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Re: Wednesday ramblings--The corporation!

By: joe-taylor in ALEA | Recommend this post (0)
Wed, 22 May 13 11:35 PM | 59 view(s)
Boardmark this board | The Trust Matrix 		Msg. 13524 of 54959
(This msg. is a reply to 13520 by Cactus Flower)
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CF,

We worked for corporations for almost twenty eight straight years. We left the corporate world in may of 2000 and have been increasingly more critical of them ever since. One of the corporations that we were employed by went through a phase of trying to be a good corporate citizen, however, you don't hear that mentioned as much as you used to in the corporate world. Now it seems to be all about the money.

I do not care how much money a corporation makes as long as they have some ethical core to what they do. But when they, as a group, begin to alter the terrain that forms the basis for those ethics, it becomes a bad thing.

Those supporting Apple crow that it pays a million dollars and hour in taxes without thinking of how much money it makes an hour.

The corporation that we last worked for paid their CEO around six million dollars a year plus some stock options at the time that we left. At one point a few years after we left them, they had a CEO who took home one hundred million dollars a year in salary. That is just plain greed and it materially damaged the corporation. We saw some financials on this same corporation recently and the current CEO is taking home 1.1 million dollars in salary plus incentives which the company has not reached the past few years.


Regards,


Joe


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


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The above is a reply to the following message:
Re: Wednesday ramblings--The corporation!
By: Cactus Flower in ALEA
Wed, 22 May 13 8:12 PM 		Msg. 13520 of 54959

I am not sure I would use Microsoft as my example of the less greedy corporation. Nor do I think wealth is in and of itself a wicked thing. And if wealth isn't wicked, I don't suppose greed is entirely either.

I tend to agree that giving companies a single over-arching purpose (becoming more valuable) tends to create damage. Whereas when a business has more than one purpose these may soften the harms a single-minded company causes.

But finding and affirming those purposes is tricky inside a corporate structure. People are incentivised using money. They tend to get more money if they grow the business more. Generally, a person working hard to improve their condition is not considered by many people to be a bad thing. Greed can have a positive effect.

However, collected into a company, this hive-like activity may draw itself up into something dangerous to society.

Corralling the influence of money on politics is the basis of much political philosophy. Fable of the bees and stuff.

Which is why I harp on the US constitution, which seems not to provide the protection to politicians against the influence of money which is required in order to make thoughtful decisions.

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