The Corporate State Wins Again

[Mr. Perfect]

Communes have to produce, and co-ops are subject to the same structural problem, ie when the co-op starts deciding against minority blocs, the minority blocs will just walk away and the group continues to grow smaller and smaller.

[Tinker]

[Endovelico]

[Tinker]

interesting Endo

[Caskhades]

[Colonel Sun]

[Tinker]

[noddy]

[Tinker]

Yeah noddy. I am kind of up into the Intentional Community scene here. A lot of these people have these Utopian ideas of how to organize things and my view on it was that even if it's unofficial, there is always some kind of leader who makes shit happen.

I was having this debate with my friend's Mom at her daughter's gallery opening. It was kind of amusing considering that said daughter was totally and obviously the Queen Bee that made everything coalesce and happen.

[noddy]

its in the details

in any grouping of humans, some (one?) of them will be more inspired, more confident etc than the "group average" and be the one people look to.

the difference is in how that is, ermm, defined... in some situations im the one that pushes things, in another context we will look to another guy who deals with those situations better than me - we dont "define" any of these roles, they happen naturally and any difference in earnings is tied directly to output and per contract agreements on the splits, not by roles that always get xx% amounts of earnings.

everything happens per context (contract) .. we all sit down and work out whos getting what percentage and what roles for that situation, noone gets to be a niche hider, everyone gets to add or remove reponsibilities and money with the ebbs and flows of the real world and where they are at in that point in time.

i dont want to sound utopian, lots of are arguments, noone wants todo the crap roles, everyone wants more money - but with enough maturity to ride the ups and downs and the ability to give and take from contract to contract it works as good (and fair) as a group of squabbling monkeys can work for my experience.

we do usually throw a percentage (10-20%) at the "company" .. partly admin fees on the paperwork, partly a bit of income insurance against lean times.. if you leave you walk away from it.

this wouldnt scale to a large industry in the current world - too much investment in infrastructure is required, but in a future world with 3d printers and on demand creation.. i believe it would.

[skyhook77sfg]

Lawyer banker economic thinker Louis Kelso and worker ownership....



Kelso long believed that he had not originated a new economic theory but only discovered a vital fact that the classical economists had somehow overlooked. This fact was the key to understanding why the private property, free market economy was notoriously unstable, pursuing a roller coaster of exhilarating highs and terrifying descents into economic and financial collapse.

This missing fact, which Kelso had uncovered over years of intensive reading, research and thought, drastically modifies the classical paradigm that has dominated formal economics since Adam Smith. It concerns the effect of technological change on the distributive dynamics of a private property, free market economy. Technological change, Kelso concluded, makes tools, machines, structures and processes ever more productive while leaving human productiveness largely unchanged. The result is that primary distribution through the free market economy, whose distributive principle is “to each according to his production,” delivers progressively more market-sourced income to capital owners and progressively less to workers who make their contribution through labor.

Differential productiveness over time concentrates market-sourced income in the hands of those who will not recycle it back through the market as payment for consumer goods and services. They already have most of what they want and need so they invest their excess in new productive power. This is the source of the distributional bottleneck that makes the private property, market economy ever more dysfunctional. The symptoms of dysfunction are capital concentration and inadequate consumer demand, the effects of which translate into poverty and economic insecurity for the majority of people who depend entirely on wage income and cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck. And since, as Adam Smith laid down, economic demand begins with the consumer and consumer purchasing power, the production side of the economy is under-nourished and hobbled.

ANSWER

EMPLOYEE STOCK OWNERSHIP

[Tinker]

Skyhook: That is precisely it. I've been on that tip for years trying to explain that.

[skyhook77sfg]

corporations cannot exist without state sanctioned charters.

the state can require that the price of capital escaping liability greater than investment

is employee ownership of one half of stock for any inc. with more than x number of employees....

a true partnership between capital and labor

instead of cliched false platitudes.

[Tinker]

[monster_gardener]

[Tinker]

[monster_gardener]

[Tinker]

[skyhook77sfg]

Tinker is quite right

but Mr Pervert doesnt believe the last statement

due to lack of proper primary education.


and in the corporate control mode:




According to http://Foodforfreedom.com…

Senat Bill S510, the Food Safety Modernization Act, may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the US

1. It puts all US food and all US farms under Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, in the event of contamination or an ill-defined emergency
2. It would end US sovereignty over its own food supply by insisting on compliance with the WTO, thus threatening national security.
3. It would remove the right to clean, store and own seed in the US, putting control of seeds in the hands of Monsanto and other multinationals, threatening US security
4. It deconstructs what is left of the American economy. It takes agriculture and food, which are the cornerstone of all economies, out of the hands of the citizenry, and puts them under the total control of multinational corporations

S 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act, may be the most dangerous bill in the history of the US. It is to our food what the bailout was to our economy, only we can live without money.

[Demon of Undoing]

We clearly have crossed the Orwellian threshold . Whatever a law or agency is named, you may be sure it achieves the exact opposite effect .

"Food safety and Modernization" , my butt.

[skyhook77sfg]

you mean like the "PATRIOT ACT?

Or the Tax Equity and FISCAL REPOSNSIBILITY Act?


reckon so....

[monster_gardener]

[Mr. Perfect]

The world must be a place of great mystery to many of you.

[Mr. Perfect]

[skyhook77sfg]

of course Tinker is right....



English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan wrote

"Corporations are many lesser commonwealths in the bowels of a greater

like worms in the entrails of a natural man."


The United States of America was born of a revolt not just against British monarchs and the British parliament but against British corporations.

We tend to think of corporations as fairly recent phenomena, the legacy of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. In fact, the corporate presence in prerevolutionary America was almost as conspicuous as it is today. There were far fewer corporations then, but they were enormously powerful: the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the British East India Company. Colonials feared these chartered entities. They recognized the way British kings and their cronies used them as robotic arms to control the affairs of the colonies, to pinch staples from remote breadbaskets and bring them home to the motherland.

The colonials resisted. When the British East India Company imposed duties on its incoming tea (telling the locals they could buy the tea or lump it, because the company had a virtual monopoly on tea distribution in the colonies), radical patriots demonstrated. Colonial merchants agreed not to sell East India Company tea. Many East India Company ships were turned back at port. And, on one fateful day in Boston, 342 chests of tea ended up in the salt chuck.

The Boston Tea Party was one of young America's finest hours. It sparked enormous revolutionary excitement. The people were beginning to understand their own strength, and to see their own self-determination not just as possible but inevitable.

The Declaration of Independence, in 1776, freed Americans not only from Britain but also from the tyranny of British corporations, and for a hundred years after the document's signing, Americans remained deeply suspicious of corporate power. They were careful about the way they granted corporate charters, and about the powers granted therein.

Early American charters were created literally by the people, for the people as a legal convenience. Corporations were "artificial, invisible, intangible," mere financial tools. They were chartered by individual states, not the federal government, which meant they could be kept under close local scrutiny. They were automatically dissolved if they engaged in activities that violated their charter. Limits were placed on how big and powerful companies could become. Even railroad magnate J. P. Morgan, the consummate capitalist, understood that corporations must never become so big that they "inhibit freedom to the point where efficiency [is] endangered."

The two hundred or so corporations operating in the US by the year 1800 were each kept on fairly short leashes. They weren't allowed to participate in the political process. They couldn't buy stock in other corporations. And if one of them acted improperly, the consequences were severe. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed a motion to extend the charter of the corrupt and tyrannical Second Bank of the United States, and was widely applauded for doing so. That same year the state of Pennsylvania revoked the charters of ten banks for operating contrary to the public interest. Even the enormous industry trusts, formed to protect member corporations from external competitors and provide barriers to entry, eventually proved no match for the state. By the mid-1800s, antitrust legislation was widely in place.

In the early history of America, the corporation played an important but subordinate role. The people -- not the corporations -- were in control.