LEARN SOME NEW MUSIC

1. Corporations are explicitly designed to ONLY be able to “think” about profit — specifically, short-term profit. Everything else (social consequences of their actions, the fact they’ve completely alienated their potential customer-base, etc.) gets dumped into a big pile called “externalities”, and is for somebody ELSE to deal with — usually governments, which exist in a symbiotic relationship with the corporations they create; Governments create corporations, grant vast privileges (such as limited liability, corporate ‘personhood’ etc.), and basically get corporations to do their dirty-work for them (Blackwater International for example).
It goes the other way, too: we all know how corporate “persons” such as the RIAA member-companies always run crying to government whenever they might actually have to live up to THEIR side of the copy”right” bargain by allowing something to ‘lapse’ into the public domain, and the whole patent-system is nothing but a mechanism for some companies to shake other companies down.

Patents and copy”rights” are the surest indication that capitalism is NOT — and has NEVER BEEN — a “free” market.

But like I was saying, corporations very literally cannot deviate BY DESIGN, from pursuing whatever they perceive to be the quickest route to the maximum profit, no matter what the consequences. There was an extremely telling quote in that film “the corporation” (the one that I posted the link to a while back). Basically, it said that any corporation whose CEO attempted to take the social consequences of the corporation’s actions into account had better find a different CEO, fast. (I think it was one of the big-names in the “Libertarian” movement who said that, but I can’t remember the name, and don’t really want to sit through the entire movie again just to find out.)

So corporations AS SUCH are congenitally incapable of taking ANYTHING but short-term profitability into account (other than as some kind of half-assed, token gesture that doesn’t actually impact profits — and is thus, meaningless.)

So they can NEVER “admit they have a problem’, because from their perspective (THE WAY THEY ARE DESIGNED), their only ‘problem’ is an inability to squeeze maximum profit by any and all means.

They also can’t make a “searching and fearless moral inventory”, because they ARE living up to their one and only moral tenet: “thou shalt squeeze the nickel ’til the buffalo shits.”

Nor can they change course, UNLESS the new course is demonstrably MORE profitable, in an even shorter time-frame.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0218-01.htm

Quote from the above:
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“The filmmakers juxtapose well-shot interviews of defenders and critics with the reality on the ground — Charles Kernaghan in Central America showing how, for example, big apparel manufacturers pay workers pennies for products that sell for hundreds of dollars in the United States — with defenders of the regime — Milton Friedman looking frumpy as he says with as straight a face as he can — the only moral imperative for a corporate executive is to make as much money for the corporate owners as he or she can.

Others agree with Friedman. Management guru Peter Drucker tells Bakan: “If you find an executive who wants to take on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast.” And William Niskanen, chair of the libertarian Cato Institute, says that he would not invest in a company that pioneered in corporate responsibility.

Of course, state corporation laws actually impose a legal duty on corporate executives to make money for shareholders. Engage in social responsibility — pay more money to workers, stop legal pollution, lower the price to customers — and you’ll likely be sued by your shareholders. Robert Monks, the investment manager, puts it this way: “The corporation is an externalizing machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine (shark seeking young woman swimming on the screen). There isn’t any question of malevolence or of will. The enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was designed.”

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Realistically, the only way the RIAA member companies could change course at all, would be for government to revise — or outright repeal — the legal framework dictating what corporations are, and what they are PERMITTED to do.

But so long as they’re legal “persons”, that’s exceedingly unlikely to happen.

The challenge is to stop the government from bailing them out.