Now what kind of fucking straw man is this?
Corporations and economic growth are directly responsible for the possibility that this discussion is happening: the internet, cheap and powerful computers, etc
Or even better: https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/391943773963304960
The British government is directly responsible for the possibility that this discussion of "taxation without representation" is happening; colonization, trade, etc.
Sometimes when you stand on the shoulders of giants, you realize that the old ways were lousy. America as it is today wouldn't exist without slavery and Native American genocide.
I'm not comparing Capitalism to Genocide, but I am saying the form of argument you used is ridiculous, because I can use the same argument to defend awful things.
If you stop and listen for one minute, people like me are saying, "Maybe the current system is TOO excessive, and should be reigned in, in some ways." We think laws should help fight the excesses of unchecked capitalism.
We're not proposing the "share everything" that Kasparov ridicules, and posing our argument that way is an absurd straw man.
That said, I don't represent a united front of people who believe identically to me, but your argument is so absurd that I think it might practically be targeted at only a tiny minority of people currently saying anything negative about corporations and our current means of economic growth.
Except you just used a straw man. Of course it's ridiculous then.
"America as it is today wouldn't exist without slavery and Native American genocide."
Of course not. But those things went away, and the USA is still there.
But you can't have the internet without equipment, without servers built by guess who? Corporations. Take that away: no internet.
Now you're the one strawmanning by painting it as corporations existing or not existing.
It's not a binary issue. A corporation is just an organization of people with a specific legal status. There will always be organizations of people.
However, I don't think we need to confer the rights of personhood to a corporation even though they don't have the same responsibilities or vulnerabilities. Similarly, it doesn't need to be the case that corporations should be able to extract value from the commons at the expense of the poor so that the privileged upper-middle class can have the cheapest possible gadgets.
It is definitely possible to draw a better line between individual freedom and the wholesale rape of the environment. For starters, those things aren't represented in GDP, and so it's of no real concern to those in power. What gets measured gets improved.
Good, I agree with that.
But the issue with cheap gadgets goes both ways. Chinese factories allow people in India and other 3rd world countries to have a cheap (read: affordable) mobile phone.
Yes, they could pay more and give better conditions, the profit gains coming from economies of scale would still be there.
Partially correct - we need equipment, but mesh networking is becoming a reality. No corporate involvement beyond the hardware.
have a look:
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/greek-off-the-grid-internet...
And why people in 3rd world countries cannot afford expensive mobile phones? Because corporations have robbed them the value of their labour, or the environment where they live... You just seem to be confortable with the status quo, and making excuses.
Those things have absolutely not gone away. There are between 57,000 and 63,000 slaves in the USA right now according to the Walk Free foundation: http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/findings/#studies
This is a 91% decrease from the first census of 1790, in which there were 694,280 slaves. However, we are no longer a young isolated nation with limited imports. We now have access to the work of almost all the world's 29.8 million slaves. We have outsourced slavery. That's nearly a 4300% increase in available slave labor since the first census.
Native American genocide is ongoing. Communities are cut off from access to resources like water that is pumped directly through their land. They are forced into extreme poverty and unhealthy conditions that cause rampant diabetes and substance abuse. The Native American suicide rate is nearly 400% the national average, and we are cutting mental health services.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs is so corrupt they had their entire Internet access revoked. They were destroying generations of records of ownership in an ongoing campaign to rob native people of their wealth. See Cobell v. Norton.
Under existing treaties, Native Americans should own an enormous amount of the country. Instead, their land is leased or sold on their behalf to government and corporations for little to nothing at the expense of native people. Government funding for native services is continually cut, particularly health care.
According to Eloise Norton, the government owes Native Americans $176 billion. They did reach the largest settlement in US history for $3.4 billion, but that doesn't nearly make up for the ongoing native extermination campaign carried out by the US government.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/09/accounting-coup-...
Did you even bother to read a single word I wrote?
I'll repeat myself: Maybe the current system is TOO excessive, and should be reigned in, in some ways
People like you, who paint reformists like myself as Communists who are anti-capitalism really, really piss me off.
I think capitalism is great, but the edges are rough and could use some attention.
However it is possible to have large corporations and growth but also do it in a responsible manner. It won't be an overnight fix but there are a lot of smart people in this world that could make it work.
And of course lots of the solutions to the problems are also vilified (nuclear is a big one) so it isn't going to be easy.
But I think the general point being made shouldn't be dismissed entirely. They are right about many of the "solutions" that are presented being sort of a waste of time, intended only to make people feel better about themselves without making any real progress towards fixing the problem.
Oh yes, most of the "personal solutions" are not really helpful (well, in a way they are, but it ends up happening over time, like using CFLs instead of incandescent lighting, etc)
See the miners filled lawsuits against the company, because weren't for capitalism their life and working conditions would have avoided a life-threatening situation.
But then again depends what you wanna do: Find the truth or find evidence - even risking ridicule - to support your beliefs.
[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870367360...
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-07/an-iphone-te...
But it is very much worth reading.
"Contracts for Dhong and the other Nepalese men set their base salaries for 12-hour shifts at about $178 per month."
(No matter how you do the math, with no more than two days off a week, that's less than a dollar an hour (edit: I mistakenly wrote day first))
"Another letter explained that the men were getting paid for the rest of January, plus a month. It was a total of about $600 each."
(Almost twice the salary listed above (obviously still peanuts))
edit/addition: "He earns $3 a day for a 12-hour shift inspecting the glue seams on shoes before they’re shipped. It’s about half of the minimum pay he’d been promised in Malaysia. He earns less than $90 per month ..."
Consistent with first statement of salary. Only the 2 months approximately equal to 600 dollars is off.
3D printers are a movement in that direction, that ends with mini factories or replicators.
Replicators will be the death kneel of the factories.
Funnily I thought it means a final blow, that breaks a back of something over the knee.
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled." - Plutarch
“WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”? Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.
Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.
…Personal change doesn’t equal social change.” — Forget Shorter Showers: Why Personal Changes Does Not Equal Political Change
Even if every Guy Fawkes mask were made at Foxconn itself, a boycott wouldn't do anything to the working conditions. Teens would still purchase them based on the movie (or, heaven forbid, the actual comic book). What is necessary is restructuring the world to make Foxconn impossible.
[1] http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4801...