Are large corporations evil?

TRICK QUESTION!
http://www.historycommons.org/events-images/636_carlyle_group_logo_2050081722-8653.jpg

I like working for a large corporation.

Hey, here's something I've always wondered about -- maybe someone who knows some law could explain it to me. We treat corporations like individual entities in a lot of ways (taxation, free speech rights, etc.), but how does this apply criminally? Obviously the government regulates and fines for certain types of corporate malfeasance (say, over-polluting). But is there a clear line between the kinds of acts that individuals (i.e., a handful of executives) would get criminally indicted for and acts so systemic there's a larger corporate responsibility? I mean, it seems to me you'd have much higher across-the-board corporate responsibility if there were a sense that systemic wrongdoing put the entire entity at risk. (There'd be a much bigger call for whistle-blowing, anyway.)

I might be asking an obvious question here: the state does have the ability to legislate in that direction, surely?

I think the state does have the ability to legislate in that direction, but is loathe to. Enormous punitive fines could be levied, all personnel with knowledge of wrongdoing could be charged with fraud (or whatever), business could simply be dismantled (as in antitrust cases). I think we simply value "business" to much as a principle to follow through on this, no matter how egregious and widespread the wrongdoing.

Also troublesome is that you cannot toss a corporation in the clink.

LIMITED PARTNERSHIPS are the REAL devil.

I like studying the food and beverage companies, because they are often older companies. It's a great way of studying history - marketing campaigns, demographics, graphic arts, economics.

Large corporations, because of their vast control of and appetite for resources and their ability to insulate decision makers from the details of implementation, are particularly adaptable and flexible when it comes to doing evil. They often farm it out to sub-contractors, such as the corrupt government in a poor country or "security" firms like Blackwater, but are sometimes known to handle it in-house.

So, although not every large corporation is necessarily evil, every large corporation has a short easy path to get there and plenty of reasons to take that path.

So, yeah, I am basically falling in line with contenderizer's view.

what is "evil"

aimless' post just reads like a description of people, not "large corporations"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-agent_problem

ya I've just started working for a large corporation for the first time, started about two months ago. and i suppose it is a v bureaucratic place -- lots of "if you have a problem with any of these facilities please contact management as soon as possible" signs plastered around the traps for example -- but i'm enjoying it.

the only evil i've personally encountered so far is that i had to accrue for a dude's redundancy payment and the notation i had to use was something like 'accrue for employee's redundancy, employee is not yet aware of redundancy', it was kind of sad.

i'm an accountant btw

Tombot, only certain parts of my description would fit ordinary people, although as you track individuals farther up the wealth curve, the better they fit. In particular, I am thinking of two factors: the amount of resources controlled, and the insulation between the decision-maker and the implementation.

Ordinary schlubs just can't consume as much as a Fortune 500 company or command the same revenue stream, and when they decide to act, they either act directly as their own agents, or they use agents that are only tenuously or remotely under their control, e.g. Fortune 500 companies.

Although I can write to Exxon-Mobil and direct them to stop underwriting the corruption of the Nigerian government, do they listen to me and do as I bid them? No. But the CEO of Exxon-Mobil presumably is not hampered by the same heedless attitude among his agents.

I would quickly agree that the path to evil is short for any human, but the corrupting influence of power is both a truism and a truth. Large corporations allow large concentrations of power, and therefore approach the preconditions of evil more closely than the vast majority of people.

Hey guyz, my question from upthread is addressed here!

http://www.slate.com/id/2209771/

The short answer would appear to be that every corporation that could potentially be indicted just makes a deal to pay a fine.

(This seems like a poor way to deter crime, since it's pretty easy to weigh the potential profit of the illegal act against what you think you might wind up paying for it.)

Companies have agreed to all kinds of novel conditions to get a deferral in recent years, such as creating 1,600 jobs in Oklahoma or installing slot machines at New York racetracks. Sometimes, the terms of deferred prosecutions seem to be heavily influenced by the personal inclinations of prosecutors themselves. Former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, now running for governor of New Jersey, has been among the more creative: He required Bristol Myers Squibb to endow a $1 million chair of legal ethics at his own alma mater, Seaton Hall Law School.

the nu CIO is apparently ONLY 31!1111111.

he's injecting NEWLIFEINTO IS. <<<<-wld be sweet considering the financial reporting system has been around since 1974 no lie

For much of Jeff Immelt’s 16-year run atop one of the world’s largest conglomerates, an empty business jet followed his GE-owned plane on some trips to destinations around the world, according to people familiar with the matter. The two jets sometimes parked far apart so they wouldn’t attract attention, and flight crews were told to not openly discuss the empty plane, the people said.

The second plane was a spare in case Mr. Immelt’s jet had mechanical problems. A GE spokeswoman said that “two planes were used on limited occasions for business-critical or security purposes.” Mr. Immelt didn’t respond to requests for comment.

eat the rich

if i had to guess at flavour i'd probably say gamey overtones with a hint of ham

maybe best served with a soy-chilli glaze but i'm happy to experiment a bit

http://cdn1.bostonmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/04/jeff-immelt-ge.jpg

Including dividends, GE's stock gained 8.2% with Mr. Immelt at the helm, compared with a 213% rise in the S&P 500.

eat the rich

― midas / medusa cage match (bizarro gazzara)

problem is that it doing so usually involves eating a piece of shit. catch 22

not if they have processed properly at an accredited Soylent Green plant, they should taste fine:p

No need to eat the rich, just cut off their heads and display them in the town square.

what is the cut-off for being rich

It is a mystery, but I still know that rich people exist.

if you have to ask...

i just feel like nobody would begrudge somebody that made just a little more than them (for being "rich") and so by induction we could argue all the way up the chain that nobody's really evil, no matter how rich

i'm comfortable calling people who fly in private jets -- let alone having a spare come along just in case -- rich

i just feel like nobody would begrudge somebody that made just a little more than them (for being "rich") and so by induction we could argue all the way up the chain that nobody's really evil, no matter how rich

the sorites paradox does not disprove the existence of heaps.

what is the cut-off for being rich

i'd say - generously i think - making a million dollars a year makes u rich

the real question is what moral bar does a mil-a-year earner have to clear to keep them off my dinner plate

Immelt earned his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, graduating in 1982. He described business school as "one of the most intense times of your life."

relatable

full quote far more humanising

“Business school,” recalled GE’s Immelt in a recent CNBC interview, “Is one of the most intense times of your life. There are times you do feel overwhelmed from the standpoint that it’s midnight, I have another case to read, I don’t really understand the subject material, and you say, ‘Gosh, what am I going to do?’

“And then, sometimes you are sitting there in the middle of a discussion and someone says something so smart that you hadn’t thought of and you think, ‘I am a dummy. I’m an idiot. This guy is so much smarter than I am.’ So you do feel inferior at times. You do feel overwhelmed at times.”

imo most of MBA/Business School culture is performance. like your main function when aspiring to be a CEO or Entrepreneur or whatever is to have the act down, to partake in the Cult of Personality. all the theories are things people have already thought of for years and years it's up to you to string together the right buzz words, the trite lingo of the moment, etc. make it seem like you know what you are talking about, like you are the authority. this provides great value in legitimizing Business. it's a bit like playing a role in a play. like politics its the Entertainment branch of Industry. they deserve the Big Bucks because they convincingly act the part.

i don't think it necessarily leads to evil though, any more than so many other realms do. power structures themselves can promote evil behavior (prioritizing abstraction/bottom line/numbers over human life) and to that extent the evil can flourish in a large corporation, a small corporation, a neighborhood co-op, any momentary misalignment of power. furthermore if you look at the history of horrible things large corporations have done in the 20th century (building/dropping nukes, poisoning the earth and us, etc.) it was almost always hand-in-hand with public interests so yeah not really so quick to lay it all on the bad corporation anymore.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/18/chipotle-downgraded-employee-pay.html

Chipotle has a new problem on its hands: It's paying its employees too much.

Bank of American Merrill Lynch downgraded Chipotle and cut its earnings targets for 2018 and 2019, saying the struggling restaurant chain will have trouble cutting back labor costs any further than it already has.

"We are downgrading Chipotle to Underperform from Neutral as we believe, assuming no significant tax reform, that 2018 and 2019 consensus EPS needs to drop at least 10 percent," analyst Gregory Francfort write in a note Wednesday. "We believe further gains from trimming hours will prove difficult which limits the opportunity to get labor below 27 percent of sales even if traffic recovers."

Chipotle has taken definitive steps to scale back its labor costs as sales decline. The average weekly hours for full- and part-time Chipotle crew members were cut from a high of 34.6 in 2006 to 21.7 in 2016, according to the report.

Chipotle has a new problem on its hands: It's paying its employees too much.

t/s: eating the rich vs eating chipotle

i'm no economist but to my mind if you're having financial trouble the answer is not that you're paying the people at the bottom of the ladder too much, it's that the people at the top are incompetent

and most likely delicious when stir-fried with ginger, garlic, shallots, lemongrass and chilli

I don't see a good reason for any one person to make more than like 300k US/yr tbh

i was def being generous with a mil-a-year allowance

what if you want to buy more than $300k worth of stuff every year?

tough shit i guess, just be glad all your succulent flesh is still attached to your bones

Don’t you think there might be a slippery slope between that and no one is allowed to buy more than 12 CDs

nah, we have spotify now

buying more than 12 cds a year is counterrevolutionary

love me a slippery slope argument

also who is going to decide how much people should be allowed to consume per year? should we leave it up to world renowned resource allocation expert bizzaro gazzara?

It’s pretty challops and contains a number of indefensible statements

You could’ve just linked

― El Tomboto, Thursday, October 19, 2017 7:41 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think it's pretty good, actually

don’t you guys believe in freedom?

― the late great

post of the year

i've had shitty experiences at small companies and big companies. i don't think large corporations are _uniquely_ evil.

lol at "people who presumably care", that's pretty slick

You thought you cared... but you really don't!!!!

heh ya thats p dickish rhetoric. that guy's writing actually drives me up the walls a lot of the time, but that's the only piece i know representing this view, which is useful to consider imo

"ppl who presumably care" is great shorthand for the elites of the D Party

the R Party doesn't pretend

lol what are you talkin about doc?

And people who presumably care about workers should also rethink their passion for tininess:

i just thought it was funny how he was implying "if you don't know about this way to help x, you don't really care about x"

just had to air that out.. i'm a petty man

Mostly, the argument Henwood is trying to make is privately owned shops with 150 or fewer employees, versus publicly traded ones that have 150+ or whatever.

small businesses aren't harder to regulate than large ones. The opposite argument is made just as easily - big ones span state lines and national borders, like IKEA. Try to regulate that. IKEA is one gigantic tax haven for a Swedish family. Regulate that how, again? To what end?

small businesses don't treat their employees worse by default. They tend to treat them pretty well until they go public (or get bought by a traded entity). Again, the bigger businesses are beholden to one thing - the board. This phenomenon has created more inequality than any proliferation of small businesses ever.

Lastly, for now, name some big traded firms that didn't start out with under 20 employees just trying to cover the lease. The top 10 tech companies all come to mind. Every business was a small business once, and the thing that changed was the board demanded some GRC quad charts showing how they were going to achieve regulatory capture by spending x% on white shoe lobbyists and lawyers.

I could fisk his essay for a few more hours but it's not worth the time. There are lots of things small businesses do that are stupid and a mess. Few of them are of the degree that giant firms commit, and multinationals also fuck shit up in ways that no small business could ever hope to do.

u can fisk deez nuts

jkjk

i do like IKEA tho

ime small firms are sad sketchy fiefdoms and large firms are kafkaesque bureaucrohell with no one at the wheel, sort of a pick your poison

i think the idea of class struggle a socialist like henwood believes in makes a lot more sense in a setting with large firms in industries with increasings returns where workers can strike and bargain over the surplus rather than with a multitude of small firms barely making ends meet; to a neoliberal shill like me i can't say i have a strong opinion about it except some two-handed answer like 'it depends on the firm and the industry blahblah'

i love intra-left beefs in that vein tho (reclaiming a position seen as reactionary by contemporaries in context). this piece by bhaskar sunkara on naomi klein is the kind of thing i like seeing out of the radical left; there was something too 'feel-good' about a certain strain of the left in the 90's and early 00's that it articulates well

https://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/naomi-klein-as-anarcho-liberal/

i think the idea of class struggle a socialist like henwood believes in makes a lot more sense in a setting with large firms in industries with increasings returns where workers can strike and bargain over the surplus

Has this been working out that well over the last few decades, though? How much has neoliberal globalization changed the terrain when it comes to this aspect of big business and organized labour?
xp