pai mei

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6587379.stm


This is what capitalism is, if it's not profitable it doesn't get made. And if it's profitable it gets made. No matter the consequences, money are the god of the system.
Good thing for Thailand , they seem to realize that money do not cure diseases, humans do.

Willravel

Didn't the US break patents when 9 people died from anthrax a few years back? Over a half a million Thai people have AIDS. This is a no brainer, and I'll be boycotting Abbott as my small statement that I believe that a company has an obligation to contribute to the needy. When any organization places the dollar above human life that are immoral. Abbott has well over a 50% profit rate per year, which means they are comfortable and the hike on stage 2 medications is not necessary to keep the company afloat.

pai mei

I said this is capitalism. I am sure no company wants to discover a cheap drug to cure cancer for example. They just don't want that. Isn't that a strange thing ?

In problems like this one - researching for drugs that can save lifes we need to be communist, and once discovered those drugs must be distributed freely.

I mean state funded research, I am sure there are smart people who want to go into research industry to help others, so the state will atract all of them and all will research not for profit but because that is what they like and want to do - am I too naive ?

In problems like - who can make the coolest pair of sport shoes, let it be capitalism , competition and profit all the way, shoes are not that important

The_Jazz

pai mei - you asked the question, so I'll answer it - yes, you're naive. State funded research won't work because people aren't basically altruistic. They're (we're) all greedy. That's the reason that communism has failed in every country it's been tried in, mainly because people are greedy.

Drugs aren't cheap because it takes a lot of time and effort to discover them and then make sure that they are safe. It's not like you can walk around the Amazon, get sap from a random tree and say "Eureka! I've found a cure for cancer!" You have to find the right one, get the right part of it, isolate the portion that does what you hope it does, find a way to manufacture it then test it on animals and people. If there were simple cures for cancer, don't you think that they would have been found a long time ago, like aspirin was?

As for the Thai's, they're welcome to do whatever they want with their own patent laws. By breaking these patents, though, they've probably done their people a disservice in the long run since most drug companies will be hesitant to do business there.

__________________
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin
"There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

Bill O'Rights

Good for you. That's how it should work. If you have a personal problem with the ethics of a company, then simply refuse to do business with them. In the long run, it may not mean jack shit. But, at least it's not your dollar, that you earned, lining their pockets.

That said, I wholeheartedly disagree that any company has an obligation to contribute to the needy. You may choose to reward those companies that opt to do so, with your consumer dollar. But, they are under no obligation to do so. The only obligation that the executive officers of any company has, is to the investors of that company.

__________________
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony

"Hedonism with rules isn't hedonism at all, it's the Republican party." - JumpinJesus

It is indisputable that true beauty lies within...but a nice rack sure doesn't hurt.

Willravel

I think everyone has an obligation not to harm society. Withholding vital medicines because a country wants to break some of your patents is wrong. If Abbott made widgets or something, then it would be different. People in business to save lives have a unique dual responsibility to help people and make money. When they come into conflict, saving lives should win out.

I know I've used Pedialyte solution before, which is one of many VERY common products produced by Abbott. If you disagree with them, there are alternatives to almost all their products.

Bill O'Rights

Doctors and hospitals are in business to save lives. Pharmaceutical companies are not. They are in business to make money. Why do you think so much money has gone into medication that gives old men stiffies, while Aids and cancer medication plods along? There is more money in treating the symptoms than there is in finding the cure. Ethical? Probably not. But it's all about the benjamins.

__________________
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony

"Hedonism with rules isn't hedonism at all, it's the Republican party." - JumpinJesus

It is indisputable that true beauty lies within...but a nice rack sure doesn't hurt.

roachboy

i support what the thai government is doing and would hope that more governments follow their lead. this from the article linked via the op:

from this a few points
1) i dont think that the current state of ip law is desirable: it should not be the case that corporate patent claims for drugs are understood as not different in kind from patent claims on an innovative new napkin ring.
not all types of "property" are equivalent simply because they are "property"...

2) i am unclear about the rationale behind emphasizing the production of new drugs if many many many many many people around the world cannot afford access to existing drugs. this is not to say that i oppose the development of new drugs--but rather focus on new drug development tends to occlude the very real problems of pricing when it comes to existing drugs--and from that follows an ethical problem that pharmaceutical corporations cannot get around, to my mind--it is unethical that people who are in need of existing drugs cannot get them simply because of their cost. this is a variant of point 1.

3) more generally: the "problems" riaised here are addressed neatly in this article in the ny review of books:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17244

an excerpt:

this raises a number of questions...among them is a dismantling of mr. jazz's claim above concerning big pharma as an example of market capitalism--it isnt--they operate with extensive direct and indirect state funding. so the premise seems to me to be wrong.

the article is interesting, though. have a look and maybe it will widen the conversation.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

pan6467

I have to disagree Bill and say that it is a fairly recent phenomenon where companies believe they have NO obligations to anyone but their shareholders.

Henry Ford stated that a company needs to pay their employees enough to afford their product and be able to pay their debts. That way the company would have built in lifelong customers.

It worked.

Hershey, Firestone, Goodyear, Tappan, Westinghouse, US Steel, Hoover, Ohio Brass, etc etc all built housing and sold them to their workers cheaply. The company heirarchies back then believed it was their duty to maintain a thriving community and they did. In doing so they were able to maintain a "homegrown" consumer base that would try out new product and be loyal to the town's biggest employer.

What happened is greed. The unions wanted more, the communities expected more (thus taxes would increase) and in all honesty neither needed more. But the companies had no choice but to give in, however ir destroyed their R&D and caused them to start becoming more expensive and putting people further into a debt status. (Instead of a car costing someone a thousand and them being able to pay cash or have it paid off in a year or so... cars jumped to $5,000 and required 5 year loans.)

Eventually by the late 70's when the recession hit and the first true wave of imports came, the companies by that time were in bad shape and started to crumble. Some crumbled into nothingness, some sold out and merged and some moved. But all were starting to tell communities that they were hurting and it was the community's turn to return the favor by lowering taxes. Some communities listened, some raised taxes even more.

In the 80's Reagan helped weaken the unions and made it possible to outsource and lowered tarrifs. Management at this time still cared about the communities, to some degree but were more worried about self preservation.

Now today,we have allowed the scenario to take a 180. Now, the company heirarchy now longer cares about the community or its employees but only profit and lining their own pockets.

Hence, the communities are truly dying, the employees cannot afford regular living expenses without going into debt and the companies now hold the communities hostage with tax abatements or we move. Thus we see CEO pay in God awful amounts and golden parachutes and upper management not having that past connection to the company.

They want theirs and they want out. They don't care about growth, employees and the community, because they tried that, now it's all about them making money.

What we as a country and as a world society need to do is find middle ground all would be happy with.

Short answer: YES it is very much a corporation's responsibility to help and give back to the community and employee, BUT it is also the community and employee's responsibility to make sure the company stays healthy.

I know I babble but I have lived around it my whole life, I have known as close friends both management and employee families and I have listened to both sides.

My hometown, Mansfield, Ohio, would be far different today had the (Armco, Ohio Brass, Tappan, Westinghouse and so on), union workers and community not been so greedy.

This scenario has played out to where now schools suffer, both parents have to work, kids are in unstable environs because both parents have to work and society itself has changed to "fuck everyone else, I want mine."

We can rebuild and become great again, not only as a nation but the planet as a whole, IF and only IF balance is found and everyone believes and remembers that society can only grow if they give back to the community so that it can grow and acts accordingly.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

Willravel

So doctors don't get paid nice salaries? Everyone is in business to make money. That's the name of the game. Abbott has sold it's soul for money, though, and nowhere does it say that companies have to follow the dollar instead of their moral compass.

The 'it's all about the benjamins' mentality is fundamentally flawed ethically. Business ethics dictate that a company has an obligation to make moral decisions.

roachboy

business ethics?
well folk who do business ethics for a living in various b-schools would certainly agree with you--but in the world outside b-schools, the relation between business ethics and actual operations is problematic. generally, implementation of ethics policies comes down to three main things: a code of ethics, implmentation of some type of internal monitoring apparatus, and integration of this type of monitoring or auditing with other types of information/auditing. since most tncs do (2) by constructing a separate bureaucratic area, they set up an adverserial relation between everyday operations and those who would audit it. the results of these ethics audits are not generally integrated into other types of reporting--so they tend to float around as public relations tools.

thing is that a notion of the "triple bottom line" would make it much more difficult for pharmaceutical corporations to do what they presently do in terms of pricing because it would force consideration of the social consequences of business decisions---so it is not like business ethics could do nothing, and despite my cynicism about the area, it is better that it exists than it would be if it didnt. internally, the main problem with the triple bottom line is "metrics"--working out ways to integrate "social and environmental footprints" into quantitative form, so that it would occupy a status parallel to that of financial performance. generally speaking the firms that have gone the furthest in trying to work this metrics problem out have been those which have come under the most intense political pressure and so are most concerned about either being or appearing to be proactive. like nike. this is because in almost all cases, the primary driver of change in corporate action is political pressure--the motivations for such changes rarely come from inside the corporations themselves. i think it is this political pressure around the cost of AIDS drugs in particular (with primary reference to africa over the past few years, but with implications that are much wider in fact) explains why big pharma and their proxies in the american govt have not reacted to thailand's actions.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

The_Jazz

Business ethics dictates nothing of the sort. A company's first and foremost obligation is to turn a profit. Period. It also needs to follow the law. Ethics dictates that the company must make the moral decision in light of those two rules.

Pan made a very good point about greed, and I think that my earlier post highlights some of his points fairly well (although I'll disagree that this is a recent phenomenon - there are lots of examples from the 1800's). When people get greedy (and they ALWAYS do at some point, with no exceptions), the company and employees suffer. In some cases, the entire community suffers. The ethical decision for the pharmaceutical manufacturers comes in reducing the price, not offering it for free. If the Thai government were serious, they try to negotiate bulk discounts or possibly team up with neighboring governments to negotiate as a group.

In the free market system, companies have a right and an obligation to make a profit. Roachboy may not like it, but it is the system in place and will almost certainly be so throughout all of our lifetimes. As such, there's little reason to discuss any radical changes. If "harming society" (whatever that means) will both make the company a profit and not injury the company short- or long-term, then there's no ethical reason for the company not to chose that course of action. However, I can't really imagine how inflicting societal harm could ever be at best a neutral for a company, so it's hard to imagine how the company would make that kind of decision. However, not all companies behave ethically and some do things that are bad for themselves in the long run, espeically when those things come to the attention of the greater public. Enron is one of the classic examples, and they made a lot of money in the short term over the power crises in California, only to have those choices come back to kill the company in the end.

__________________
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin
"There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

roachboy

this just seems like one of those days in which nothing is gonna happen for me in 3-d. what am i still doing here?

anyway: mr. jazz.

1. if you are going to adopt the miltonfreidman position about the role of the corporation (to make profit for shareholders etc.) then it is obvious that your position about business ethics would be. the whole business of business ethics is a huge reaction against freidman. even the terminology fight over whether one should refer to shareholders or stakeholders indicates this.

2. there is no business ethics in general. there are lots of claims floating around about what a business ethics in general should look like, but no consensus about which of these positions is most compelling. personally, i tend to favor sustainability criteria--which embody ethical positions--because i think (a) the past 30 years of neoliberalism has shown pretty clearly that the friedman position is bad ideology: bad for business, bad for states, bad for transnational institutions; (b) firms are blind to all sorts of consequences to their actions...bounded rationality is the sociological term that i think explains it best...so while i makes some sense that a firm would not explicitly decide to fuck up the social situation in country x, often you find firms doing it anyway.
how is that?
they exclude social consequences from their calculations, from their decision-making process.
what enables this? the boundedness of the internal rationality. if firm x is internally committed to a 1-dimensional profit-uber-alles worldview, and this worldview is knit into the administrative culture of the firm, it would follow that it'd be easy peasy to ignore any number of social consequences to their business decisions. the problem then is the rationality itself.

in the initial phases of globalizing capitalism, neoliberalism enabled firms to treat the entire fucking planet as one huge industrial reserve army, put all social consequences to business decisions into the externalities box and just pull up stakes and move somewhere else when the shit hit the fan. when they couldnt do that, for whatever reason, often they would simply lie (unocal in burma/myanmar, royal dutch shell in nigeria are good examples)--until the political consequences of lying became great enough that these firms were forced--and i mean forced--to change course. unocal went under ultimately: royal dutch shell is still doing more or less what it was doing before, and every last annual report has some myustifying blurb about the "war on terror" in nigeria. what a great bunch of guys--well, as individuals, the folk in either of these firms were probably no better or worse than anyone else: but within the bounded rationality of the firms, they were frankly irresponsible and dangerous people whose actions resulted in significant human rights abuses (you know: torture, rape, death, all those nice things.)

2a: i think another way of looking at the scenario pan outlined above is to see it as an index of the collapse of an older *political* consensus (fordism)--it is not that people suddenyl became greedy when before they weren't--rather they operated under a different set of political rules that they found no longer obtained. given the appalling neoliberalism of the reagan period (and after) it followed that corporations would interpret the collapse of this political consensus as authorization for anything goes. the people were the same on either side of the collapse. the rules changed because the political context changed.

there's more, but i have to get off this machine before i start thinking that my entire day has been sucked into it.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Bill O'Rights

I'm not arguing with you. I agree.
True. But, there is also no obligation for a company to follow a "moral compass" instead of another $1.50 in profits.
No..it doesn't. All business ethics dictate is that a company obey the law. No more.
You may not like it. I may not like it. we all may not like it. But, that's the way that it is, and to believe otherwise you're only kidding yourself.

__________________
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony

"Hedonism with rules isn't hedonism at all, it's the Republican party." - JumpinJesus

It is indisputable that true beauty lies within...but a nice rack sure doesn't hurt.

The_Jazz

RB: we're delving into that messy area where theory and reality meet. Clearly economic theory can never account for the individual. Humans are, I'm sure you'll agree, messy little creatures that are impossible to accurately predict individually. In other words, individuals will act in their own perceived best interests and cast aside what is the greater good, whether that be for society or "the company". That as a part of my first part as well.

Why do firms fuck up the situation in country x when it is against their best interest? For the same reason that many people think the US invade Iraq - the guy in charge thought he had a score to settle.

No one has a crystal ball or a supercomputer capable of predicting all outcomes of a particular action - the butterfly effect still reigns supreme in the business world. I can tell you that from my point of view as someone who views himself as a success in business, I can tell you that every success that I have comes because of personalities. The same is true of some of the biggest companies in the world. Hank Greenberg, who ran AIG until fairly recently, cut deals over dinner and drinks and left the details to be worked out by the lawyers or underwriters.

As far as individuals go, I'm sure the people at Unocal shared a large part of the blame for Nigeria's problems. However, they're not the only ones. The Nigerian government was and is full of folks who enriched themselves quite a bit at Unocal's teat and managed to create their own domestic policy.

Which leads us back to the question of pure government-funded research. That's something that I completely object to, for that reason above.

__________________
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin
"There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo

Willravel

I need to chastise your business teacher. Criminality is only on facet of business ethics. Hostile takeovers are not illegal, but can often be unethical. Corporate social responsibility suggests that organizations should consider the interests of customers, employees, shareholders, communities, and ecological issues in every decision they make. As such, the obligation extends beyond legality and profit. Any and every organization that is run by moral people should always have these considerations.

Bill O'Rights

Feel free, though I highly suspect that he is long since retired. My observations are taken from years of experience in the actual business world, where actual business takes place, as opposed to the classroom, where only theories as concepts are examined.
You seem to hold some very lofty ideals of what the corporate world should be, and I'm not saying that you're wrong. What I am saying is that the "real" world is a very different place than the Utopia that you imagine.
Business is in business to make money. Period. Every dollar spent has to realize a value. If not directly to the bottom line, then to public relations. You, for example, are far more likely to buy your widget from a company that puts a few dollars into...say the environment, than you are from a company that doesn't. If there are enough people of your mindset, then it becomes advantageous for a widget company to spend those environmental dollars. There is a monetary value gained. Ethics can be relative...dollars are not.

__________________
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony

"Hedonism with rules isn't hedonism at all, it's the Republican party." - JumpinJesus

It is indisputable that true beauty lies within...but a nice rack sure doesn't hurt.

Willravel

I worked as vice president for a corporation for 2 years. In the real world. By the time I had left, we had consistently given 10% of our profits back into our community without fail. We supported a tee ball team, we donated to the Michael J. Fox Foundation (I know someone who works there), and we hosted free community food drives for local shelters. Guess what? It was easy. It took almost no management, it ended up being a boon to community relations, and I slept like a baby knowing I was doing good.

One could make the argument that the dollars we spent had value in customer relations and community relations, but frankly those considerations should be secondary. I should have to make the case for $$ to my boss in order to justify doing the right thing. We had two great years where profits soared and all of the employees, myself included, had fair salaries and hourly wages. We helped kids learn teamwork and to learn excellent exercise skills, we helped people who may not have eaten eat, and we could have helped to cure Parkinson's.

BTW, ethics aren't relative. People are able to bend or break their ethics when they allow greed to tempt them away from doing the right thing. This is going to sound despicably self centered, but the world would operate better if corporations were run by people like me. Profits may not be as high, but lives would be saved or at least extended. Since the introduction of the first AIDS medicine into Thailand, AIDS has dropped 70%! Can you imagine that number in Africa?

With Abbott, when they heard that the patent was going to be broken, they pulled arthritis, blood pressure and even AIDS medicines from the Thai market. That's not valuing the dollar, that's an act of vengeance. It would be easy to say that Abbott was afraid that they were worried that their other patents would be broken, but why would a government need to break a patent on arthritis medication?

FoolThemAll

It definitely sounds like there was a little bit of vengeance in that decision. The ideal reaction wouldn't include the removal of a drug that the Thai government hadn't already stolen. But then, in this situation, I'm not sure I can blame them all that much for acting less than ideally - large-scale robbery does tend to raise tempers.

And without treading too much onto a slippery slope argument - the Thai government already decided that it's okay to break patents in response to exorbitant prices, what's the remaining unshakeable moral principle that prevents them from breaking patents for expensive prices? premium prices? more-than-dirt-cheap prices? Is the arthritis patent really perfectly safe?

I agree. And businesses that can afford to contribute to effective charities or lower huge prices without endangering the bottom line should do so. Companies that can and don't, have room for ethical growth.

But as for governments that compel businesses to attain this level of ethics through patent-breaking or punitive fines or what have you... I don't consider those governments very ethical, either. I place them on the same level as governments who would arrest adults for binge drinking or risky sexual practices - they're busybody governments, sticking the legal nose where it doesn't belong. To some extent - and what extent? therein lies the debate - governments should allow both citizens and businesses to behave unethically. Otherwise, we've got the incoherent notion of liberty as "the freedom to do that which is right", and I had enough of that idea at Hillsdale, thankyouverymuch.

'Course, public funding for pharmaceutical research just mucks it all up...

__________________
I wonder if we're stuck in Rome.

roachboy

without actions like that taken by the thai government, what capitalism effectively is saying is that the lives of the children of the affluent are worth more than the lives of the children of the poor.
in other words, the extension of capitalist market relations into areas like medicine is itself unethical.
what it amounts to is the subordination of the physical well-being of people in the southern hemisphere who are poor to the profits of trans nationals based in the northern hemisphere. i see no way to justify that ethically.

2. i see no problem---at all---with state funding of pharmaceutical and other medical research because it functions to remove aspects of medicine from the context of capitalist market relations.

even within the ethically impaired context that is the united states, state funding is already the underpinning for this illusory (see the article i bit above) rapid advance in research. without that funding, i think much ongoign research would collapse. this because it appears that big pharma treats research costs as externalities, these corporations presuppose state funding, they rely on state funding. so you have all the problems of unequal access to drugs based soley on income WITH such funding and its elimination would only make an already repellent situation much worse.

if anything, because in the present context expansion of state control is the simplest way to reduce the impact of capitalism on health care, i would favor its radical extension---universal health care is a basic human right and its provision is an infrastructure function. the sorry history of neoliberalism implemented over the past 20 years has amply demonstrated that market relations never increase efficiency in infrastructure areas, and that the whole idea that they would has been proven over and over again to be nothing more than a neoliberal fantasy.

not only do i not see a problem with this, i do not understand what the basis for arguments to the contrary could possibly be.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

FoolThemAll

And with actions like that taken by the thai government, it's effectively saying that it's okay to steal the results of research without just compensation. It's effectively saying that it's okay to steal. Tomayto, tomahto. Any way of thinking will "effectively" say abhorrent things, because no way of thinking comes without its negatives.

It'd be naive or dishonest to say, however, that the justification for patents lies in valuing affluent children more than poor children. At least as naive/dishonest as saying that patent-breakers approve of theft in general.

I do. Medicine requires time, effort, and resources. The providers of said time, effort, and resources should be the ones who decide where the medicine goes.

I think the disagreement here goes to a very fundamental level: whether need of a product is equivalent to a just claim to the product. I don't think it is. Thus, I don't understand how health care could be considered a right.

__________________
I wonder if we're stuck in Rome.

Nimetic

Doctors are business to save lives? Yeah. Just like mechanics are in business to save cars - and dentists are in business to save teeth.

It's more complicated surely.

Willravel

These are good and important questions. I believe that the WTO grants governments the power to break a patent, but I'm still fuzzy on the particular protocols involved, which can be blamed on the media who reported on this very important story. According to the internets, the procedure is laid out in the Doha Declaration. Unfortunately, there is little information I can find on who is allowed to make the determination as to when and why a patent can be broken. The language is vague enough to where it could legally be taken advantage of (like Abbott in Brazil, where Abbott is taking a loss trying to give AIDS medicine to Brazilians).
Well put. I couldn't agree more.
Ah, but this isn't as simple as a government trying to force ethical behavior. People are dying, and by the truckload. This should, first and foremost, be about saving lives. All other considerations, though important, are tertiary.

roachboy

just compensation? a non-profit can use revenues for salaries. that is just compensation. profit is not.

stealing? you act as though existing ip law, existing conceptions of property and property relations are not political expressions. any legal parameter is a political parameter as well. in a case like this one, the thai government is effectively rejecting the political logic and enframes drugs as property in the way that a lawnmover is in the way that a hat is. seen from this angle, their actions are a political act. another reason perhaps why the americans and their lackies in the wto have no moved against thailand over this may be that big pharma and the governmental apparatus that serves as its proxy does not want to find itself in a public legal fight in the context of which it would actually have to defend the "right" of tncs to subordinate the well-being of actual human beings to profit. such a proceeding would do irreperable damage to the logic that you would defend, fta: as theater, as political theater, forcing big pharma into basing a legal action on this logic would place them in a wholly untenable position.

there is a problem in this. the problem is that the choice human well-being without regard to income vs. the desire of pharmaceutical firms to generate profits for shareholders IS an ethical problem and that there is no way to generate an ethical argument FOR the subordination of human life to profit.

on the question of health care as a basic human right: this too is a political question wrapped around an ethical core: at issue is the kind of society would would prefer to see: one that views human well-eing as a central collective goal, a kind of infrastructural feature, or one that views profit for the holders of capital as the paramount collective interest. this does not turn on the question of business yes/no as business can operate in either context: it is a question of the politics of that context, of collective values. in the states, we have experienced some 25 years of neoliberal ideology in a position of such hegemony that it does not even have a name domestically: within this ideological context, wherein almost all relay systems (media) are held by for-profit corporations, it is not surprise to find that. absent significant masspolitical opposition, we have been subjected to 25 years of illusion, 25 years of self-evidently false claims that there is no meaningful choice to be made between corporate profits and overall well-being of a society.

to see that this is false, look around.

the united states is a brutally stratified class society: the dominant ideology addresses this by pretending that class is no longer a variable. everybody is middle class. this is self-evidently false empirically--ideologically, however, is must be held to be true because it functions as a demonstration of the otherwise vacant claim that capitalist markets, left to themselves, can be confused with the rational, that no-one is responsible for attending to the human consequences of capitalist operations because to do so would be like trying to stop the tides----because markets are necessarily rational. the fact that this flies in the face of 150 years of the history of actually existing capitalism is apparently of no consequence: the population functions with a deep historical ignorance it seems and an even deeper desire to believe what they are told so long as what they are told comes packaged in simplistic formulas and reassuring slogans--particularly of the type that reassures the television viewer that this brutal systems is in fact the same thing as a free system, that this powerlessness is in fact power, that this irresponsibility is the fullest manifestation of responsibility, that the distinction between actual holders of capital and the rest of society can be erased behind a myth of universal social mobility in which isolated, powerless individuals can, through gumption and other such subjective attributes, become part of the bourgeoisie--this because people apparently would rather believe in a simple pretty myth than look at a complex and ugly reality....

(all the above applies in spades when you start thinking about northern hemphere.southern hemisphere socio-economic relations, profoundly assymetrical relations fobbed off for domestic television consumption as transient distortions which are only comprehensible as distortions because you as a viewer already believe such nonsense as "the level playing field" and the "virtues of competition between manly firms in a free market"--both of which effectively make it impossible to even begin to understand what his happening behind the facade of "globalizing capitalism")

people in the states like to pretend that belief in the illusory capacities of markets to "float all boats" (or whichever of the equally empty and misleading metaphors for market rationality you prefer) casts market rationality (whatever that is--markets dont embody reason, they do not have natural tendencies, they are not natural formations--historicall speaking if markets tend to anything , it is toward concentration) as a type of Fate which enables you to explain away the consequences of capitalist relations as if markets were the instrument employed by some god--so that all the human consequences of a profoundly irrational socio-economic system become non-issues because all is in a sense written or determined in advance by this god (market rationality, whatever that is) and so people deserve whatever happens to them.

at all points, people who are not you are treated as things, signs of a divine order, debris thrown aside by the March of Captialist History--and no-one, anywhere, ever has to take any responsibility for any of it--except perhaps in the context of some televised documentary that illicits these empty feelings of pity the primary function of which in this ideological context is not to reveal something about the irrationality of the order itself that would produce such consequences on other human beings--rather, these documentaries provide an occaison for you to congratulate yourself on the fact that you are not the people you are watching, but rather are among the set of people sitting in their living rooms watching those people. so even when you are shown the human consequences of this system, you interpret those human beings as signifiers, as things. and the ideological framework you bring to bear on the watching leave you no reaction but this meaningless, empty pity, which leads you to nothing once the brief period of self-congratulation ends. except maybe for a subsequent period of shame for that moment of self-congratulation. but that passes, like gas.

it is a beautiful ideological framework. from it follows the possiblity that one could claim that corporate profits are more important than allieving human suffering and disease. this priority accorded to profit is apparently the amurican way.

that we operate within an ideological context that divorces the idea of ethical choice from those of the consequences of the normal operation of capitalism does not mean that we, collectively, do not still make ethical choices. we do. we make really bad ethical choices that, like big pharma and the us government and the wto, we are unwilling to face down. so we prefer to avoid the questions, avoid the problems. pretend they are something else. and like big pharma, the us government and the wto with respect to thailand, this becomes clearest when a situation arises such that the frame of reference within which this facing-down unfolds cannot be controlled.

so i dunno: human well-being vs. corporate profits. if you cannot accept the premise that these are identical functionally speaking, then there is an ethical problem. that the united states functions within a system that self-evidently privileges profits over human life is a bad ethical choice. bad ethics, bad politics, bad context, bad for business, bad for people. the question of one's attitudes toward health care, its availability and its costs, is but an index. it is an unpleasant one, because it is far too easy to think about actual human beings across this. better to run away into the mythologies of how wonderful "free marekts are" and with that to run away from reality.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

FoolThemAll

Sigh... roadblock. I can't wrap my mind around the idea that "profit is not (just compensation)". Not sure what else to say here.

Lots of things are political acts. Eminent domain is a political act, rejecting the political logic of real estate property rights. Indefinite detainment of enemy combatants is a political act, rejecting the political logic of the fourth amendment. And then there's the political act of patent breaking, rejecting the political logic of drug property rights.

So I don't really understand your point here. It's possible for a given political act to be morally reprehensible. I'm arguing that existing ip law isn't solely political, it has a moral dimension as well. Every result of human deliberation does.

Unpopular, probably, but certainly not untenable. People absolutely do have the right to hold profit above the well-being of other human beings. Companies are not and should not be required to ensure the safety and nourishment of a man two continents or two blocks away before profiting from goods sold or services rendered. It may be the morally ideal thing for that company to do, but it ain't the least bit moral to use the force of government to compel such actions.

There's no nobility in it. There's no sacrifice in it. Most importantly, there's no productive effort in it.

Because it's not your property that you're trying to give away.

An ethical argument for the subordination? I'm betting it could be done situationally, but in general, no, I agree. There is a way, however, to generate an ethical argument for ALLOWING others to make that subordination. See above.

To make it clear: I'm not defending the ethics, although I think it can sometimes - but definitely not always and probably not often - be done. What I'm defending is the right. Individuals should follow the golden rule. Collective power structures with a monopoly on the use of force - governments - should use the silver rule: don't do unto others what you wouldn't want done unto you. I wouldn't want other people deciding that I can't use my property in a way harmless to the property of others.

When you argue that the opposite side favors profit above all else, this is why you're off the mark: it's liberty that's favored above all else. Even when that liberty would let greed in through the backdoor of human depravity. It's not "human well-being versus corporate profits", it's human well-being versus human liberty. The two are frequently irreconcilable.

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I wonder if we're stuck in Rome.