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Old 02-09-2007, 11:38 AM   #36 (permalink)
roachboy
 
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Quote:
If the company is owned by shareholders it is nobody's business accept for the sharholders.
um, not necessarily.
first, the analogy to the babysitter is false (again).
second, corporations do not operate in some econ 101 fantasyland of abstract markets impacted by abstract variables like supply and demand to the exclusion of all other social and political factors. so they manage complex relationships with stakeholders (the set of social actors whose interests are directly or indirectly affected by corporate activities) that tip into political questions once stakeholder groups mobilize, frame a debate, make that debate public, etc.. so any subset of corporate activity is potentially political. if a corporation is paying say 15 cents a piece for a shirt, selling it for 80 dollars retail and the ceo is making say 10 mil a year (what not?) then the ceo salary can obviously be made into a political matter simply by linking the variables together (e.g. it is politically, socially, ethically unacceptable that a corporation can pay its ceo x dollars/year when it pays the workers whose labor creates the objects get paid dick.) in a world where demand is to a significant extent maintained via branding, this (or any) type of political argument/action can be quite damaging--witness nike for example--and the corporation will have to respond to it--or generate a convincing appearance of having responded.

babysitters just arent in anything like that position.
my claim at bottom is that there is no a priori divide that separates private from public, private from political. there are fluid boundaries that are being continually renegociated. this is a simple statement of empirical fact (again, look at nike--they are something of a textbook example).
your position is geared around an arbitrary a priori. it leads to a simple refusal to see what is in front of you. i would imagine that were you ceo of a tnc that found itself inside the political flashpoint on a given issue, that attitude would render you dysfunctional in a hurry.

there are tncs that have tried--and try--to work the way you (implicitly) suggest: walmart is one example. they seem to figure that their scale gives them impunity. obviously, this is a risky position to occupy, and to some extent walmart is paying for it in pr at least. another exception in monsanto, but they are privately held, so the rules of the game are a bit different for them. but they too have paid a heavy price for their stonewalling. watch "the future of food".

kangerau: much of what i was going to say in response to your post is in the above. while i do not know what you mean exactly by a "neosocialist state" (maybe you could explain it more), i can tell you that i have no problem with democratic socialism. part of that follows from knowing what democratic socialism actually entails. i mention this because, too often in discussions here, folk operate without any clear idea of what the word "socialism" or its compounds mean.
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