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Old 02-04-2007, 10:34 AM   #19 (permalink)
roachboy
 
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what part of this gives you trouble, loquitor?
the statement that corporate activity cannot coherently be understood as private seems pretty straightforward.
but it contradicts a basic assumption of neliberalism, which has assimilated idiotic claims like those of milton friedman, who argues that corporate activity can be understood through exclusive emphasis on shareholder profits (going so far as to say that corporations act ethically when they generate profits for shareholders)--within this logic, corporate activity would be private.
the only problem with that logic is that it is wholly false--except in a narrow legal sense--but that narrow legal sense is not a viable political sense--because corporate action is NOT private, because it is legitimately a target for public action, for political action--because it is political----the friedmanite line--which your post above repeated, whether you know it or not--has been largely abandoned--except for certain flinstone behemoths like walmart. that because the friedmanite view is bad for business--it blinds corporations to the consequences of their actions, it erases any impetus behind anything like corporate ethics, replacing them with shareholder profits as the main index of coherent action.

now in the fantasyworld of american freemarketeers, the trends of tnc internal monitoring (which increasingly have been shifting over the triple bottom line-based assessement, a move which presupposes replacement of the primacy of shareholders with the broader category of stakeholders, a rearrangement of corporate power, an imperative for greater transparency, etc.) may not matter--but that is (yet another) index of the increasing irrelevance of this ideological position.

have a look at the csr audits collected here, if you like:

http://www.globalreporting.org/Home

and think about what this shift in internal monitoring amounts to from a political viewpoint.
one thing it means is that neoliberalism is bad for business.
another thing it means is that the premises of neoliberalism are being rejected.
among these premises is the logic of your earlier post.

naturally, american conservatives haven't caught up with this kind of tepid move at the level of tnc internal monitoring. what you make of this is an open question. personally, i think this shift functions as a kind of immanent critique of american conservative economic ideology--which has left a trail of disaster everywhere that it has been applied (think structural adjustment or captialist "shock therapy")....but that presupposes that the data about tnc activity is more significant than the statements about that activity you could get from a neoliberal administration and the media apparatus that shares its assumptions about economic activity. one could see this information across a reversal of priority and start with statements from a neoliberal administration--but to my mind, that makes no sense. or you could start with assumptions about economic activity more generally grounded in that ideology--but that too makes little sense. folk do it. i assume the reasoning is mostly based around it being easy. easy peasy.
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