The corporation!

When we were young in the business world, we met a person who thought that they might study the law. They, as far as we know, didn’t follow up on that threat. However, they did leave us with a bit of what they had studied to ponder upon. They told us that, at that time, the oldest known corporation was nearly one thousand years old and was apparently based on the fishing industry. There was no known records of it doing any current business but it did prove the idea that once a corporate structure is put in place it can live well beyond those who placed it there We suppose that this conflicts with the Citizens United supreme court statement that corporations are people. If they are then they are sometimes also like gods because their elongated existences make them sometimes close to immortal.

Lest it never be forgotten: the main functions of those heading the corporation are to preserve it’s existence and further it’s corporate aims. And those aims usually involve money far ahead of things like its role as a good corporate citizen.

The beginnings of the modern American corporate structures occurred mainly after the American civil war when these identities began to come into being in some numbers. Among the things that they provided were shields against the libelous activities of those who were the owners of them. Let it never be forgotten that before he was our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln was the corporate attorney for one of Illinois biggest railroad corporations. The nineteenth century was a rough and tumble world and didn’t come under some sort of governmental regulation until the great depression that resulted from the activism of the roaring twenties when the whole nation went mad and the freedom of almost complete deregulation spawned what it inevitably did!

Still yet, corporations in the modern era have grown immeasurably and their power and influence have grown with them. We have passed the time when freedom could be defined as what individuals wanted if they could get themselves together in large enough numbers to create a populist definition for it. Now, the great corporations defy individual governments as they use their multi national reach to intimidate individual nations by showering their favors on those who will give them a fertile environment to do what they like to do best: make money. Even inside of the United States, the great amount of corporate wealth that has been accumulated over the last thirty years has been used to buy politicians who will protect and advance the corporate aims and agendas.

Freedom and innovation have also created a downside for corporations. The rise of the computer and the access to the internet has spawned an age when things can happen in an instant and a company’s reputation can be ruined overnight by what some computer hacker can accomplish with almost no investment at all, not to mention what can be done to the individual through things such as identity theft and theft of precious assets which are hard to recover. A corporation can employ someone in a position of trust who can ruin an entire company that may have existed for generations with some measure of bad activity unbeknownst to the head of the corporation until it is too late.

The rise of the computer has been mirrored by the rise of the computer manufacturing corporations. The art of creation and manufacture has now spawned something beyond the computer called the “device� which can transcend any one particular type of computer to create things which mimic several types all at once. One of the pioneering computer manufacturers is the corporation known simply as Apple (AAPL). Apple has been around since the early days of the personal computer and was once known as the computer company for educators and college students because that it where they peddled so much of their wares. Where Microsoft has stayed in the soft wear arena for much of its existence, Apple has done both soft wear and hard wear at the same time. For many years, Microsoft products that fit certain computers dominated the personal computer industry and around ninety percent of all computers used Microsoft based products. This created such wealth for people like Bill and Melinda Gates that they were able, along with the noted billionaire Warren Buffet, to create enough wealth to begin to fund large scale philanthropic projects that have done a great amount of good for people who are among the poorest and least fortunate across this world.

Unfortunately, the founder of Apple--Steve Jobs--did not take that tact with his corporation. Jobs, who is now deceased, led his company to do great innovations before he passed away but chose to follow the path of hoarding his corporate cash offshore and in shell corporations around the world as his accountants created tax dodges that have not only benefited Apple but have also led the way for many other corporations to do the same things as Jobs corporation has done. In effect, Jobs and Apple have taught the corporate world how to cheat the tax man across many nations. While doing that, they have also been among those who taught the corporate world how to pay their workers the least amount possible in nations that do not have the national ethics that places like the United States are supposed to possess.

What Apple has done with Foxcom in China is a disgrace to the entire world and a bane on the progress that a century or more of hard won often union sponsored gains has wrought. Even corporations like Wal-Mart have found their limitations by what we have recently seen in the factory collapse in Bangladesh but, until it was brought to light, Apple didn’t much care about its Chinese workers and they knew it, driving many intelligent and underpaid people to commit suicide as they faced a surrealistic 1984 type of corporate world.

To look at Microsoft and Apple is to look at two very starkly different visions of the world. The Microsoft vision sees the elites helping the proletariat to rise to better heights while the Apple version exploit’s the worker and his governments for nothing more than the common greed that is the very basest part of human existence. And it would appear that the Apple path is the one that is winning out as Microsoft flounders as Apple keeps making obscene amounts of money by introducing a constant stream of new devices when it knows that it could introduce these items less often with more innovations per item that it already has on the shelf but forces it loyal group of followers to buy again and again in a vain attempt “to finally have it all.� We have been using a Microsoft based P.C. for almost six years now while some of our friends buy a new Apple product every two years or so.

The Apple version of life is for Apple to make more and more money, pay less and less taxes, and to do nothing more than hoard its corporate cash while it benefits from the fact that others have paid a very high price to create the world that Apple continually sucks off of. They say that it only takes one rotten apple to ruin the entire barrel and, to be blunt about it, Apple, as a corporation, is rotten to the core!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.