Why do you desire so much to read my opinion of anything? I'm no one special. And Joel Bakan is. If you read his book, we could then have a good discussion over mutually read issues raised by the book.

Victor, I would like to read YOUR opinion/knowledge of corporate law. Why do YOU think it is bad? 

Walt It's not the corporation that is bad, it's the rules by which the corporation (corporate law) must play that are deficient. It's like parenthood. Give a children unbridled freedom, and they will likely turn into sociopaths. Give them solid structure and they are more likely to turn into good citizens. It's just the nature of the thing. I encourage you to read the book. It's a real eye-opener.

Victor - I will gladly look for the book.  In the meantime, are saying some corporations are good and some are bad?  Is the profit motive/level the determining factor of if a business is good or bad?  Is it the number of shares and to whom they are issued? 

Corporations essentially allow risk to be allocated to the entity and not to an individual.  It keeps private individuals from losing everything including the kitchen sink not related to the business if the business fails. That is good.  If your "corporations externinalizing costs" means the burden is on stock holders, how is that bad?  A stock holder is an owner in the company.  Again, the risk is limited to the ownership stake.  On the other hand, reward is distributed to the owners, which is good.  Is that bad?

Corporations are in essence, democratic.  Whoever owns a piece of the company has a say in how the company runs.  Again, how is that bad?  Is it bad that some people can own more than others?   

 

Walt - If you are truly interested in why corporations are the target of so many comments, perhaps you should read the very excellent book - The Corporation, by Joel Bakan. It gives a good history of corporations and corporate law, the impact of that law upon society and the environment (their right to externalize costs), and why the corporation has been described as a legal person with sociopathic personality (pertaining to their protected right to pursue profits above all other responsibilities of the law). We are not talking here about limited or relatively small corporations such as you might see in the case of South End press, but instead large publicly traded corporations which have special protections under law. Give the book a read - it's small and entertaining. Then let's discuss.

"Serve your nation," okay, that may sound fascistic. Isn't "serving your country" more palatable?

Did not actually give JFK fascist motives. Just partially embraced a long-ago history professor's statement that the quote in question was "a fascist slogan." That statement was a little over the top. but not completely. We've been around the fascism thing a million times on this blog I think and I've had occasion to cite various authors. I don't really think JFK was a fascist. No corporatism isn't fascim; I agree.

In a world with countries that are not going away (much to the chagrin of the anarchists) everyone of those proported explainations of fascism read like a description of the incarnation of the socialist state, a la, Chavez's Venuzuala, the Castro brother's Cuba, N. Korea, China, and yes, even the old Soviet Union.  The ONLY difference between the application of socialism to the state and fascism to the state is one (socialism) proports to expand the socialist agenda to everyone and the other (fascism) limits the socialist agenda to a select racial/ethnic group. 

But that being said, no one has really said why corporations are inherently bad, especially in light of South End Press being a corporation. 

'It is a categorical mistake to equate the state and the country.'

The weird, neo-con right makes this error, far more than the left does or the old right ever did. Listen to O'Reilly, Hannity, or Limbaugh. They equate ANY criticism of the executive branch with an attack on the nation of America as a whole. However, they do not follow their own rules as they used to attack Clinton and pled the line, 'I love my country but hate my government.' O'Reilly is the most inconsistent offender. He hates the public schools and the judiciary. So, let's get this one straight: If I criticize illegal NSA wiretaps, I attack the nation of America and for what it stands, but if he, with his customary smear tactics, attacks a judge or a decision, he is not attacking the nation of America and for what it stands. Alfred Jay Nock made the distinction between the nation and the state; The nation is not reducible without remainder into the state.

' Also, are you saying that corporations are to fascism what collectivism is to socialism?'

Not corporations, per se, but some economic arrangement, where the government regiments the economy, usually to wage its wars, thru cronyism with those who bank-rolled the regime into power or prop it up. The people are made to sacrifice, so that the favored recipients are made extremely wealthy thru redistributions of capitol. All of this implies a concentration and centralization of power and wealth into the hands of state actors.

Not all meaning altogether, as this and this provide useful clues to detect the slide.

Some of Eco's points are dated and specific to Italy, but points 4-7, 14, and the last paragraph bear careful reading, imho. Also, the analysis leading up to his list of characteristics (not included in above link) is worthwhile:

...you can play the Fascism game in many ways and the name of the game does not change. According to Wittgenstein, what happens to the notion of "Fascism" is what happens with the notion of "play". A game can be competitive or otherwise, it can involve one or more people, it may require some particular skills or none, there may be money at stake or not. Games are a series of diverse activities that reveal only a few "family resemblances"...

btw, a little rally held yesterday in a nearby town. It's hard to take these disaffected and disoriented youth as a serious problem tho, given the size of their membership. 

Socialism is not synonymous with state control, otherwise absolute monarchy would be a form of socialism because everything belonges to the state-Emperor under this system.

But it is also inaccurate to say corporatism and fascism are one and the same.

While the Fascist state subjugates the worker, it also subjugates capital under the banner of nationalism. Corporations are profit seeking entities which only see the bottomline, they are not bounded by nationalism or religion. But Fascism has a strong nationalistic ethos and sometimes also a religious one like Franco's Spain.

Just because corporations get some favorable treatments under a fascist government it doesn't follow that the government is their tools. Quite the opposite, under fascism corporate interests are promoted and permitted only if they serve the higher purposes of the state. Outsourcing and capital flight would not have been allowed under Hitler. Anyone looking at history objectively would not have a problem in telling who the master was. Only the idealogues of the left would try to spin Hitler into some coporate whore, in the same way the idealogues of the right try to spin him into a socialist simply because the Nazi did introduce some social programs.

"Fascism" nowadays appears to be just a dirty word and it has lost all meanings.

"Fascism is a set of ideologies and practices that seeks to place the nation, defined in exclusive biological, cultural, and/or historical terms, above all other sources of loyalty, and to create a mobilized national community. Fascist hostility to socialism and feminism, for they are seen as prioritizing class or gender rather than nation. This is why fascism is a movement of the extreme right. Fascism is also a movement of the radical right because the defeat of socialism and feminism and the creation of the mobilized nation are held to depend upon the advent to power of a new elite acting in the name of the people, headed by a charismatic leader, and embodied in a mass, militarized party. Fascists are pushed towards conservatism by common hatred of socialism and feminism, but are prepared to override conservative interests - family, property, religious, the universities, the civil service - where the interests of the nation are considered to require it. Fascist radicalism also derives from a desire to assuage discontent by accepting specific demands of the labour and women's movements, so long as these demands accord with the national priority. Fascists seek to ensure the harmonization of workers' and women's interests with those of the nation by mobilizing them within special sections of the party and/or within a corporate system. Access to these organizations and to the benefits they confer upon members depends on the individual's national, political, and/or racial characteristics. All aspects of fascist policy are suffused with ultranationalism." Kevin Passmore. "The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power." FDR Stanley Payne's Fascism: Comparison and Definition (1980) uses a lengthy itemized list of characteristics to identify fascism, including the creation of an authoritarian state; a regulated, state-integrated economic sector; fascist symbolism; anti-liberalism; anti-communism, and anti-conservatism. It is not the collectivization of the means of production. Rather it is its inverse, the control of the govenment by corporate interests. It is a turn to nationalism and away from domocracy but it is not a turn away from capitalism or corporate power.

"It is a categorical mistake to equate the state and the country."

 Please explain what you mean by the above.

 

Also, are you saying that corporations are to fascism what collectivism is to socialism? 

I think historically, you are extremely inaccurate to say corporations are the economic foundations for a fascist state.  Knowing how Hitler came to power, as well as the fascists in Italy, Croatia, Romania, Hungary, modern Yugoslavia, can you REALLy say that corporations provided the economic power necessary to turn a country fascist?  In doing so, you're completely disregarding the collective nature and centralized economic control that accompanies national socialism.

I hate that speech too, I really hate the part where he believe that being poor is an act of god... Yesterday there were a huge anti-war demo across the state.. again news outlet seem to minimizes the attendance.. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070318/ap_on_re_us/iraq_protest

“ask not what your country can do for you but rather what you can do for your country”

The problem with attributing fascist motives to JFK is that the word 'country' is used rather vaguely. Did he mean it to refer, soley, to the extremely violent appuratus, which he was presiding over or to the sum-total of all that is American? In 1961, had an American been repulsed by the persistence of segregation and sacrificed his efforts to ending it, he would have done something noble for his country at a cost to himself and without the country doing anything for him. He would have had to confront or disobey the government to have done so, not serve its ends. It is a categorical mistake to equate the state and the country. Possibly, JFK made his exhortation intentionally vague to suit his own, no doubt self-glorifying, ends.

Corporatism is not Fasicsm:

Corporatism is an economic arrangement, a species of Merchantilism, whereby the costs, investments, and risks of doing business are imposed by the government on the public, but the profits are transferred by the government to private entities. Fasicsm is a form of governance, characterized by the centralization of power in the hands of an executive, the militarization of civic institutions, and a rabid nationalism animating and justifying the above. Corporatism is not Fasicsm, but a corporatist arrangement is usually the economic foundations of a Fasicist state.

 

You don't want an answer. You just want to get all us stupid leftists rattling on with our idees fixe so the conversation gets lost. A kind of reverse filibuster. Don't fall for it, comrades. We're talking about how the supremely privileged avoid responsibility. Which is, come to think of it, what corporations are for! "Limited" is short for "limited liability." T

(And maybe Krupp too.) A big one was Brown Brothers Harriman of New York, in which Prescott Bush (yes, grandpa) and Averell Harriman were senior partners (two of three--the other was Averell's brother "Bunny"--these multibillionaires like cute names). The firm reluctantly stopped bankrolling Farben (at least legally) in 1942, under FTC pressure. A lot of Bush money came from this connection all through the thirties. T

Why is there such a need to demonize corporations?

 

Z-net's parent, SouthEnd Press, is a corporation registered in MA.  Does that make Z-net evil?

Yes sk. U.S. Cold War, anti-Social Democratic and Grand Area capitalist reconstruction imperatives mandated the release of Krupp war ciminals and restoration of the familiy fortune by the early 50s. Even before the "Good War" was over, Chomsky has been noting for a long time, U.S. hostility to left-led resistance forces mandated reconstruction of fascist power structures in Italy. One chilling line in the link you gave is this one: the roster of Nazi capitalists pardoned by U.S. imperialism "included Fritz Ter Meer, the senior executive of I. G. Farben, the company that produced Zyklon B poison for the gas chambers. He was also Hitler's Commissioner of for Armament and War Production for the chemical industry during the war." You know I find that even a lot of nominally liberal and purportedly progressive [United-States-of] Americans just can't deal with this sort of information when it comes to U.S. policy....whether its about collaborating with fascism, past genocide against Native Americans, monumental mass murder in SE Asia or the Middle East. They just can't process it...it short-circuits their brains or something; you can present all the facts you want and they just look at you like you just escaped from a mental hospital. They just can't handle it and so the messenger of such (one would think) vital information gets painted out as absurdly negative, pathologicallty alienated, etc. It's sad how it works.

Perhaps a little off topic, but nevertheless related - An interesting article from Truthout: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/031507E.shtml

The horrible punishment meted out to Herr Krupp for crimes against humanity.

btw, a fascinating line of enquiry into a question that has flummoxed all outsiders.

SGTR...uh, well...ummm...Nah, I mean No..Nope. I mean, not true on what you say about fascism. Here's a reading assignment: William Manchester (don't worry, he's not some kind of a Marxist or something), The Arms of Krupp. It's all about the legendary bourgeois Krupp dynasty and does a number of chapters on the family's relationship with Nazism and the fact remains that they and other capitalists retained critical control over and ownership of the means of production. Plenty of capitalists had some very real reasons for being more than a little happy with fascism, which smashed trade unions and assaulted the Left and opened all kinds of fascinating new profit opportunities (like the opportunity to use slave labor in Krupp's case). Your equating of fascism with Soviet socialism (some on the left call it state capitalism)makes much of the interwar period and WWII incomprehensible. The notion that wanting a national government to serve the people --- and not (as is the general rule under capitalist rule)the wealthy few ---- is to embrace a totalitarian model is a little absurd. In my opinion you should (as I've said 2 or 3 times before)drop your obsolete Cold War obsessions (the Iron Curtain came down a long time ago and still you cling to the Orwellian absurdities of that era)and deal with the fact that there is a totalitarianism of money/capital/corporate power right here in your own "free" homeland. Please consider liberating your mind from western orthdoxy. It's never too late!

SGTR - You have no clue as to what fascism is. You don't know what socialism is. You don't know what corporatism is. You have no idea of what a free society is. You have no concept of 'freedom' at all it seems. And you certainly don't exhibit even a remedial knowledge of the proper relationship between a people and their government (notice I did not say a government and its people). You don't even realize that today's American government is not a government "of the people" at all. Faced with the very serious challenge of educating someone from ground zero before I can even begin to address their comment is, I'm afraid, too daunting a task for me. Perhaps someone else has the stamina to take it on.

To say that "fascism welds corporate rule" is to mistate fascist economic policy.  The state - the socialist entity - controlled the corporation's means of production.  The economy was centrally planned which is the tenant of socialism, not "corporatism" or capitalism. 

If we ARE to ask what our country can do for us, as implied, we are to expect a socialist government where the people have no choice and "big brother" makes all decisions for us.  After all, in a free society, a government is made "of the people" which is precisely why we ask what WE can do for our country, and not the opposite. 

Yeah the Armed Forces exploit an often noble (in and of itself) desire to do, well..to do something good --- to serve others. My favorite Jefferson Airplane tune says over and over again --- and it's a left song --- "We are volunteers of America." It also states openly at some point that "we are enemies of your private property" (I paraphrase).

One thing the Left doesn't like to mention much is that a non-draft (mercenary) army does tend to be staffed by a disproportionate share of folks who (frankly) really do dig "the opportunity to maim and kill new and interesting people in exotic settings." I've spoken with antiwar young people who agree basically with obvious Left observations about class selectivity (the "poverty draft") in who "serves" but who then also want me to know that some of their high school's most vicious racists and bullies (not always working-class or poor) actually couldn't wait (and here I am contradicting Paris in Sonic Jihad) to be deployed...if you know what I'm saying.

I think there may be as much of the "understanding" you want as we can expect given the almost compelte near absence of a Left --- and (a related matter) of meaningful public and democratic space --- in the U.S. We are now four years into this latest quagmire of mass death and crippling --- all based on transparent deception and manipulation and combined with related domestic policy outrages --- and the default U.S. personal response (not everyone...more marches are coming up to mourn the fourth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Liberation [OIL]) is not so much to embrace the vicious bastards in the ruling class and their racist petro-Empire as just to shrug and say "oh well, let's see if I can get through another maddening day of overwork and credit card bills and rent/mortgage paying and commuting and [fill in in the blank] and trying not to overdose on antidepressants."  The thing is just to try to achieve a modicum of stability in the only realm of life within one's alleged functional (to quote the Twelve Steps New Age culture) "sphere of influence": purely private existence. The neoliberaliization/hyper-privatization of daily life (of which the Internet is at times both symptom and agent...I say from my atomized keyboard) could be the permanent death of democracy in the U.S., with grave consequences for the planet not just the U.S.

I hear alot of 1960s Grace Slick et al.'s left instincts in Paris' lyrics (check out the whole CD, pretty left beneath the bluster...and its interracial [listen to opening of third track]). They (along with much more) are some reason for hope. The radical and democratic energy is out there, all-too hidden and underground but showing up in surprising ways, but there's a dangerous, pre-fascist absence of moderately adequate institutional mechanisms and outlets to corral and express it all for progressive purposes....a desperate privatization of dissent. And the institutional realities reflect back on the ideological issues because people tend not to believe in something when they perceive it as having no chance of ---or even vehicle for ---- winning. And who can blame them.

Building effective resistance is the main thing to be doing. And it's critical not to give up. Rosa Luxembourg (as quoted in Michael Albert's memoir): "you lose, you lose, you lose, you win."

I'd be cautious with the phrase "undereducated."  One of my best friends from graduate school (who is under-employed, as are all the smartest folks I went to school with...and this guy is just brilliant, runs circles around people with multiple academic honors) teaches in a prison and tells me that the guys from ghettos he instructs are "much better than the students [he used to teach] at Northern Illinois University."  The prisoners totally know the score on race and class and immediately get the story on U.S. foreign policy/imperialism.  They refer to themselves as "economic development" for the rural prison community that uses them as (well) economic development and provide cogent analogies between the Bush administration and the gangs through which they passed on the West and South Sides of Chicago. I guess its called experiential learning. And they've got a lot of time to read right now.

Grace Slick once quipped during that other morass of war and civil rights abuses: 'when will my country die for me?'

That the army says its the highest calling is not odd.  The churches, unions, schools and social services offices all say the same thing: there is innate human value in sacrificing your own interests for the benefit of others.  On that, I wholeheartedly agree.  The military, however, is the only one that is offering undereducated and the downtrodden the opportunity to maim and kill new and interesting people in exotic settings as part of that sacrifice.

We do have to wonder when, precisely, we will come to understand that the 'values' promoted by the corporate elite and the sacrifices they demand (and sacrifices by whom) directly contradict the interestes of the people being asked to make those sacrifices. . . . and as Grace and the Airplane asked in that other age, when are we going to force those agents who demand such sacrifices to surrender their ability to make such demands?

My comradely best, from the top of the world.

Jeff.