From: Terry W. Colvin (fortean1@mindspring.com)
Date: Sun Jul 27 2003 - 17:11:38 MDT
I agree with the analysis given of the article.
Moore is certainly abrasive and not always accurate. But he bring a
lot of points up that are just ignored by no other major figure.
I'm very much in favour of capitalism. However, it's totally unclear
to me that what we have here is capitalism -- if companies really
worked properly, then when a company lost money, the CEO would at the
least lose compensation and at the most be fired. This just never
seems to happen. It's been shown time and time again that there is
no correlation at all between executive salaries and performance of
the companies involved.
The classic example is the music industry. The accounting for the
music business divides the cash outflow into 17 categories, things
like promotion, production, artists and repertoire, etc. Of those 17
categories, the largest amount of money goes into executive salaries,
the smallest goes into artists royalties (just below "property rental
and acquisition"). This has been true for 20 years and hasn't
changed despite the fact the the major labels have experienced severe
losses in the last ten years or so. What's really troubling about
this is that it's totally unclear that the executives have any
positive effect at all on the quality of the product generated or on
the companies ability to sell the music.
In a true capitalist system, musicians who produced great sales would
be rewarded. This is only true for an extremely small number of
musicians, perhaps two dozen in the entire world -- the vast majority
sees the fruit of their labor taken away from them by fraud and
deception -- see < http://www.negativland.com/albini.html > for example.
The issue is that the corporate system completely white-washes
accountability. A corporation is considered legally a person with
the same rights as a person but few of the responsibilities.
Shareholders are unable to get any sort of accounting, criminal
behavior by the officers of the company is in practice unpunishable
-- consider the thousands killed and over a hundred thousand
seriously injured by the extreme, informed, conscious negligence of
management of Union Carbide, not one of whom ever spent a day in jail
or paid a dollar in fines!
Michael Moore points this out. No one else seems to care. More power to him.
/t
-- Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@mindspring.com > Alternate: < fortean1@msn.com > Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html > Sites: * Fortean Times * Mystic's Haven * TLCB * U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program ------------ Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List TLCB Web Site: < http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org >[Vietnam veterans, Allies, CIA/NSA, and "steenkeen" contractors are welcome.]
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