Feudalism!)
What to do about it? That's an open question, but there are some classical answers. Classical as in "ancient greek" classical
A readable book on the ethical relationship between business and government was written a few years back by Jane Jacobs of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" fame. It's Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce & Politics, a recorded discussion/debate between a group of characters. (Like most of Jane's books it's fun and readable, not an academic treatise). It raises all the basic questions about commerce and government that we've had since Plato, and I daresay it is one direct answer to "what's to be done?"
--davecb
davecb@spamcop.net
First off lets not forget something. Corporations are people. They aren't some titanic faceless thing that lumbers in and destroys. They are made up of people, most of whom don't give a rats ass about what is going on as long as they keep getting paid and the boss just leaves them alone.
Now for the main point. You fight a corporation by depriving it of it's source of income. How you might ask? Well you can just not buy the products yourself, encourage your friends and family not too, stage a general boycott, sabotage the production lines, suborn their employees, burn their buildings to the ground and/or stage a armed rebellion. All of these could work but the boycotts are probaly your best bet.
Simply take it on a low level. Don't support a company you don't believe in. Don't like Disney for whatever reason? Don't see their movies, don't buy their products for yourself or your children, don't visit the Magic Kingdom (look it's magic! you're wallets empty), and don't watch their television stations. Remember you are only responsible for what you do and if you support a company that does things you don't like then you are giving them at least marginal approval of these things. If you want to try and convert others then go ahead. Remember that others might not take well to conversion though. If you do want to convert then convert your friends and family. The best way is by example, by the way. Then they will convert others and so on.
Remember a corporation can not function without money and if enough like minded people bought with their beliefs in minds and not just their desires then things will improve. Corporations will bow to public demand if the public demands it. How else do you describe low fat foods or enviromentally friendly (at least on the surface) products? The public wanted them, or thought they wanted them. This assumes the public has a decent grasp of what is good and what is not... this comes from a good education and is another bag of worms entirely.
Why vote republicrat when you can vote for Ralph Nader. The last person in Washington with any balls left.
The most obvious is his conflation of corporatism and conformity. Historically, strong pressure to conform was around long before the corporation existed. Were the witch-hunts in the 1600s the fault, somehow, of businesses of the time? Pressure to conform has a lot to do with our monkey heritage, and little to do with multinational corporations. And noting that non-conformity is uncontroversial approaches tautology: All controversy has some sort of expressed difference of opinion (= non-conformity) at the hear of it.
And Has it occured to Katz that the rise of Walmart or CNN or McDonald's is that most people like them? Personally, I don't; I value skill and individuality more than I value the few dollars I'd save by buying from one of those companies. But most of America has different values than me.
Why does Katz feel it necessary for everyone else to share his values? Isn't that just another demand to conform? He appears to feel that these values are the result of mass-media brainwashing that only he is safe from, but he doesn't demonstrate this. I'd bet that Americans liked cheap, greasy food long before the first McDonald's ad was on televison.
Most telling, though, is this comment:
That's just ridiculous. Has he considered the possibility that people are being polite? Even if it's not a vice he personally indulges in, many people like being polite to others. And although I'm not an expert on the topic, I have the impression that etiquette existed before the corporation.
Maybe Katz has a real point buried somewhere under all this. But he'll have to work a lot harder to convince me that corporations are the root of all evil.
>No one really wants to be individuals. Being an individual means you are better than someone at some things.
:-)
>The modern obsession with equality has been so pervasive...
You are confusing equality with sameness. It's the same fundamental misconception made in some of the more disastrous attempts at communism, and the same misconception held dear by libertarians as a justification for their cause. Sure, a lot of people in our society make this mistake, but it's their loss, and there _are_ still people whose individuality goes beyond clothes and hair. Besides which, people don't have to be different in every way conceivably possible - if I think that social philosophy is important and clothes are not important, who are you to say that I'm a clone because I just grab mass-marketed clothes off the shelf (thus saving me time and effort to be better spent developing unorthodox social concepts)
>Don't believe me? Ask yourself a few questions:
Answers to these questions do not seem at all universal - in fact for some, I don't even know which answer you were expecting to get! Anyway, my answers:
> 1) Is any system of government other than democracy legitimate in the modern world;
Yes.
> 2) Is racism good?
No
> 3) Is anyone fundamentally better than you are?
You need to be more specific - I could answer both yes and no depending on my understanding of what you're asking.
Furthermore - what are you trying to show? Just because with enough searching you found some questions that (you thought) humanity has finally reached some consensus on, you think this indicates a lack of individual thought? Some things are agreed upon because experience has found them to be unwaiveringly true - this has nothing to do with individual thinking.
For every one question you can find with an answer that people agree on, I can find two questions that people disagree over.
Yes, we're up sh|t creek, but you're paddling in the wrong direction
It's basically the same story we've had for most of civilization's history: small portions of the population making decisions that affect (in a mostly negative way) the lives & environment of the majority. We used to have Kings & their courts of ministers, admirers & hangers on. Now we have multinational CEOs and boardrooms. In the end, the people working in the factories are little better than well kept slaves.
Think about this: We buy a house that is ridiculously overpriced. (Ever look at the price of lumber compared to the price of the finished house?) We spend 30-40 years (all of our "useful" years) struggling to maintain the home and pay the bank (and pay taxes on the property that the bank owns!!!) until we retire -- tired, stressed out and useless -- to live on a fixed income until we either die or lose our sanity.
We buy cars which do little more than get us to work and back, and they constantly break down. (Can anyone tell me why mufflers aren't made out of rust-proof metals?) The average new car is upwards of $10,000, and you better expect to pay at least $15,000 if you want a/c. And just think, in only 5-6 years - that large chunk of money will be rusting in a junk yard somewhere. And let's not forget the mandatory insurance payments.
We're APES, people! We were designed to hang out in trees eating fruit and playing. Not for sitting in cubicles for 8-9 hours at a stretch, staring at screens and processing data.
For every one person who achieves the "American Dream" there are thousands who struggle through their entire lives just to survive. That's not much of a return on the investment. (Did you know that Bill Gates -- alone -- earns more than the lowest 40% of Americans COMBINED?)
-The Reverend
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
=(.\')=
i read katz's article, and then i read the comments following. first, there's complaints that katz is expressing opinion without any facts! ohmigod! we've been so brainwashed by the "objectivity" of modern media that we don't see the agenda behind the story. i'll take somebody with a clearly stated opinion over a hidden agenda any day. at least the author of an opinion piece is very clear about where they come from. the only thing you know about the motivation behind the story on "dateline" tonight is that it's primary purpose is to make money. second is the opinion that corporatism isn't so bad. hey, it gave us the internet! bullshit. it's given you a whitewashed version of the internet, with governments the world `round itching to restrict the bejeesus out of it, precisely because it's become a corporate communications channel. disney doesn't want smut on their internet, goddamnit, so the government better do something about it! better still if there weren't any offensive content at all. better still if there wasn't any content at all except that which is favorable to the corporations. for a community so anti-microsoft, and so pro-open source, one would think that there would be a few more supporters of these ideas here. what's been proven instead - /.'ers don't like to have their ideas challenged, they don't like new ideas that might even be different from their own! they'd prefer to keep their heads down and code, and let the giant corporate machine roll straight over them. you might be better served to save yourself the time flaming katz and fill out that employment application for microsoft, they're looking for a bunch of mindless cattle that can code much like yourselves.
An example: Microsoft claims so often that it is an innovator that people are starting to parrot the company line.
Okay, that was an easy target.
How about this: Seen the ads for Verizon wireless? You know, the single company formed by the merger of Primeco (which had just merged with something else, IIRC) and two other companies? Have you noticed that their ads claim that customers have *more* "freedom" and *more* "choice" now that there are fewer cellular providers? Just how much sense does that make?
The sad truth is, ideas like freedom and liberty are being redefined by corporations every day. Like I said about government a while ago, the only function of a powerful organization is to keep that power. Everything else is totally ancillary.
For example, if a shoe company thought that it could increase its profits by engaging in slavery, don't you think it would? Oh, wait a minute, they already have.
The government is currently in control of my lack of freedom. It would be better to have them in control of my freedom.
I do not agree with ACLU stances on every issue, but what other organization is doing anything productive for my desire for online privacy and anonymity? My right to express my beliefs without the government strongarming me into silence? My children's rights to speak against the actions of a school's administration while in school? I havn't got the time, the money, the legal expertise, or the charisma to effectively defend myself against the army of lawyers, so the best course of action i could find was to support the lawyers who seem to be slowing the evil ones down. Not ideal, but what are my options? Idealism and purist philosophy will accomplish nothing. If you want to change anything you need to ante up and try to do somehting real about it through the means that are available.
Who are the principalities of power here? Who owns the money you have so little of? You still have better boxes to live in then the other peasants on this planet. Gee, giving you guys the idea you had special inalienable rights from God will have to be suppressed somehow. Maybe make the government more important and apart from the big guy... that's it!
It seems to me that the nature of these corporate entities seems to fall very well in line with the tradional Marxist line. Once again we see a very typical conflict between the means of production and labor. While means of production are far more equally distributed than they were in the early industrial age of Marx, the people who control the means do so far more powerfully and skillfully. Certainly, the theories of value that Marx supported have no bearing on today's world, but the confict now betweem the consumer who is simply a object of consumption and the buisness man simply out to make a profit seems eerily described. Also, while Marxist theory is often attacked because it holds economics to be the driving force in history, this seems to be more the case than ever. Why did the Pinkerton's get into the pre-teen spy business? It wasn't for a moral, social, or political motivation. It was simply economics. How often does this happen now? When Ben and Jerry's sells out to a conglomerate we have a very depressing situation. This is off my own topic, but had everyone seen the RoboCop movies? Forget the cheap looking special effects and acting, and look at the society that they show. OCP is the coming plague. It buys the city, dehumanizes Murphy and places shareholding on par with democracy...It is well worth a look for a much earlier version of what Katz has drescribed.
BUT....
what would you suggest limiting government power over? i am fully in favor over limiting gov. power over our bodies (i.e. the abortion issue). but i am in favor of increasing gov. power over corporations.
the government's power IS limited over these corporations. for instance, the US government has no control over the sweatshop conditions that the global Nike corporation imposes on employees in developing nations.
also, it is not government versus the people, it is the corporation versus the people. corporations control the government (as well as basically everything else, including the media). the government bends for corporate interest simply because the influence corporations exert on government officials in the form of money is much greater than a citizen's constructive criticism.
too bad what we need is just theories: (1)a government, with strong powers over corporations, that operated in the interest of citizens rather than corporations and itself (2) a society based not on money or materialism, etc etc etc, theory theory theory.
all i know is that things have to change. the system as it exists cannot sustain itself for countless reasons, not the least of which is that ordinary human beings will not stand for it.
I saw the movie RKO 281 last night! BTW an Excelent movie.
Its the story sorrounding the making of Citizen Kane by Orson Wells.
It was based on the live of William Randolph Hearst. Now if you want to talk about corporatism and Information control, thats your guy.
At that time he had s much influence in the corporate world he came close to preventing Citizen Kane from getting on the big screen.
Since then others have joined the race for information distribution, but the Hearst Corporation lives on, they have diversified in all fields of communication. i.e. The Hearst Interactive Media group created in 1993 have a partnership in the well known website women.com and others.
But basicaly what Im saying, Hearst was powerfull back then, and some companies can be now.
If you'd like a brief history on Hearst AND the Hearst Corporation : http://www.hearstcorp.com/ah7.html
oh and RKO 281 is a good movie you should check it out. its an HBO production. recently release, in DVD also.
I was halfway afraid he was going to start spelling "republic" with a K.
- MC
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
In both cases, you end up with a centrally controlled economy with little real input from the peons. In both cases, the purpose of the media is to support the control system, not to enable the people to communicate with them.
What other things are common to the two systems?
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Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
The Roman Empire was in its INFANCY under Nero. He was after all only the third emperor. (Caesar was never emperor, so it was Augustus, Caligula, Nero). The fall of the western roman empire is usually dated by the battle of Adrianople in 478 AD. 400 years off buddy. Your conspiracy theory sounds sort of weak when you put it in historical context. Everyone knows the Bavarian Illuminati run the world anyways.
wake up and find out that you are the eyes of the world.
Several years ago Coca-Cola was in the process of doing a major land purchase in the small Central American country of Belize (which borders Mexico and Guatamala). When they were thorugh with the initial proposal, Coke would have owned approximately 60%-75% of all of the land in the country. This effect was something similar to somebody purchasing 60%-70% of a company's stock in the stock market.
From what I last heard, Coca-Cola backed down on the project because of the PR reprecusions from "owning" their own country in a very literal sense. If there were a company who didn't care so much about PR perception, especially if they were principally an industrial supplier, they probabally could get away with doing something that bold. At least it is an idea to consider... or at least a good plotline for a science fiction novel.
In terms of more local poltical juristictions, this already happens. At the beginning of the 20th Century, coal mining companies routinely established "company towns" where the mining company literally owned everything, from the schools, police, fire departments, banks, grocery stores, and homes. (For a non-confrontational view of this, watch the movie "October Sky", which uses the coal town as a story background to a surpurbly geeky moive)
This was probabally best described by Tennessee Ernie Ford in the song Sixteen Tons where he sings about life in a coal town. (BTW, the link has the lyrics and a real-audio recording of the song.)
"the act of voting -- which citizens increasingly see as pointless and meaningless, since they have such restricted options to choose between ".
Doesn't that just remind you of the episode in the Simpson's where the aliens land kidnap Bush and Clinton and assume their forms just in time to start campaining for the presidential elections ?
Oh the big, bad, EVIL, corporations are taking over!!!
Give me a break! Corporations are responsible for the greatest increase in the standard of living than anything else. It is because of their existence that we have an internet, television, radio and telephone networks. Corporations have allowed more communication among individuals and groups than any other entity human-kind has created.
Nothing to watch on television because "everything is the same" or ABC is blacked out? I don't know about you, but I just CHANGE THE CHANNEL. My corporate controlled cable provider offers me 70 channels if I don't rent their decoder box, 150 if I do. If I still don't like what they have, I'll just go to my corporate-controlled video rental store and rent something there. Failing that, I can surf the internet on my corporate-controlled broadband connection. If worst comes to worst, I can read a book on my shelf or buy one at the local corporate-controlled bookstore. None of these choices existed for me 25 years ago. As far as free speech is concerned, just where (at least in the US) is it abridged? An adult can say just about anything and not be dragged away by the secret police (as a rule).
People have this idea that corporations are going to take over every aspect of life and replace popular government. That couldn't be further from the truth. Corporations and Government are mutually exclusive entities. Here's why:
1. To receive rights in a corporation, you buy them. A government gives them to you as a birthright.
2. If you do not perform your duty in a corporation, you are exiled (fired). Under a government, such a person becomes homeless, goes on welfare, etc. and becomes a burden to be carried by the rest.
3. If you commit a crime against the corporation (ie theft), you are exiled (fired). In a government, you are incarcerated and become a burden to be carried.
4. Corporations exist to make money. Governments exist to organize people. These are two very different missions.
5. In corporations, the top officers must perform or be fired. Performance is measured by value creation (accurate as measured in monetary units). In government, non-performing top officials can be re-elected or re-appointed. Performance is measured by how stable society feels (can't really be measured as accurately as profit).
What it comes down to, is that corporations are VERY different from governments. Should they attempt to supplant governments, they would have to deal with the non-performing elements of society. Once they started doing that, they would BECOME governments.
Did you have a point to make?
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This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Katz, you should take your anti-corporate blinders off sometime, and look around.
Couple of questions, somewhat rhetorical:
1) Ever heard of a company that exterminated 60-120 million people? Neither have I, but Stalin's Soviet Union succeeded at it. The Sovs continued to kill people until Communism imploded, and the vile ideology of Communism STILL gets praise from western academics and political elites. Disgusting.
2) Ever heard of a corporation that destroyed an entire country? The US has killed 1.5 million Iraqis in the past ten years, by restricting trade (by those evil corporations!) that has kept food, medicine, and industrial equipment out of that now impoverished country. This is not an apology for that nation's totalitarian government, but a point toward the difference between the power of the Company versus the deadly force of the all-encompassing State.
The increasing control over the media by the State (whether nationalist or internationalist, it still kills PEOPLE), should have you much more scared than Time-Warner's childish action against Disney. Time-Warner did not precision-bomb Belgrad and Novi Sad's sewer treatment plants. M$ hasn't destroyed the lives of civilians from Vietnam to Panama to Mt. Carmel, Texas.
You should turn your keyboard on those that cause real, calculable harm on people, Jon Katz. The increasing power (and blind rage) of the modern State should have you much more scared than Napster, the MPAA, Time-Warner, or even Pinkerton.
Corporate power can be controlled at the stockholder level, in the spectacle of the media, and on the level of direct action, if needed. The power of the Nanny State and the agenda of the left-centrist coalition in the industrial states crushes all opposition, violently. While claiming to "protect rights" and calling for "humanitarian" wars, the elite that "lead" this country are tearing it apart, and stuffing their own pockets with our labor.
Man, am I in a foul mood all of a sudden. 8/
J05H
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
Care to explain why I can't be creative because Time-Warner can blackout "Who wants to be a Millionaire"? I mean really, this piece is full of buzz-words that have little meaning without specific interpretation/proof.
Glad to see that somebody else feels the same way!
While I mostly enjoy reading Katz's artilces (if only to see how many argumentative hooks he puts in and how many people nab themselves with them) the few emails he and I have exchanged has not ever taken the veil away from mysteries like why he doesn't back up his words with more than the rhetoric of the 60's and 70's.
Creativity is not dying. If it were I'd expect to be talking in doublespeak right now and thinking doubleplusungood thoughts about the professors at my school.
This is about Jon Katz, not 'The Corporate Republic', so skip if that's what you're expecting. This also probably won't be exactly brief ...
Jon Katz: some people hate him, some people love him. Some people have him blocked off their list of authors, others visibly brighten upon seeing a new Katz article on Slashdot. Why?
I'm honestly ambivalent about Mr. Katz's articles, and often have trouble seeing what all of the uproar in response is about. Nonetheless, I'm not completely unbiased, and I'll start by admitting that I tend to find myself agreeing with him more often than disagreeing, so this is written from that point of view.
I thought I'd try to work out the reasons for all the strong opinions:
Slashdot, while advertised as News for Nerds, is really much more than that. It certainly has the this is a really cool new breakthrough and the new version of Apache news items, but it also carries various news items that are more socially-oriented and connected, ranging from the article yesterday about toxic waste in Silicon Valley, to the (in)famous serious of articles a while back about the Littleton shootings.
One of the unspoken assumptions that some make at Slashdot is about the homogenity of opinion about the issues that are posted/discussed here. IMHO, while it's true that opinions on many technical issues are relatively homogeneous despite the the all-over nature of Slashdot's audience (geographically, socio-economically, politically, culturally, etc.), that opinions on social issues are not homogeneous.
Though questions like Windows vs. Linux, Free/Open Software vs. Closed Source, etc, etc. are all assumed (for the most part, correctly), to have a general consensus, it seems to me that assuming that opinions on social issues will also come to a general consensus is unrealistic.
Most of Jon's articles tend to deal with the social side of computing and technology. He deals with corporatism, invasions of privacy, etc. These are all things that tend to be volatile issues, on which we should expect a difference of opinion. This is okay. I disagree with Jon a hefty amount of the time also. But I don't see any reason to get nasty about it, just as I don't usually see any reason to worship the guy as the next Jesus (or substitute your appropriate diety or natural force)
When it comes to social issues, disagreement is a Good Thing(tm). If we all kept on nodding our collective heads in unison, Slashdot would be a very boring (IMO) place. While having a unified opinion on technical issues can lead to more productive discussion, a unified view on such more flexible things like social issues only tends to lead to stagnation.
I personally believe that Jon's articles are written in a thought-provoking manner, designed to promote discussion, both in favor of the points in the article, and against. However, I don't agree with the cynical view taken by one of the earlier posters on this thread about Jon's articles essentially being nothing more than trolls, ZDnet fashion, used to generate revenue via ad banners.
Jon has done a great job in stimulating discussion on Slashdot, and although he may have been a little too successful (witness the flame wars that exist in the discussion forum of every Katz article) in stimulating strong opinions and even stronger *ahem*discussions, I must applaud Jon for his overall contributions.
When I read your article about Metallica and Napster yesterday, the message that came through loud and clear was, "We have got to stop Metallica's evil ways for the children!" It seemed more than a little hypocritical, and just more evidence of how so few people manage to resist dragging out irrelevant, emotional arguments to bolster their cases when they've got a weak one. Sure, I expect the mainstream media to shout "for the children!" at the top of their lungs as often as they can, but I've gotta admit that I never expected it from you, Jon.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
"One of the hallmarks of the unconscious civilization" off-line is our failure to grasp how pervasively we have slipped into conformity. Our media embrace "objectivity" -- a marketing ploy invented by publishers in the 1800's to make newspapers less offensive to large blocks of potential consumers. Corporatism is now so ubiquitous we can hardly even see it, even though it affects the food we buy, the restaurants we eat in, the books we can make and read, the movies we can see, the music we can listen to, the software most people buy."
Ah, now I see. Everybody but Jon is suffering from a false consciousness. Only our idol Jon has the intellectual temerity to see through the veil and bring to us the True NatureTM of things.
This is the classic Leftist attack on corporations. Corporations are successful in a free market because people *want* products and services they want. But Katz and others know that is a lie -- we only think we know what we want, but really we need a vanguard of individuals to deprogram us.
Give me a break.
Isn't it interesting, btw, that most of the things Katz writes about are about access to corporatist pablum? The Revolution *will* be televised and, apparently, it turns out to be "What Wants To Be A Millionare"?
Really, Ted Kacszinski does this better than you.
Words to live by, Jon. Words to live by.
k.
The preceeding post was brought to you by ADM, makers of Soylent Green brand food products. Archer Daniels Midland, supermarket to the world.
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"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I've noticed that some people have been posting about how this issue has been brought for the past 100 years, but I don't see this as a valid argument on why it should not be discussed. 1. It cannot be denied that corporatism has branched into almost all aspects of our lives, more than at any other time in history, so it seems to me that these discussion have MORE reason to be in a forum then ever before. 2. Yes, people have been TALKING about them for a while, however still little is being done to stop or slow them down. So, maybe that means that either people are talking enough, or maybe it means that talking doesn't do anything. I guess what I'm trying to point out is that it is time to take ACTION rather than talk about it. Most of us already know that corporatism is wrong, we need to discuss how to eliminate it. Racket
The strength of us all could have demolished the wall, but you chose to walk through the door.
Here are some other links to inform all you Slashdotters of the way the world works these days: advertising
Corporate use of DNA
Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States
Corporate control of democracy
These are of course just the beginning of the debate. Recently, Ralph Nader and Phyllis Schafly (a pairing that boggles the mind) have united in an attempt to raise awareness regarding the commercial exploitation of children. There is advertising in this country that is targeted at children age 2!! The idea is to develop brand preferences to insure future profits. This makes me want to vomit.
All the Slashdot posts in the world will NOT CHANGE A THING. Go out and GET ORGANIZED.
1. The C.S. Lewis quote refers to state socialism, not corporate power. Corporations are not interested in "leveling" people the way socialists are. In fact, corporations are more likely to encourage unequal human excellence, rather than discredit and eliminate it... Michael Jordan sells a lot more Nike's than would a typical city-league ballplayer.
2. I see no evidence that criticism is "thriving on the Net, but declining elsewhere". Quite the opposite, in fact. We have become a nation of people that bitch and moan perpetually about milk cows getting hormone injections, SUV's blocking our sight-lines on the highway, meetings in Seattle about international trade agreements, and so on, and so on.
3. Your entire premise of corporations vs. individualism is flawed. Corporations do not care whether you are an individual or a drone. They only care about how much product you are willing to buy from them. Individualists are just as likely as anybody else to buy cars, computers, and Pez.
4. Far from holding individuals "under the gun and on the run", any given corporation survives only if it convinces enough consumers that their product or service is worth paying for.
5. The majority of Americans hold at least a little stock (a 401k, if nothing else), which means we own them, not the other way around.
6. Governments are far more dangerous to freedom than any company could ever hope to be. AT&T did not gun down a black man in New York when he pulled out his wallet. Cisco did not murder the wife of a separatist looney at Ruby Ridge. Ford Motors did not assault the residence of a minor religious cult in Waco, Texas. Microsoft did not beat the living crap out of Rodney King. Phillip Morris did not lock up Kevin Mitnick for nearly five years without a trial. ADM did not send in shock troops to deal with a family custody dispute... The bottom line is that you have a lot more reason to fear Janet Reno than Steve Jobs.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Corporate tax contribution to the US Budget
Pre World War II: ~15%
Today: ~10%
Personal income tax contribution to the US budget
Pre World War II: ~15%
Today: ~45%
You can see the full graph here
Source:Executive Office of the President of the United States - Office of Management and Budget
The enemy isn't Disney;it's people who buy tickets to Disney movies. If everything is 'Disneyfied', it's because that's what The People, so beloved of Katzian leftists, *actually* *want*. Contrary to bumper-sticker politics, 'corporate greed' exists only to serve 'human need' -- otherwise, the greedy corporations don't get any money. Corporations serve The People more slavishly and more fanatically than any government does.
Katz claims he wants the opportunity for individuals to excel, not to be crushed into gray paste by the evil corporations -- but isn't a global corporation the ultimate symbol of human excellence? Katz seems to think that you have a right to run a business if you're barely eking out a living, starving slowly in your little shop in the little main street of a little town, but, should you be SUCCESSFUL -- should you advance beyond your little store, become a big store, then a chain, then a franchise, then a true player on the international scene -- well, then, you've gotten too big for your britches, buddy, and you must be controlled, constrained, chained down -- in the name, hilariously, of 'individualism'!
Katx has not merely redefined 'corporatism' -- he has redefined 'invidualism' to mean 'communism'. Rather a tricky task. When Katz demands corporations produce media that is more 'controversial', he is saying, in effect, "Produce stuff no one wants to buy! It's your social duty to go out of business!" That he wraps this sort of self-evisceration in the mantle of 'individualism' -- which Katz clearly opposes utterly -- is repellant.
Every cent a corporation has was given to it by one of The People, who freely chose to buy their goods. If corporations have 'too much power', then, blame the people who gave them their money -- not the businesses whose only crime is offering goods for sale that anyone is free to choose not to buy.
Signing off, while I sit here by my Dell Computer and guzzle Diet Coke. I think, in honor of Jon, I'll go to McDonalds for lunch today.
Who cares? A vast majority of Americans are too stupid to understand (South Park rules dood!), don't care (but theres food on MY table), or embrace this idea (YAY! Real World Marathon all week!) I think JK would fall under the first category. Of the rest, they either stop watching TV, support their local merchants, and home school their children (GASP, you mean both parents don't WORK?), or they spout drivel over a JonKatz "article."
This post is well thought out and accurate. Therefore, it cannot reflect the opinions of the SlashDot moderators.
I didn't think anything was worse than being forced to install IE5 inside another program's installation the other day. Now I find that there's going to be more articles like this one? This is truly horrible!
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Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
If I recall the plot correctly, the "hero" is a star rollerball player (a cross between roller derby, hockey, and legalized mayhem) on the Houston team who rebells to being a corporate pawn. It is becuase of his "star appeal" and celebrity status that he's considered a threat.
(shades of Napster - until Metallica got involved, this was below the radar of the mainstream press. After, it become a topic on Howard Stern's show.
The case isn't done until the Supreme Court has ruled on it (or refused to deal with it). Microsoft's money may yet prevail, and even if it eventually doesn't, don't you think this case would've been over a lot sooner if they didn't have so much money?
Dunno - a true government has to do a lot of stuff for the citizens (even if it's not treating them real well) which a "normal" corporation doesn't really want to deal with (since it's generally considered "overhead").
Also, I doubt that "normal" governments would appreciate another government appearing solely for the purpose of supporting a single corporation - and "normal" governments have a tendency to enforce their desires using heavy-duty weaponry financed by their taxpayers.
Still, it would make an interesting fiction story - and I could see a large company essentially "buying" the government of a small country, and then exploiting that country for resources & labor. They'd still have to work behind the scenes pretty much, though.
1. Corporations are bottom-line oriented. They want to make money. That means that they will cut cost where they can, make as much money as they can, at the same time pushing the legal envelope as far as they can. The only thing that prevents them from way overcharging is the free-market, unless there's a monopoly or a cartel of some sort.
2. Corporations that control the media are powerful because they are the gatekeepers of information and popular culture. They influence how people think, act, and buy. Until the advent of the Internet, they had very dominant control over the media distribution channels. Media, of course, being things like TV, radio, publishing, CDs, etc. They come between advertisers who want to sell products and/or services to make money and the rest of us. They also have control over editorial content and therefore filter and dictate what we see, hear, and read.
3. AOL Time-Warner is obviously in the category of a media company. When media companies start acting on each other funny things happen. They are competing against each other, but have to follow some fairness rules that the government has set up.
4. What worries me most is that giant megacongloerates that owns several different kinds of media channels that is so powerful that it can afford to coerce its clients (the advertisers, or other media companies) to follow its own set of rules. It can be more powerful than the government because it controls what information goes out to the audience/consumers, it creates the direction for popular culture. In effect, it charges companies to sell their ideas to us, it controls what we see, hear and read, it tells us what we should spend our money on, and we should be glad to pay them for telling us to do this. It even tells us how to think and what to laugh, cry and get mad at.
Corporatism of old is different from corporatism of new, simply because the communication channels have well extended their reach into every household. Media corporatism is a dangerous force to be reckon with, I'd imagine. Now that the Internet and the massive communication infrastructure has gotten up to a good start, I think we as consumers need to be very wary of the media corporatism that will rise.
Good thing we always have subversive elements in the society that prevent use from becoming mindless zombies following the whims of media conglomerates.
One hundred years ago, corporations in America didn't have the same rights as regular citizens. Now they do, and having lots of money, it seems that their rights need to be "protected" more than the American citizens.
That's why we have the DMCA, and why UCITA will probably pass, and why copyrights have been extended retroactively all in the past few years. Does any of this legislation help citizens, or does it help corporations?
I mentioned in a Slashdot forum a month or so ago that Lincoln's words about a nation "of the people, by the people, and for the people" would today have the people replaced by corporations.
We can make a difference by helping organizations that are on our side: Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACLU, etc. We can also make a difference by being the voices of reason to others and expose these things to the light of day.
DCMA? Tell people what it REALLY does.
UCITA? Let them know that it is a bad thing.
Time Warner made a bone-headed move by keeping people from seeing the Millionaire game show... it's exposing the worst of what Jon calls Corporatism to the American public. Hopefully, this won't be the last time, and maybe some of the rest of us bone-headed do-nothing Americans will finally figure out what is really going on.
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"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
I have come up with this vision on my own and I don't want people like John Katz putting this up in his next article making it sound like it came from himself!
It's the "newtype" corporations that will replace these traditional companies. Traditional companies will scramble, but they will fall on their big fat asses. heheh then they will break up into little units and "newtype" will acquire them. "Newtype" companies like mine will begin to surface soon kicking out the bullshit old-establishment companies.. not to mention the lame ass dot-coms out of the business space.
Perhaps these "newtype" corporations will have a heightened sense of consciousness as well... like Amuro Rey hee hee
Griffis
www.rounin.com
HR 1218 -- Teen Endangerment Act Introduced by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-FL, this legislation would make criminals out of anyone other than a parent -- including a grandmother, aunt or older sister -- who helps a teenager travel to another state for an abortion. The bill, officially called the "Child Custody Protection Act," but nicknamed the Teen Endangerment Act, would make it a federal crime for a person to help a young woman travel across state lines to obtain an abortion unless she has already fulfilled the requirements of her home state's parental consent or notification laws. The ACLU opposed the bill, which was passed by a vote of 270 to 159. -- Gee, I wouldn't want to lose the *liberty* to take my 14 yr old neice across state lines to put her baby under the knife of some butcher without telling her parents. -- HR 2 -- Voucher Scheme Introduced by Rep. Dick Armey, R-TX, as an amendment to an education bill, this proposed legislation would have created a national voucher program that would have diverted taxpayer dollars to private and religious schools. By a vote of 166 to 257, the House rejected the Armey voucher scheme. The ACLU opposed the amendment. -- Whew, I still have the *liberty* to have money taken out of my paycheck to fund the failing public daycare^H^H^H^H^H^H^H education system, even though my children are schooled at home. Boy am I glad to have that *liberty*
This post is well thought out and accurate. Therefore, it cannot reflect the opinions of the SlashDot moderators.
--start wrongheaded Katz quote--
This is, the natural, inevitable evolution of an era in which government has abandoned its historic obligations to police the power of business; in which technology and marketing permit companies to grow beyond anything previously possible; in which markets race insanely out of control; and in which globalism has put many companies beyond regulatory oversight or moral restraint.
--end wrongheaded Katz quote--
The problem isn't that Time Warner yanked Disney programming from its network. They have the right to do that. The problem is the network of local governments who have given Time Warner government enforced monopolies to build cable TV infrastructure in their towns and cities. It is a *crime* to start a competing cable company in these jurisdictions.
Corporations without government violence to back them up are held to a customer service discipline in the market. It is only when government helps corporations violate rights by giving monopolies or government fails to enforce the commonly understood laws against various corporations that corporatism becomes possible.
Microsoft is a criminal enterprise. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer should be in jail for what they did to DR-DOS amongst other companies (Palm being the latest victim to come to light) in a criminal RICO case that would have cleaned the stink out of MS without going through the farce of anti-trust. Fraudulent error messages, knowingly fraudulent claims of interoperability, these are Microsofts real crimes and if they had been brought to heel under classic fraud law, we wouldn't be faced with the specter of government intrusion into the day to day computing life of a majority of computer users everywhere.
DB
The reason voters see little choice is because both the Republicans and the Democrats are alike in most ways. They have created a status quo and are loathe to change it.
But there is a real third option, the Libertarian Party. Visit the site, take the World's Smallest Political Quiz and decide for yourself.
From the story:
Walker seems to excuse corporations for their impact on society -- or rather, the story is more about the way individuals can be seduced into relinquishing their privacy (and individualism) by corporations. He correct puts the onus on us, individuals, to raise awareness of the problems and to safeguard our privacy. Yet, Katz has a valid point about the lack of retraints and accountability for global corporations.First, American education is not great. It's good enough to turn out middle managers. And it does an adequate job at babysitting. But anyone that is different gets smacked down. That's cultural -- all an individual can do is home-school. So there's no real opportunity or avenue to protect the freaks as a whole.
Second, politics is and has always been a forum for the lowest common denominator. Politics will tend to homogenize relentlessly until everyone is a member of the lowest common denominator. Perhaps it already has. Individualism will get no protection from government. No government has ever put itself on the line to protect the individual. This is due to the instinct for self-preservation exhibited by all organized entities, be they collections of cells or collections of collections of cells. (The rule is recursive.)
Finally, we get to business. Corporatism is pretty horrible, I agree. But I believe that there are loopholes that can be exploited. The tricky part is to guide the evolution of law and culture so that even if Old Individualism dies, New Individualism can still flourish. What is New Individualism? Frankly, I don't have a complete answer to that. Neither do you, Jon, you just want the Old Individualism back, the one that you think was given to you by God and country and our forefathers. But pining for the past is not the American way. The American Way means that you redefine Individualism so that it can flourish again. It means being faster, smarter, and able to turn on a dime, while the culture-homogenizing corporations lumber along behind you, maybe even right at your heels. Does this sound familiar at all? It should, if you've read books about small business, garage startups, and assorted clue-related manifestos. You see, The American Love Affair with business is unlikely to end soon. But we can be sure that the economy will falter if creativity is completely stifled. Where does this path lead?
Back to business. Because business has a vested interest in preserving individuality and creativity. If all businesses in a given market are the same, no business has a competitive advantage. The smart businesses churn through ideas, trying to find the one that that will keep them on the leading edge. The dumber (and often older) businesses try to squash ideas instead of pouring their resources into smart people. The market, as a result, is in a constant state of flux. As a market ages towards death, the companies eventually turn into red giants, engulfing everything around them. (Coke, Pepsi...)
Within a dying market, there is no room for individualism. The Web came out of nowhere and grew magnificently, on Internet time. Now it's dying on the same Internet time. What is my point here? My point is that if you live on the wired planet, all you can see is the red giants relentlessly expanding towards you (like AOL/Time-Warner). But just because Internet individualism is being squashed does not mean that individualism as a whole is as well. Take corporate individualism. Howard Hughes, Walt Disney, true individuals, even if we didn't always like them. Then, dead time. Then later, a fresh crop like Bill Gates and Michael Dell. Small businesses are growing at a fantastic rate right now, in more than just the technology sector. A small business of one person is still an individual. I always bring up this company, but how about Novica? This company has staked its reputation on the individual. Each of its artists is a small business, a subcontracted seller of goods and services. Novica on its own will grab 0.01% of the market for interior decorations - not a threat. A thousand Novicas, tapping a million individual artists, are a threat indeed.
What I see ultimately occurring is a rebirth and renaissance of individuality. Bruce Sterling's essay on the future, where everyone is in business, comes true. But individuality will have to make itself valuable somehow. This may make you cringe -- perhaps you think art is only art if created without respect to money. Or that an idea or opinion that is paid is absolutely tainted and invalid. We have only to look to the Italian Renaissance to see how false this is. Painters and writers and musicians had to convince their patrons to give them money (or be rich themselves). And yet real art came out of the studios of patronized arts.
In conclusion: Use the past as a guide, but don't try to resurrect it. Bend like the willow before the winds of change, little grasshopper.
Best,
Amanda
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"If children weren't copyrighted, no one would have babies." -- Alex Eulenberg
1. Attempt to make annoying new buzzword; "Corporatism," Check!
2. Sixth-grade writing techniques; Beginning the article with a dictionary definition, Check!
3. Broad generalizations; America is becoming the headquarters of the Corporate Republic, a new kind of political entity that transcends geographic boundaries... Check!
4. Unjustified alarmist language. Everywhere in this new Republic, individualism is on the run. Check!
Bra-vo. It's good to see success has not spoiled Jon, and that he continues to give us more Katz-y goodness with every article.
and as for on-topic-ness, I'd say that I partly agree with the premise that corporations have negative effects on society that should be recognize, but I feel uncompelled to express this idea in broad terms, without specific cases to apply it to.
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share and enjoy
OK, so lets look at this from a slightly different perspective... Government is slow, bloated and basically filled with the kind of people you probably wouldn't want over for dinner. What has the US government given to you? Think about it... Are you getting your money's worth? If not, can you easily drop your current government and go with another one? Do governments have to compete for your tax dollar? No No No and No. Government is the world's greatest monopoly. There is no choice. If you consider your individual vote a choice, you didn't pay much attention in Civics class. You're stuck with your government. There's no customer service number to call if the pot hole you hit everyday to and from work isn't getting fixed. Oh sure, you can call your "representative" in the appropriate legislative body but the most you'll get out of that is a letter in the mail and a deluge of campaign solicitations around election time. Corporations, no matter how big, have to compete for your dollar. You do have a choice. Granted, some choices are the lesser of evils, and "switching" can sometimes be onerous, eg. telephone company (don't discount cellular providers) but never the less there is choice and a "customer service line". So what about the mom and pops driven out by Wal-Mart and Home Depots etc.? This is basic survival of the fittest, pure Darwinism. Its a fact of life. If the only supplier of say, electronic components in your area is a tiny mom and pop operation and Jameco wants to open a mega-store in your area would you want the mom and pop store "protected" or would you welcome Jameco with open arms and pitch a tent to be the first person in the store after it opens?
No, but there should be possibility _of_ conflict. People in society simply are going to have differences of opinion. It's important for people to be able to voice their opinions rather than be told that they're wrong by some higher power (which, being human, is fallible)
Generally monocultures are not a good plan. Only granting freedom of speech to 'approved' groups would create a monoculture of thought. Am I defending what the KKK says? No. Am I defending their right to say it - the same right used by their opponents? Yes.
Censors operate on both sides of the 1 dimensional political spectrum, and for the same reason. They disagree with what the censored people say and think, and believe that the opinions are too dangerous for anyone to even be aware of. How can we oppose the KKK if we don't know what they do? Censorship is generally a very bad plan, and I do not believe that it is ultimately successful either. I would much rather let people think with the brains God gave them than attempt to do it myself.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
In order to sell out, you have to convince "the establishment" that you have something worth buying, so you may be off the hook on that one.
I mean, really, you used to work for CBS (which is currently being swallowed by Viacom or the other way around), but you don't even understand that "must carry, must pay" rules that the broadcasters bribed Congress into passing mean that it's not entirely the fault of Satan's little helpers at Time-Warner cable that Satan's other little helpers at ABC-Disney expect the cable company to pay even more (passing the cost on to cable customers of course) to the local broadcast stations (who use the airwaves that *we* own) to be allowed to deliver to cable subscribers the exact same programming (and advertising) that those subscribers could get for free if they used an antenna instead of paying the cable company to act as an antenna for them.
By the way, whose that pleasant, intelligent chap who plays you on C-SPAN?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The banks control the world because they control the money. By allowing the banks to control your money, you allow then to regulate the value of your money. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was a horrific coup of the US Government, and it went completely unnoticed. The Federal Reserve Act sold the exclusive rights to US Currency to a group of private banking families and remains a private institution to this day. The FED is NOT a government institution. Look for the FED in your local telephone directory and you will not find it in the government section, but in the business section right next to Federal Express (which isn't a part of the US Government any more than the FED). If you're interested in all of the details, please read THE ECONOMIC RAPE OF AMERICA
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This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Flamebait? Lots of anti-Katz prejudice among today's crop of moderators. A condescending or sarcastic response to a personal attack isn't flamebait, guys. It's more in the league of "Here's a clue."
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This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Hear hear, MooKow. Mr. Katz has previously claimed that newspapers are dying. But newspapers have editors, who wouldn't let some of Katz's buzzwords pass without clarification. This is a problem with this otherwise great new democratic media venue of slashdot.
Some buzzword examples:
"techno-driven global economic boom" (so previous economic booms weren't driven by new technologies? How about the steam engine, railway or telegraph?)
"Mass marketing technologies" (TV? radio? plastic packaging? UPC codes? Fiberoptic cables? 8-mm cameras? etc?)
"Disneyfied" (so everything becomes more cartoony? Or people aren't allowed to wear earrings and have to keep their hair cut short? Or everything's 5/6 of its normal size?)
"The Media" (Obviously the monolithic entity conspiring with 'Them' against valiant rebels like Katz, Mulder and Scully)
"Non-conformity" (against this above monolithic entity)
Other words: "Corporate Republic" "The civic system" "moral restraint" "globalism" "ideology" "sanitized", etc. etc. Entire shelves of academic libraries are filled with books devoted to these topics.
I want to come down particularly hard on Katz because I *agree* with many of his statements. But you're *wasting my time*, Mr. Katz: tell us something we don't already know. So the U.S. is a 'corporate republic.' So what?
You plaintively wonder if anyone's even listening at the end of your piece. No more 'filler' articles like this, please, or you'll soon have the answer to this question.
If TimeWarner is willing to do this in meatspace, what would they be willing to do when they get more cyberspace influence as part of the AOL consortium?
Got a beef? Plug a name into the Bizarre Rumour Generator!
... invert the sense of what you're attacking.
"Beneath its hope-filled surface, it subliminally encourages people to put themselves ahead of others, to work against them to better oneself, and to treat every opportunity in life as a means of making more money for yourself."
Okay lets invert that:
- people should be encouraged to put themselves down and conform to the crowd
- people should remain frozen and not seek to better themselves
- people should treat every opportunity as a means to lose money
Now you come to see the hateful evil of this stance. The essence of "left" is coercion. Your property isn't yours, it's ours to own for our good. You don't own yourself. You exist to sacrifice yourself for all our wishes and needs.
Don't grow, it will make the stunted people feel their smallness.
Don't own. Everything you have we want, though we have nothing to give you in exchange. But you must esteem our lack as a virtue and hate your plenty as a vice.
Don't produce. But if you must produce, you may'nt have anything you've created, you must sacrifice yourself, your effort, your property to those who can't produce.
Don't think, it will place you above the stupid people. And who are you to tell them they are wrong?
Don't judge, what makes you so moral you can call us immoral?
Don't be good, or you will expose our evil
Think about it.
Think for a moment about a corporation. The law says it's a person but has none of the responsibilities of a person. It is potentially immortal. And by its very charter it can have no conscience and no consideration for ANYTHING except maximizing profit. An officer of a corporation has (and I quote) "A Fiduciary duty to maximize stockholder equity." This means that any action, any at all, which does not serve to increase profit to the greatest degree possible is not permissible. Also, look at how the popular press views The Market. It has replaced the Deity. The Market is omnipotent; nothing can withstand it. It is omniscient; if there is a need or a desire The Market will know about it. It is omnibenevolent; if The Market is allowed to do exactly what it wants everyone will be perfectly happy. I used to be an economist before I realized just how flawed the (pseudo) science behind the field was
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
Now, I don't particularly like what AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, or any other media conglomerate, but I have some respect for them. Like it or not, Steve Case, Bill Gates, and Andrew Grove are excellent businessmen, and I'd rather not see them dragged out into the street and shot quite yet.
Here's something to understand, though; the people on these lists, the programmers, web developers, computer scientists, and generally smart people - we're not an easy market to capture. This is why the SciFi channel isn't carried on basic cable in a lot of states, despite the people around here who adore science fiction. The market that *is* easy to capture is the one we aren't, and AOL and the corporations are doing a wonderful job of capturing it. And, while we may not like it, we're not who they want.
And we're not in any real danger as people, I don't think. Consider for a moment, Jon, trying to take this to its final extreme. Do you really think that your friends, family, or even just a well-meaning stranger won't come and help you if some businessman comes raging into your home searching your house accusing you of whatever crime he cares to?
Nor as a niche. Bear in mind, if we don't like it, AOL has a tough time running without the resource of human intellect. Sure, they might be able to run the business, but these outfits need web developers and programmers. They can't be too careless, or if they are, I, for one, would like to know why.
On a similar note, I haven't heard word of Andover, Red Hat, or the FSF being bought by the "corporations" - and I'll be rather surprised if the FSF ever gets bought out, because it's an ideological thing, not a business one, despite whatever money might be gained from it. Corporatism is a danger, but you're forgetting that these corporations are being run by individuals, just as mortal as you and I. I don't think Gates wants Case beating his door down, and if he does, this trend won't stick around long enough to say goodbye. I really don't think we're in critical danger here.
Now my charms are all o'erthrown, and what strength I have's mine own... - Shakespeare, "The Temepest"
Now, ask yourself why you mindlessly take up his battle cry without asking why.
Because like the vast majority of "Americans," he's brainwashed by constant propaganda from the "American" corporate media.
Bottom line: He's just another braying jackass American.
So ask yourselves this -- why would an ex-CIA Director be pissed off at a group defending American freedom and liberty? ... Oh, right. Duh
Could it be that ex-presidente Shrub is opposed to freedom? Or is "freedom" spelled "freehdom" (the F.B.I. director is named Louis Freeh, for those of you who live a sheltered life)?
You continue on here on Slashdot, despite being beseiged round about by people who could care less about what political termites are eating away at the very wood of the log cabin that is their basic freedoms. They won't care until it comes crashing down on their heads, and they won't even remember you telling them they had a termite problem. You walk the tightrope between a visionary and Chicken Little, and that is an extremely courageous thing to do. Our country was founded by men who did just that.
However, today, I have to take exception to something you said, which could have the effect of helping to unravel your whole cause. The quote is here:
Beware! This is a very dangerous tactic you are suggesting. Even though it does look like the right thing to do, and it accurately depicts what is going on today, redefining Corporatism, even using this accurate new definition, is exactly one of the things that George Orwell warned us about in 1984. Specifically, you are suggesting that we resort to Newspeak. This tactic will eventually come back to haunt you, because everyone will want to do it, and justify it. Newspeak tactics is a critical pillar in the kind of oppressive society that you and I both fear.
What am I saying, they already are doing it! Grab yourself an old Webster's dictionary and look up any number of definitions and compare them to some in a modern Webster's dictionary. You won't even recognize the two from each other!
Jon Katz, please take the safe road and place your definition under a new word or conjugation of words. I would suggest Neo Corporatism, or Hyper Corporatism, or Neo-feudalism. But the definition of Corporatism has already been set in stone. Thanks.
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63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Thanks for not having a link to some religious propaganda at the end of your post. I was afraid for a second, there.
:-)
Happiness does not come from material wealth, you're right on. However, I do wish I could afford a bigger hard drive to store my band's mp3's on... Oh no, I've been brainwashed by geeks! I crave GEAR!
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Here is a great essay from Adbusters about the history of corporations in America:
http://adbusters.org/magazine/28/usa.html
I really appreciate McDonald's.
I'm not saying that I eat their grease-filled foods (well, not often, anyway), or that I like their decor.
I appreciate them because they provide an absolute baseline, below which any restaurant, to survive, must exceed.
I eat out a lot, but almost always at independently-owned restaurants. Because every home-owned restaurant knows that people could have spent their money on McDonald's, they all have to beat Mickie D's in some way.
Today's lunch was at a sit-down 'pho' restaurant whose goal is to be faster, cheaper, and better than McDonald's. Know what? They succeed beautifully. I left with a stomach full of rice, veggies, and a little meat for $5.
Corporatism at its worst will define a 'bottom line', below which no company can survive. Take operating systems: Microsoft's monopoly gives us a bottom line, below which any operating system cannot fall. In order for a competing operating system to survive, it must exceed Microsoft in some way, either in stability (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, etc.) or in ease of use (Macintosh).
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
What it's all coming down to in America is we are choosing one dollar = one vote over one person = one vote.
You seem to be confusing 'corporatism' with 'capitalism'. These terms are not synonymous. Readers interested in individualism might wish to check out Reason magazine for another perspective.
If I sold out, I did a bad job. E-mail me and I'll invite you to my house. Worst sell out in history. But I see you are reading, painful tho it is for you. Poor baby.
Money isn't the only thing that one might sell out for. One can also sell out for the opportunity to feel that one is somehow important or influential, or that one is a heroic white knight defending all the poor little disenfranchised geeks from the big mean jocks.
Your closing line 'But I see you reading[...]' tips your hand: You're a whore for attention, not money. Of course, you've done a poor job selling out by that standard, too (unless you're one of those pests who enjoys negative attention as much as positive). But the fact that someone has done a poor job selling out doesn't make them any less a sellout, or any less contemptible for it.
Someone else here said it best: Unjustified alarmist words.
Notice how everyone's got an angle on how the world's going to hell? And somehow it all relates back to corporations. Hm. That's a shocking coincidence.
Of course, you wouldn't see these sorts of problems if corporations weren't so tied up in governments. But do people talk about separating the two? No, they talk about restricting corporations, beating them, bashing them to a bloody pulp, because (see above), they're the cause of every human problem, from the ozone layer to the necessity of viagra. (Don't laugh, I once read an article by a maoist who said that sexual frustration are caused by the "alienation" of capitalism.)
Again, another shocking coincidence. Why, it lends me to believe there's some sinister work afoot.
Governments build up monopolies they like, and smash down monopolies they dislike. They provide incentives to join markets and disincentives. Despite the amazing market power some companies wield, it is insignificant next to the power of big brother. Yet companies, the willing and unwilling pawns of the government master, are the ones who get the beat. Why?
The difference between a government and a corporation is that a corporation can offer you a choice, a government can force it upon you. Companies have advertising; governments have guns.
Honestly, which is the more dangerous weapon?
bry m.
"I'm not anti-government, government's anti-me" -- Mike Muir
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
And as long as the mass public is satisified with the bread and circuses they get, little is likely to change. Historians will probably call it a rebellion when it does.
Corpratism is really about multinationals. In my opinion, companies who's reach is limited to a single country, no matter how large, very much operate at the whim of that country (unless I guess they have the option of going somewhere else, which makes them pseudo-multinational).
;-) and the whole world is at risk.
The problem with the multinationals is not that they're businesses, but that they can play countries off against each other. "You won't let us operate tax free with slave labour? Fine, we'll go somewhere else that does?" "Your people won't buy our cheaper products because they aren't made in your country and we don't put anything back in to the local economy? Fine, we'll go elsewhere?" Frankly, I can't blame the multinationals for doing what they do: they are essentially playing by the rules that have been set for them.
The thing is, on the political front, people are so afraid of "the New World Order" and concerned about protecting the "sovereignty of nations", that the notion of having multinational governmental bodies with real teeth (i.e. enforcement power) is just not possible these days. I have no idea why people think it's ok to have multinational companies but not multinational governmental bodies. It doesn't make any sense to me.
The truth is, the sovereignty of nations is being continually reduced, and without some form of body who's got power beyond that scope, you just create a vacuum. Instead of doing something about it, countries are sadly trying to shore up their "sovereignty" and at the same time allowing the corporations to play a "divide-and-conquer" game with them.
Countries try to limit access to the Internet. They try to establish strong trade tarifs. They try to impose "cultral protection" laws. The fact is, there are lots of things that are global. Here's some basic examples:
1) The Environment. Until countires accept the fact that they have negligable control over the environment in their net territories, they will forever be stuck doing piecemeal environmental controls which probably have more impact on their neighbors than on themselves.
2) Nuclear Arms. Trying to limit the know how about how to assemble one of these is a joke. Currently you can control access to nuclear materials to a limited degree, but there is no reason to imagine this will continue forever. Under current conditions, all it takes is one nuclear power's political/police/military structure collapsing (and we know that never happens right?
3) Work Conditions. The unions are some of the biggest opponents to "big government", and yet they know damn well it's increasingly easy to have work done anywhere in the world (i.e. whichever country will make the most concessions).
4) Human rights abuses. Serbia is a wonderful example of this: massive human rights abuses can occur so long as you can play off different nations against each other. Imagine if a serial killer could be certain roam free as long as he could keep the various police departments in the world fighting amongst themselves.
I could go on.
Americans should look back to their history. They'll remember a time when some foreign nationals showed up on the doorsteps of the natives of this land. The natives were divided into small warring tribes with no single voice to represent their collective needs. The foreign nationals simply executed a convincing "divide-and-conquor" strategy that allowed them to commit agregious offenses while ensuring minimal retaliation. Europeans just need to look back 60 years to a leader who was able to commit shameless acts while various other nations quibbled about and worried about protecting their own back yard.
Hey, international governmental bodies scare the heck out of me too. National governments do too. The thing is, they scare me a lot less than the alternatives.
sigs are a waste of space
The way I see it, we the people (plural) have a say in the US govt through our votes. Similarly, we the people have a say in corporate power through our use of dollars. The US government helps prevent the rise of monopolies so that the people can choose what company they spend their dollars with. You know how you get the govt you deserve? Well, you get the corporations you deserve also. Things may seem ominous and all, but even if multinational corporations get really powerful, it's still at some level got to be at the consent of the people spending their dollars with them. The depressing thing is that people seldom seem to let broader ethical societal concerns affect their spending decisions. i.e. all those small shops driven out of business by the Walmarts. Some people may pay lip service to mourning the loss of the small shops, but obviously not enough are putting their money where their mouth is.
Sounds rather good to me,then again,I'm not a hard-core capitalist ;).Is this Social Democracy?I'm not quite sure.If it is could somebody bring over here to the states?
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Etot "sig" byit pisyat v Russki!
(35.0% Slashdot nezdorovi.)
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Thus Spake ComradePenguin
That's close. Remember that Katz did say that this would be the first in a series. This was on the Coporate Republic so according the Civilization CTP timeline, Katz next articles should be "How a technocracy hurts women and minorities especialy children, Children, CHILDREN", "Good Reasons for an ecotopia (aka Save our Children), and "Creating a Virtual Democracy" (although it will seem like a socialist state from Katz's description) like you said.
Or something like that.
Indeed, it is becomming increasingly difficult to distinguish between corporations and nations as we enter the new millenium. For example, think of that great nation-state from antiquity: Greece. Greece's approximate GDP in 1998 was $143B produced by about 10M citizens; contrast this with General Motors which had $189B of revenue last year with corporate assets nearly twice that of the annual output of our Hellenic friends. GM employs 0.38M people directly with "more than 260 major subsidiaries, joint ventures, and affiliates around the world".
If one were to judge from bumper stickers, it seems clear that people feel far more strongly about their car company than they do their country. Think of it: GM gives me a job, Disney provides me with a fasimilie of culture, WAL-MART provides me with all my stuff, what has my country done for me lately?
My recommendation? The United States Government better get themselves one hell of a PR firm if they want to survive.
Oh really? And which people are those? The ones who own stock, of course! And to a lesser extent the consumers, although the arrogance of corporations towards their consumers can sometimes be staggering. Nonetheless, corporations have no need to serve any people other than their shareholders and consumers! In particular, if, as is increasingly the case, the workers who produce a good are not the same people who buy it (frequently these days they don't even live in the same country), there is no reason whatsoever for the corporation to protect the interests of the workers. All it has to do is keep them alive and working, and frequently it doesn't even have to do that, it can just go somewhere else!
Furthermore, even assuming that things homogenize to the extent that everybody is a consumer of every major corp, corporatism (in the sense of corps wielding political power) still poses a serious threat to our notions of liberty and equality. This is because corps care about money not people. Think about it. The people whom you claim are served so slavishly by corps must be rich people. How else do they have the money to "vote with their dollars"? Thus corporations will always favor the interests of the rich over those of the poor, simply because the rich can afford to buy more of their products. Of course, our existing system of pseudo-politics serves the same purpose, but at least it was designed on the principle of equality, one man one vote (and thank God the sexist bias of this statement has been abandoned!). What you are proposing sounds to me like some sort of "corporate democracy" in which the people's interests are supposedly represented because of their economic influence over corps. But in practice this will always amout to government of, by, and for the rich.
Moreover, I question your wordplay. "Individualism" and "communisim" are nothing alike. Actually, "corporatism" is much more similar to communism. In communism, the needs of the individual are subordinated to those of the state. The state is held to represent "the people" so completely that the interests of the people and of the state are held to be identical. In corporatism, the needs of the individual are subordinated to the needs of the corporation. Via the argument you've presented, people claim that corporations represent the people so totally that the interests of corporations are equated with those of the people. Sounds kinda like communism to me. Individualism, on the other hand, holds that the freedom of the individual takes precedence over the interests of any collective body, corporate or governmental or religious or whatever. Katz isn't against success. What he seems to object to is the success of a large group of people at the expense of individual freedom and rights. There's a difference.
To some extent, we all have to be individualists, because we are all individuals. People can be pretty enthusiastic about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the one, until they are the one in question.
"--Yes, we're all different! --I'm not" --Monty Python, "The Life of Brian"
Now M.Abdera please go back and logically analyze your reponse to the AC post. Please inform me and all those who read this thread how your are not espousing the very views that the AC was pointing out.
From what I can tell, you have only 2 examples against the ACLU, both actually supporting the AC's hypothesis that the ACLU strictly follows it charter. Example one being a direct infringment on a person's right to travel from state to state. The other example being the right to discriminate through a convuluted scheme of 'school vouchers.' These both seem to be excellant points in favor of the AC's argument, while being rather pointless on your part, as with the second example showing that a majority, almost 2/3, of the house voted against a 'liberty' I believe you were wanting. Obviously the ACLU must be emensely powerful to sway such a large swath of the assembly, a feat many very powerful lobbying firms would love to enjoy, or most thought it was a very bad idea. Draw your conclusions, but at least keep them within the limits of the facts.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
"Any society which will sacrifice a little freedom for a little order will get and deserve neither"--Thomas Jefferson
"The more man smoke herb, the more Babylon fall."--Bob Marley
Very good point, but I believe M.Pe1rxq was pointing out that suffixing democracy with any noun or adjective indicatates the group that gets equal votes. Thus Corporate Democracy gets equal votes for corporations. We really aren't a Democracy (notice no preceeding modifiers) and there are so very few cases that when there is, it is usually called a True Democracy. This being since Democracy has been watered down and worshipped so much to lose its meaning.
We (USofAers) live in live a Constitutional Democratic Republic, lots of modifiers there. Really the problem is corporations were meant to always be less than a full citizen, but have moved thier standing to be more than a citizen. This 'super citizenship' they now enjoy is totally against the idea of CDR (gotta love that abbrev.) The first step I would like taken, is for Corporations to be knocked down to citizen level.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
Most of the nonsense Katz spews in this article has been adequately responded to by other posters-- notably MrLizard. It's a shame there is so much nonsense, because he's made some good points on this issue; I thought his expose of Pinkerton was terrific, and terrifying.
However, there are a couple of things he says that are just wrong and need to be responded to. First, he states that "Though H.L. Mencken brilliantly and savagely spoofed organized religion and politics a half-century ago, it would be nearly impossible to do so now in any public forum outside the Net."
What kind of a rock has Mr. Katz been living under? Has he ever read Florence King's column in _National Review_, or *anybody*'s columns in _Liberty_ or _Reason_? (Or, if your political persuasions run the other way, _Z_ or _In These Times_ or _Mother Jones_ or _The Nation_). There is at least as much diversity of opinion expressed in print in America as there was in Mencken's time. True, Mencken wouldn't get on television today, but in his time there was no television-- and he wrote for little magazines, _The Smart Set_ and _The American Mercury_, hardly the mainstream media of his day. Television is increasingly irrelevant anyway-- which is why the example of Time Warner pulling ABC rings so hollow; nobody, but nobody, got denied any important information or any viewpoint because of that.
Secondly, he says that "the very idea of regulation of corporate growth has vanished as a civic idea" and "government has abandoned its historic obligations to police the power of business." This, after the Microsoft lawsuit, and the lawsuits against the tobacco companies, and the lawsuits against the gun companies? This, when the number of regulations in the Federal Register increases every year? When has government ever done *more* to regulate and restrict the operations of large businesses?
Here I think Katz is a victim of socialist government-school history. We are taught that the Progressives and New Dealers were heroic crusaders against the power of big business. In fact, all they were crusading for was their own political power. Regulations have always been co-opted by large businesses to protect their market domination against upstart competitors by creating barriers to entry into markets.
And that's the big point Katz is missing here. The problem is not corporate power; it's political power. Political power that corporations use as a club to beat their competitors and preserve their monopolies; political power fueled by the immense amount of government expenditures, from schools to prisons to construction projects to sugar subsidies to bombers. If such power is strong here, and getting stronger, it is stronger still already in the Leviathan States of Europe (as other posters have noted). What we must do to take away that power is *not* to fight the corporations-- it is to fight the government.
Is Metallica the ultimate symbol of musical excellence?
Is a toxic waste dump the ultimate symbol of environmental excellence?
Is a pedophile the ultimate symbol of childcare excellence?
Sorry man- you are _crazy_ to think as you do. Enjoy the cancer you'll eventually get from blindly consuming anything your fed (you _do_ smoke, don't you? The ultimate symbol of selfwill excellence), and enjoy the social cancer of the corporations you so love... while it lasts.
This article is published on a website that derives money from banner-ads. It draws traffic. It makes money. Slashdot is a news site. A for-profit news site. Owned by a publicly traded(?) company called Andover.Net. Andover.Net is a corporation too. Granted it's not as large as the AOL/Time Warner bit, but it's still out there to make dough. Now, knowing all this, I have to ask myself: Why was this article posted? It seems plain as day to me that whenever something like this is posted, a thousand people come in here and read it. They also (presumably) read the banner ads. Slashdot makes /money/ from these articles. Kind of ironic, isn't it, that a news site that is out to make a buck publishes stories about the 'evils' of corporatiss in order to draw traffic, to make money? I submit to you all, that you are being misled. You are being led on by a company out to make a buck. They publish stories like this to make money, nothing more. Am I the only one who has noticed that this site is /full/ of controversial subjects? Controversial subjects that draw a lot of traffic? This site has plenty of opportunity to betray your trust in its accuracy and motives. Who knows what is going on behind the scenes? And they even go to the point of calling corporations 'evil'! Slashdot is so hypocritical, it makes me sick.
If you don't like the way the world is, and I certainly don't, then fight back. The first thing to do is to think about what you really
want the system to be like and then find others who can agree with at least parts of what you want it to be like and work with them to
iron out a real plan for an alternate system. Then look for ways to make it reality. At this point I think it's to late to clean the system
up with small nudges to the government. We've let it go to far and now the world is controlled by a nameless devil. The only way to strike
back is to resist the enemy in mass groups. We must first realize that we are the enemy every time we watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, use
MS Office, buy from Wal-mart, etc. Every day when you go to work and you help build up a corporation you are contributing to the problem.
Every time you vote for someone that you don't think will really do what you want them to you give them more power over your life. We've
become lazy and now we as a people are suffering because of it.
Now here's some of my suggestions on what to replace the system with.. I don't think we could cleanly destroy the idea of money so I'd
rather add to the idea.. by reordering a tax system that goes from dirt poor to filthy rich so that anybody undex the median gets extra
money from the government and anyone over the media pays money to the government to fund this. This is somewhat like socialism except that
it could be dropped on top of our capitalist system.. it's a highbreed of socialism and capitalism in fact.. that strives to make everyone
'mostly' equal finiancially. With this system I'd grant an offset by which people could contribute less or collect more depending on their
trust relationship with society. Essentially I'd allow every citizen to vote for every other citizen so they can define how much they
trust that person to look after the collective good of the society as a whole. Those with more trust would have more resources they could
expend. The trust factor could go up and down both so if someone misused their resources they could lose access to them. That means if the
DOJ found Bill Gates guilty of running a monopoly people could decide on their own to vote down their trust on Bill Gates and suddenly his
$100 billion would be gone, assimilated into the society as a whole. For practical purposes I'd create a short-circuit system on such a
trust system so that it could only go up or down by a given amount within a given time period so that the system would be harder to con or
crash. So realisticlly Mr. Gates would likely find himself the controller of a mere $50 billion rather than lossing it all in one day. This
would help keep the system stable. Rather than having elected officials I'd have the entire system democratic. Every citizen would be
required to be a voter. In each election the system would select voters from the appropiate areas randomly to vote in the election rather
than having everyone vote. This would keep daily life from getting spammed down by voting as well as making it harder for campaigners to
focus their money and media on the voters to convince them to vote their way. Anyone who did not vote would lose trust points as they are
not looking out for the best interest of the society.
This system would not be perfect but it'd be better as it'd keep any one group from easily running away with it. It'd of course require
technology to exist, but then so does our current corporate republic. The primary forces in our current society that allow it to be ran off
with is the abilty to control so much wealth in one place rather than dispensing it to all the people. Also the extreme bloat of our
government has made it an easy target. Government really should not feel the need to take care of everything. Given enough resources to
live most people can take care of themselves. We started out as farmers and thinkers who forged a world where we could be free. Lets not
give it away to a minority that doesn't care for us as a whole just because they have stolen the most magic crystals. We can still work and
think and that is why all the money in the world will not let them make us slaves unless we allow them to.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
However, I don't tend to see "corporatism" as something new and surprising, nor is it all that surprising that it should arise in the supposedly individualistic and egalitarian US.
Corporatism is simply the natural and perhaps inevitable conclusion of the rise of the Bourgoisie (sp?), which has been going on for centuries. History books are quick to point out that the rise of the democratic republic was made possible by the shift in wealth from the Nobles to the Bourgoisie. However, they also have a tendency to pretend that the Bourgoisie, in their enlightened benevolence, created the republic in the interests of the people, in order to prevent evil monarchial oppression from ever happening again. Any cynic can see why this is obviously not the case. Power is always an end in and of itself. In the history of class struggle, one class displaces another as the ruling class in order to gain and hold power for itself, never to actually put an end to oppression (and yes, I am drawing on Marx somewhat for this. Marx was right about a lot of things. Live with it).
The problem that the textbooks tend to miss is, the democratic republic, at least in its idealistic form, is not the ideal environment to secure the hegemony of the Bourgoisie. It was a step in the right direction for them, since it takes power away from the Nobles without completely giving it to the people, and it creates a power vacuum which is only too easy for those with money to fill. However, it has several significant disadvantages as well. It gives the people a voice, however weak. It creates this enormously powerful entity (government) which, though largely under corporate control, still has to respond to influences other than market pressures (horror of horrors!). Governments create safety regulations and worker's rights laws and environmental protections and all that cumbersome stuff. This is why so many corps have been migrating to countries with weaker governments. Thus I think that the democratic republic is becoming more of a hinderance than a help, and will probably be phased out at some point.
I think that the Bourgeoisie created the democratic republic in the first place to make corporations possible. Corporations can't even exist without government charter, but our eighteenth century merchants found monarchies to be too powerful and difficult to control. By creating a government of, by and for the (rich) people and ousting the nobles from power, they created a good (but not completely ideal) environment for them to sieze and hold power. Now that their power base is secure (and you can be assured that it is secure. Corporatism is much more entrenched than Katz seems to realize.), I think they will begin phasing out governments entirely, since once a corporation has enough power it no longer really needs a government to legitemize it. When seen this way, our good old democratic republic seems to be nothing more than a bridge between monarchy and corporatism.
We must remember that monarchism ended because the rich realized that the real power is wielded by those with money, not by those who hold land and title. This fact hasn't changed. A ruling class doesn't really care what system it rules under, so long as it rules. I think the recent "globalization" trend really amounts to nothing more than the rich finally deciding to take us off the training wheels of democratic republic, and shift us over to their preferred form of government, global corporatism. This will finally (and perhaps irrevocably) place all power in the hands of the super-rich. The problem is, by the time we've realized it, it's already too late. Look around. The deed is done, and all that's left is to make it official.
"Old pirates yes they rob I; Sold I to the merchant ships..." --Bob Marley
Regarding the 'war' between ABC and Time/Warner: When governments reach a point where they can't resolve their conflicts, the result is often bombs dropped on each others' populations. When these two corportations reached that point, the result was missed television programs. My god!!
Ideology has been repeatedly shown to be a profoundly lousy tool for comprehending the world.
Your utopia of "powerful gov controling corps in the name of the masses" is ideology, disconnected from any reality.
Our theory of gov, when the Constitution was created and for about 50 years thereafter, was:
a) We, the People, are sovereign.
b) We sovereigns create the gov, and allocate it limited, enumerated powers.
c) We People have Rights which pre-exist any gov.
Within this context, corps are easy: If you don't want to work for them, don't. If you don't want to buy their products, don't.
But, of course, that puts a price on your conscience, since alternatives to Nike may be less good/more expensive/less convenient.
And so, to avoid paying that price, you wish to grab some of the illegitimate gov power to make Nike do what you want. Nike, in defense, wishes to grab/purchase some of the illegitimate gov power to foil you.
A pox on both your houses.
In a system which prevents people like you from trying to use the gov to 'do good', we don't have any particular problems with corporations.
You completely avoided the impossibility of programming for an open environment with laws. Didn't understand programming, open environments, chaos, computational complexity,
Lew
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
They are not supporting both sides of an arguement so much as they are supporting the right of both sides to take part in an arguement. Subtle but big difference. -N
"All rise for the Corporate Anthem..."
Wouldn't want any heros to show up and stand for individuality now would we?
I think a valid hope is that corporations will drown in their own bullshit.
The corporate entity I work for has decided that text paging is just so wonderfully convenient they expect me to pay attention to 25 to 30 informational (non-action) pages per day, plus the four or less action pages (pages that deserve attention and require actually doing something...). I turn the alert audible when I am on call and to silent all other times.
When you place enough noise on a communication channel that channel becomes useless. Spam makes e-mail less useful. The ILOVEYOU virus wipes out entire email exchanges by placing an overload of NOISE...
Half the crap I get as corporate communications is entirely useless. I have managers who feel productive in meetings (what the f*ck is that? Meetings are a barely necessary evil to decide what productive things to do later - after the f*cking meeting).
The corporate "culture" I work in is so smugly superior and self-satisfied ("it's not easy, you know, to get hired here at XYZ...") it's enough to make you puke.
But I also hoped that network TV would be forced to improve in quality by cable and satellite - instead there seems to have been the spread of even more bland product...
TV is a vast marketing entity with no art, no soul, and 34 minutes of programming per hour... I grew up with TV, but at that time they were just beginning to perfect advertising and targeting. My kids are so thoroughly targetted they don't even see it.
And the game shows - Marry a Millionaire? What WAS that? Greed! Greater Greed! Stupendous Greed! I am going (I swear) to bring in a "new" idea called "Beat the Reaper" including pitching "Symptom Six" as one of the features. And do these guys just miss completely the satire in "The Running Man" (one of the best tongue-in-cheek Schwartzenegger films). In the background of one of the scenes was a guy climbing a rope trying to grab cash and avoid being eaten by sharks...
I was alarmed at the Pinkerton WAVE concept - the idea of "let's just make the money, if we don't someone else will...". No one actually EVER consults their conscience as to what should be done. Look at George "here-we-go-again" Bush, with the largest fund raising pre-primary pot ever (70 Million? And that was just what showed...) - and he is too un-seeing to even realize that that isn't a good thing (raising tons of corporate $$$$)... And now he is a reformer????
I think you are quite right to raise a warning flag here, Jon. I would hope you do keep this up. Enough ranting, got to go laugh at the MS Exchange admins rebuilding their servers after ILOVEYOU finished 'em...
Geeee!!! Sounds like big bad ole communism (tm) to me!!!
--
Here's my mirror
"All rise for the Corporate Anthem..."
Wouldn't want any heros to show up and stand for individuality now would we?
I think a valid hope is that corporations will drown in their own bullshit.
The corporate entity I work for has decided that text paging is just so wonderfully convenient they expect me to pay attention to 25 to 30 informational (non-action) pages per day, plus the four or less action pages (pages that deserve attention and require actually doing something...). I turn the alert audible when I am on call and to silent all other times.
When you place enough noise on a communication channel that channel becomes useless. Spam makes e-mail less useful. The ILOVEYOU virus wipes out entire email exchanges by placing an overload of NOISE...
Half the crap I get as corporate communications is entirely useless. I have managers who feel productive in meetings (what the f*ck is that? Meetings are a barely necessary evil to decide what productive things to do later - after the f*cking meeting).
The corporate "culture" I work in is so smugly superior and self-satisfied ("it's not easy, you know, to get hired here at XYZ...") it's enough to make you puke.
But I also hoped that network TV would be forced to improve in quality by cable and satellite - instead there seems to have been the spread of even more bland product...
TV is a vast marketing entity with no art, no soul, and 34 minutes of programming per hour... I grew up with TV, but at that time they were just beginning to perfect advertising and targeting. My kids are so thoroughly targetted they don't even see it.
And the game shows - Marry a Millionaire? What WAS that? Greed! Greater Greed! Stupendous Greed! I am going (I swear) to bring in a "new" idea called "Beat the Reaper" including pitching "Symptom Six" as one of the features. And do these guys just miss completely the satire in "The Running Man" (one of the best tongue-in-cheek Schwartzenegger films). In the background of one of the scenes was a guy climbing a rope trying to grab cash and avoid being eaten by sharks...
I was alarmed at the Pinkerton WAVE concept - the idea of "let's just make the money, if we don't someone else will...". No one actually EVER consults their conscience as to what should be done. Look at George "here-we-go-again" Bush, with the largest fund raising pre-primary pot ever (70 Million? And that was just what showed...) - and he is too un-seeing to even realize that that isn't a good thing (raising tons of corporate $$$$)... And now he is a reformer????
I think you are quite right to raise a warning flag here, Jon. I would hope you do keep this up. Enough ranting, got to go laugh at the MS Exchange admins rebuilding their servers after ILOVEYOU finished 'em... And, Christ /., get some f*cking power in your servers, this is so slow it's pitiful...
Ever considered that he just wants you to think
about issues? Instead all 80% of the people here do is rehash the same old Katz-prejudices and slag him off because he's not technical enough, or he's not a geek. We judge others because they profile us, but we're just as bad. I often don't agree with Katz, but at least he makes me think about certain things I wouldn't otherwise be thinking about, whether it'd be geek profiling or corporatism or intellectual freedom. Is the art of debate lost on you? Slinging insults and taunts is not going to make you look better, nor will it help you convince people that you're right.
Being geeks does not give us the right to be arrogant, because there will always be someone who's smarter, more technical or better than you.
Humility is indeed a virtue.
--
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
Full Time Idiot and Miserable Sod
Nothing is real but the pain
Welcome my son, welcome to the machine
Where have you been?
It's alright we know where you've been
You've been in the pipeline, filling in time...
That's ok Jon, you're only 25 years behind on this story :)
Jack
Probably not.
If you're desperate enough, or pissed off enough, or crazy enough to try though (or if you're just curious to see how others plan on getting crushed) then comment on this:
www.macrocomponent.org/foundation.html
'The core of individualism . . . is refusing to mind your own business.'
Except where you make it your business to be an individual.
First, The ACLU opposes using tax payer money to fund religious schools since this is a pretty clear cut violation of the establishment clause, i.e. there are not enough students for a Budist school, so all the budist children must go to christian school.
Scond, I suspect many of the people who are involved with the ACLU oppose taking tax payer money frm public school to pay for any private schools or home schools (since this would harm poor children). This is puerly a money and quality of education for the poor issue, i.e. a poor parent might not have the qualifications or ability for home schooling. I do not know the ACLU's official position on this issue, but it will revolve around the poor having a right to a half way decent education.
Anyway, I'm shure most people at the ACLU like the idea of home schooling, but do not think that the government should pay for non-standard parts of it. The government should give home schoolers some help (text books, classes for parents, etc), but should not give them funds which could be spent in way which violate the establisment clause.
BTW> There are some pretty good evidence that home schooling is the best alternative when the parent is sufficently educated).
BTW2> The only solution to the "privatize" education debate is to require schools to offer "partial schooling options," i.e. parents could send their kids to diffrent schools for diffrent classes. Example: I can send my kid to public school for most classes, but send them to a religious school for a couple of classes (at my expence). This soltion prevents the public and private schools from running an "ideological monopoly." The private schools can not force kids to take religon classes and can not force parents to pay for all ofthe tuition when the parent only wants their kid to take a couple of classes at the school. Public schools can not prevent kids from taking religiohn classes.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Many state chapters of the ACLU have supported the NRA and gun rights. The national ACLU dose not defend gun rights for a couple of reasons, but this big reason is:
The ACLU uses the legal system to defend us from the legal system. Gun rights are an extra-legal part of the constitution. i.e. gun rights exist to allow us to kill our political leaders when things get really really bad.. the courts and people who use them tend to frown uppon this type of problem resolution.
It's not that gun rights are not importent. They are very importent (sometiems you just need a revolution). it's that gun rights are not soemthing the ACLU can defend by explaining them to a court. It's not necissarily something the ACLU can really understand (they are lawyers after all).
Anyway, you should not critisize the ACLU too much for not supporting gun rights. They are doing what they know how to do.. and they are doing a lot of good (gun rights are only one amendment out of many). If you care about gun rights you should join the NRA (and try to explain them to your more liberal friends).
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Interesting that all those left wingers are all from America. Perhaps it is only "evil America" that gives them the right to voice their opinions, no matter how misguided they are.
Pardon my blunt response, but you're a fucking idiot.
For starters, there's groups like the CNT and FAI, which are anarcho-syndicalist and anarchist-communist trade unions, respectively. They are both based in France and Spain. And what about the Zapatista National Liberation Army, a (to some degree) collectivist anarchist federation fighting for freedom in Mexico?
I could go on, but the truth is that bottom-up politics will exist for as long as top-down structures exist.
Stop listening to Rush Limbaugh, stop being one of the mindless masses.
Michael Chisari
mchisari@usa.net
What the fsck are you talking about?
I think YOU are crazy for even equating individual ambition with those things.
So what is the ultimate symbol of excellence at ambition? Influence? Philanthropy? Happiness? Economic power? I would say that all of them play a part.
-Stu
Everyone hates Katz apparently, but he certainly stokes up the discussive fire. I'd say he's doing his job.
Trolls, it must be cool to be that bored.
Yes, but just take a look at Andover.Net owner.
It seems he wants the States economy to survive, and a cleanup is needed in order to do so.
Without this, the States products will no more being thrusted, and no more be bought outside United States (ex: GM food).
Also the States economy needs the European market in order to avoid a crisis.
Some years ago, Italy had to fight its Mafia in order to continue being credible.
Now, the States have to fight their corporations in order to continue being credible to the rest of the world.
The States have now to choose : power to the wealthiest, with corporations, or power to the people, with Internet.
A long time ago, French people offered US citizens the Statue of Liberty. It was the symbol of hope for every human in the World for the 20th century.
Will it survive in the 21th century as such ?
----------------
----------------
If Internet is Freedom, Linux is Democraty
I have to agree with the feeling Katz expresses. The U.S. Constitution protects us against excessive government power, and by and large succeeds. But what protects us against multinational corporations? Corporations are coming to control and scrutinize ever-greater areas of our lives: homeowners associations, pre-employment urinalysis, grocery store discount "clubs". I don't even want to get started on my personal rants on the subject....
Instead, I offer a 27-year-old poem by Wendell Berry. Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front . The poem speaks for itself. Read the whole thing, but I offer here the first stanza as a teaser:
Why is it that America has proven to be the ideal breeding ground for the current corporation-driven global economy that has gotten so out of hand?
Why is it that America makes every other country look like a welfare case, is that what you're asking? Because ambitious, money-worshipping people the world over have been immigrating to this country for the past couple hundred years. When's the last time you ever heard someone wanted to go to Norway to pursue the great Norweigan dream? Never, because that doesn't happen. It's not something in the water that makes us such jerks rather than the fact the we have been "collecting" jerks for such a long time.
I hate evil-encrusted corporatism as much as the next guy, but really, it's not the fault of capitalism at all. It's the fault of politicians in the pocket of these corporations, which seek to pass laws (UCITA, DMCA, others) and circumvent worthy, existing laws, that corporations perform such heinous acts.
Personally I think that the whole notion of the American Dream is one that needs to be abandoned. It has resulted in a society driven by violence towards acquisition and greed, in which the violence of its spirit is mirrored in its gun-obsessed, violent culture and media, and in its interventionalist foreign policy
Uh, can you say flamebait?
You don't like our acceptance of guns (relative to other developed, Western nations) or our interventionalist policies? Well then, the next time your Frenchie foo-foo country gets its faggoty ass invaded, don't expect us to come and save you, okay?
But seriously, violence in America is nothing like what is probably portrayed on your television. That's just your media trying to make Frenchies (or whatever you are) feel like they are better than us, in at least one way. And of course you want this to be true, so you tell yourself it is and that's that. From what the rest of the world hears, we Americans stagger around, dragging our 50 pound asses (22.7 kg for you Frenchies), sporting multiple bullet wounds, eating Big Macs, and making fun of the French. And while most of that is true, I don't have a single bullet hole in my chest, so there you go, America isn't as bad off as you'd like to believe.
To blame the United States and capitalism (what's left of it) for the world problem of evil coporatism is in just as bad of taste as making fun of the French. I'm sure if we lost WWII the way Europe did, rather than winning, the way that the US and Russia did, you socialists (though you'd probably never turn to socialism without the devastation caused by WWII) would be the ones with corporations breathing down the world's collective neck.
Hurqalya
The ACLU has done some very good services to individual freedoms and deserves much credit. The claim that social responsability requires censorship is ridiculous in the way it was put forward, but is less ridiculous if you consider the practice rather than the theory of the marketplace of ideas: in practice social hegemony is achieved not by winning arguments but by defining what questions get aired. Liberalism's only answer to that reality is putting forward an ideal of public discourse that has never existed and can be argued cannot exists. This is a powerful ideal, but ideals that fail to account for their relation with reality carry a big liability. This brings me to linking the ACLU and the corporatism argument that started this whole debate. as I see it, the main problem with the ACLU is that it protects individual freedom while blindfolded by a very limiting liberal philosophy: one that sees the sole essence of freedom as the possesion of a legal right and the sole danger to it as the legal infringement by government. Is the government today the No 1 enemmy of free speech? Hardly, I agree with the lead post that the power of corporations to buy media, and their growing para-legal control of the life of their employees is far more dangerous. Yet the ACLU opposes political attempts to safeguard the public space (campaign finance reform ) on 1st amendment grounds. The ACLU protects the speech of (a few dozens) nazis but ignores the right of hundred thousands of accused citizens to protect themselves in a court of law. Why? Because the right of nazis is a pure legal question while the right to legal representation involves securing the funds that are necessary for effective counsel. Yet being jailed because one is poorer than OJ is a far more serious damage to personal liberty that being prevented by the police from insulting Jews. The problem with the ACLU is that it focuses too much of the energy of people concerned with liberty on cosmetics and avoid challenging the common pieties behind which actual liberty is mocked.
-- look, cheese ahoy!
For the first real Company that effected policy you have to hop across the pond to have a look at the East India Trading company over the course of 250 years it determined much of British foreign policy and was a large reason for the growth of the British Empire.
Now there was a company that makes Microsoft look reasonable and harmless.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The competition is for mind-share and developer time.
The profit is good programs, kudos, pleasure in work, and commercial spin-offs.
This is not communism, nobody points a gun at your head and says "you're assigned to hack kernel today, comrade".
Corporatism is the classic poli-sci definition of fascism. The idea behind it is that there are less differences between business and government of a single nation than between nations (or more recently, tradition blocks). In Germany and Italy in the 1920s and 30s, this went so far as also to include the unions into the mix and create vertically integrated corporative bodies (e.g. the chemical industry that includes companies, workers and government agencies, all working on the alleged common goal). It's easy to see what that does to dissent and the freedom of speech. The result of this, historically, was an industry that worked in the interests of the government (e.g. producing huge amounts of military material on credit) what happens now is that government works in the interests of industry (e.g. by enacting over-blown copyright laws). A good book on that is Betram Gross Friendly Fascism : The New Face of Power in America
First, corporations did not build the internet. Governments in the US and around the world built it as an academic network and it was functioning very well, at a large scale, by 1995 or so when the corporate world jumped in in force. To be fair, the large private US universities were also instrumental in building it, but I think that doesn't weaken the point. Second, Capitalism does require poverty. Sorry, but it does. The poor are needed to work in factories or other menial jobs and to perform services for the rich. For example, the rich enjoy having poor people to act as waiters, gardners, cleaners, etc. A model of a society with roughly equal, high general wealth, where everyone is some kind of professional and markets work very efficiently, is conceivable, but Capitalism is not it. Where Capitalism wins, for example the reson it wins over monarchy or colonial tyrrany, is that it builds a wealth pyramid from rich to poor, wheras other systems have had two rigidly separate classes. The results are manifold: Capable people are rewarded where otherwise they would make very good reformers. Excellence is rewarded, and so high production of material goods, technology, etc. takes place. There is room for people to move up or down economically, and the fear of being demoted (and in penury) is a great motivator to keep your head down and work. This is beginning to fail as a large part of the population is off the bottom of the pyramid and has little to lose. The system rewards cooperation (of individuals with capital) and this creates a large class of professional technocrats, managers, etc. who maintain it. Most /. readers are or wil be in this group. This makes Capitalism extremely hard to unseat. Pavlos
Many state chapters of the ACLU have supported the NRA and gun rights.
I appluad them for actually living up to the supposed purpose of the ACLU (defending constitutional rights) and not using it as a facade to instead fight for a political ideology (ie: liberalism).
The ACLU uses the legal system to defend us from the legal system. Gun rights are an extra-legal part of the constitution. i.e. gun rights exist to allow us to kill our political leaders when things get really really bad.. the courts and people who use them tend to frown uppon this type of problem resolution.
Wrong. Gun rights are very much part of our constitution, so much that in the Bill of Rights, they rank above all but our right to free speech and expression. Gun control legislation seeks to erode this right. While the ACLU fights legislation that erodes First Amendment rights in court (to an extent), it never does for legislation that erodes our Second Amendment rights. I call this hypocracy.
I agree that the NRA does a good job of filling in this void (although they get chastized by the media for it, by being painted as right-wing anti-government militia nuts, etc), but if the ACLU is going to claim to fight for constitutional rights, it shouldn't pick which parts to defend and which parts to ignore.
-Tom O'Rear -- tomed@radiks.net
This article started off looking very promising. I really, really try to like your writing Jon, but the conclusions you come to, and the way you get to them remind me of my failed efforts to write college-level history papers. I didn't usually have a clear thesis, so I just pushed a bunch of ideas together and hoped the reader could sort them out. Usually the conclusions didn't follow, or weren't logically thought out.
The notion of corporatism is powerful. We experience it every day. Some aspects of it I embrace, others I detest. But WAVE and Napster are not good examples for your supporting argument (particularly Napster!). Don't weaken your original premise with current-events pandering. Use fresh examples, not re-hashes of what you have said before. Please!
I have a limited tolerance for bad writing. I've given your stuff a lot of chances, and I think maybe you are running out of those chances with me, which is just frustrating, because I can tell that you at least start with something you want to say.
Speaking of culture, Daniel Quinn's book Ishmael discusses Culture and How Things Came To Be The Way They Are. Fascinating read.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
The logical answer to the Marxist class struggle, with a Capitalistic democracy,is that the state must freely enact into it's constitution a policy of Voting-by-Mail.The only governmental juristiction worldwide that provides an Election-by-Mail,to all it's citizens,is the state of Oregon in the United States of America.
The Logical answer to the Marxist class struggle, with a Capitalistic democracy, is that the state must freely enact into it's constitution a policy of Voting-by-Mail.The only governmental juristiction worldwide that provides an Election-by-Mail, to all it's citizens, is the state of Oregon in the United States of America.