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2005-12-27 - 12:41 a.m.
Christmas is all about shopping, and we all hail the shopping god.

In honour of the gross amount of consumerism that I was witness to today, as I had to work in the mall on boxing day, here are some excerpts from a book called 'The Corporation' by Joel Bakan, based on the movie of same name directed by the author.

"Not suprisingly, then, when we asked Dr.Hare to apply his diagnostic checklist of psychopathic traits to the coporation's institutinal character, he found there was a close match. The corporation is irresponsible, Dr.Hare said, because "in an attempt to satisfy the corporate goal, everybody else is put at risk." Corporations try to "manipulate everything including public opinion," and they are grandiose, always insisting "that we're number one, we're the best." A lack of empathy and asocial tendencies are also key characteristics of the corporation, says Hare - "their behavior indicates they dont really concern themselves with their victims"; and corporations often refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions and are unable to feel remorse: "if [corporations] get caught [breaking the law], they pay big fines and they...continue doing what they did before anyway. And in fact in many cases the fines and the penalties paid by the organization are trivial compared to the profits they rake in.
Finally, according to Dr. Hare, corporations relate to others superficially - "their wole goal is to present themselves to the public in a way that is appealing to the public but in fact may not be represntative of what the organization is really like." Human psychopaths are notorious for their ability to use charm as a mask to hide their dangerous self-obsessed personalities. For corporations, social responsibility may play the same role. Through it they can present themselves as compassionate and concerned about others when, in fact, they lack the ability to care about anyone or anything but themselves."

" 'It was one of the worst things I've seen in my lifetime." Carlton Brown, a normally unflappable commodities broker, was deeply troubled by what he had seen on September 11, 2001. 'All I could thiknk about was getting them the hell out,' he says 'Before the building collapsed, all we were thinking was, lets get those clints out' - out of the gold market, that is. Brown was mainly concerned about clients who might get trapped in the gold market, which he knew would close once the World Trade Center towers collapsed. When the airplanes hit the towers, says Brown, 'the first thing you thought about was "Well, how much is gold up?" ' Fortunatly, he says, 'in the next couple of days, we got them all out... everybody doubled their money.' September 11 'was a blessing in disguise, devastating, you know, crushing, heart-shattering. But... for my clients that were in the gold market, they all made money,' he says. 'In devastation there is opportunity. It's all about creating wealth.' "

" Lucy Hughes, who serves as director of strategy and insight for Initiative Media, the world's largest communications management compay, is one of the creators of the Nag Factor, a solution to a problem that has vexed marketers for years: How can money be extracted from young children who want to buy products, but have no money of their own? Though 'you can manipulate consumers into wanting and therefore buying your products,' says Hughes, young children present unique challenges. For them, she realized several years ago-and this is the crucial insight behind the Nag Factor-advertisements must be aimed to at getting them to buy things but at getting them to nag their parents to buy things.
The fate of entire corporate empires could depend upon marketers' abilities to get children to nag their parents effectivley. 'With McDonald's,' for example, says Hughes, 'parents wouldnt be going unless their child nags.' Chuck E. Cheese's? 'Oh my goodness,' says Hughes, 'It's noisy and there's so many kids. Why would I want to spend two hours there?' Hughes, who says her company 'wanted to be the first... to actually quantify the impact' of children's nagging, found that 'anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of purchese would not have occured unless the child had nagged their parents... We found, for example, a quarter of all visits to theme parks wouldn't have occurred unless a child nagged their parents. Four out of ten visits to places like Chuck E. Cheese's would not have occured...We saw the same thing with movies, with home video, with fast food. Children's influence on what products the parents are buying is huge."

" On August 22, 1934, a little more than a year into Roosevelt's presidency and three days after Adolf Hitler had officially become Fuhrer or Germany, Smedley Darlington Butler, a former U.S. Marines general, and one of the nation's most decorated military men, entered the lobby of the Bellevue Hotel in Philadelphia. A man named Gerald MacGuire told Butler he had been sent by a group of bussinessmen to ask the general to raise an army, seize the White House, and install himself as fascist dictator of the United States.
Indeed, at the time, some major American corporations were reaping substatial profits by working for Adolf Hiter. Adam Opel AG,a German automobiel maker owned and controlled by General Motors (which, at the time, was controlled by the du Pont family), was, with the help of GM executives, transformed in 1937 into an armaments concern. It manufactured trucks for the German Army including three ton "Opel Blitz" trucks, a crucial part of the blitzfrieg attacks on Poland, France and the Soviet Union. It also built aircraft componenets, including engines for the Luftwaffe's Junker "Wunderbomber." A recent GM television commercial boasts of the role of GM trucks building roads and bridges to support the Allied campaigns during WWII - "some people say we were paving the road to victory," the ad states-but neglects to mention that the company helped build trucks for the enemy's armies as well.
IBM - a company where 'if your customer needs help, you jump,' according to Irving Wladwsky-Berger, vice president, technology and strategy - jumped when Hitler sought its technical assistance in running the Nazi extermination and slave-labor programs. IBM provided the Nazis with Hollerith tabulation machines, early ancestors of computers that used punch cards to do their calculations. Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Hollocaust, says, 'The head office in New York had a complete understanding of everything that was going on in the THird Reich with its machines...that their machines were in concentration camps generally, and they knew that Jews were being exterminated.' IBM technicians servied the machines, IBM engineers trained thier users, and IBM supplied punch cards for the machines, according to Black, at least until 1941 when the United States declared war on Germany."

Everyone should keep in mind, that corporations do not serve the greater good. Legally, they are bound to serve the best interests of themselves, and their stock holders, and nothing/no one else. A corporation wont stop to consider it's impacts on the environment if it is going to be making profits, it wont stop to consider the health or well being of a human being if making dangerous products or explosive cars makes more money than trying to protect it's consumers, it wont take into consideration any factors except, what is going to make the most money. So, next time you go to shop at a large, encorporated bussiness, think about how if they were making harmful products that they knew for a fact would damage your health, or your families health, or your friends health, or could even possibly kill you, but it was more profitable to do that than to not, that the corporation would continue to make and sell those harmfull products, completely aware that it was destroying human lives. There is no such thing as a 'socially repsonsible' corporation, because the bottom line is that corporations only take into account environmental concerns when it is absoultly vital to them for making more profits, which in fact, it very rarely is.
The only way that we can show corporations that they have to stop their horrid practices is to show them that we WONT shop at their stores and buy their products if they continue to harm the environment, make dangerous products, and continue to produce harmful toxins that polute are living spaces.
-Dave

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