> we have governments watching the interest of the corporations
Supplanting institutions with popular will is populism, an ideology that has a habit of bee lining towards authoritarianism. "Corporations" are employers, pension fund holdings, tax payers and instruments of foreign influence. The "people versus corporations" narrative is absurd.
I've seen this view stated several times this week on hackernews. Ive always seen it stated with no evidence. How is it not the people vs the corporations?
Take any environmental disaster, BP in the gulf for instance. They cut costs on construction which caused a disaster and ruined the environment and livelihoods for thousands of people. They did this to put more money in their pockets. It's not like they were trying to save money that would be dispersed among the citizenry and the gamble didn't pay off. It's not like they even planned on the extra profit to have taxes taken out as we've seen every large corporation try to avoid every cent of tax possible.
If the corporations are sharing their externalities and privatizing the profits, how is it anything but the people vs corporations? Because they pay wages? It's not like they won't stop doing that the second it's possible, all Uber's plan to rely on drivers until they have autonomous cars and plan to drop all of the drivers.
If someone has hurt you before, is openly planning to hurt you again, and openly states they don't see a problem with their actions, you don't have to wait for them to hurt you again before you call it a confrontation
> How is it not the people vs the corporations?
Take any environmental disaster, BP in the gulf for instance
I am not pushing back on the underlying debates, just the way they're lumped together. Characterizing BP vs. the people of the Gulf as "corporation versus the people" muddies the water. Small, incorporated fishing companies were hit particularly badly by the spill. Meanwhile, certain private individuals did quite well on the clean-up contracts. It's a uniquely local issue with some federal regulatory touches.
There are deep rifts involved in every issue. Understanding those rifts is a pre-requesite to negotiating them. A good way to neuter a movement is to convince it the "corporations" are the problem. The term is so broad and so vague it's meaningless, and sometimes I suspect that's the point.
> If someone has hurt you before, is openly planning to hurt you again, and openly states they don't see a problem with their actions, you don't have to wait for them to hurt you again before you call it a confrontation
If someone hurts you and instead of confronting them, you call out their whole neighborhood, nothing will happen. The offending individual will blend into the background of people enraged at being pulled into a fight that isn't theirs. That's the problem. If someone hurts you, call them out specifically.
Companies lobby together for rules that help them at the expense of everyone else. Yes they'll compete against each other, but is there more than a handful of instances where a company lobbied for better protections for laboror society over something that helped themselves? Of course not, that's how they're set up.
If they we're people they would all be diagnosed as sociopaths. They treat the relationship between themselves and labor and themselves and society as either zero sum or an attempt at rent extraction. The only reasonable way to treat them is in kind at this point
> Companies lobby together for rules that help them at the expense of everyone else
Industries and like-minded companies lobby together. Even the Chamber of Commerce, one of the broader commercial lobbyists, only represents a streak of American business.
Charging a problem as "people versus corporations" is a good way to shut it own. Identifying specific victims and offenders, on the other hand, is how one motivates change.
It's not a problem with identifiable specific victims and offenders. Oftentimes the offense is committed on a generational scale, where companies cease to exist before their victims even have a voice.
So here's the standard socialist's argument: Corporations tend to have very strong incentives to expand. Naturally, they'll eventually find some reason to expand overseas. And at that point, economic stability ends up being dependent on foreign policy decisions -- by governments that govern other people. And in order to maintain economic stability (and continued expansion) foreign policy will gradually but inevitably shift to a position of "protecting economic interests" through the application of the powers of making war.
And in a democratic capitalist society, this means that big decisions about whether war should be waged or what treaties should be agreed to is no longer the business of the common people, it is the business of whoever can force foreign nations to support this kind of "capitalist... imperialism" (for lack of a better term.)
The victims are the population of a democracy that has had its sovereignty erased by pinning the survival of their economy (and country) on the continued success of privately controlled industries.
>Identifying specific victims and offenders, on the other hand, is how one motivates change.
Is "tragedy of the commons" a familiar term? There are no specific offenders or victims here. Just a slow breakdown of society. Once you can identify specific agents, it is too late. The cow that eats the last blade of grass might get a nasty sentence, but everybody loses just the same.
If populism is a bee-line towards authoritarianism, corporatism is a charter flight towards it.
The overwhelming majority of Americans do not have a meaningful stake in the proceeds of capital. They are labour, and will benefit from gains for labour, more then they will from gains for capitalism.
If 80% of your life-time earnings will come from wages, as opposed to capital gains, your interests are not aligned with those of your employer, especially when they treat their relationship with you as zero-sum. Most of them do.
Sadly, that's why I said "should". Imagine those same governments being actual corporations... maybe your standing as a citizen would be measured by how many shares you own.
