FWD [forteana] Re: Portrait of a disturbed guy [Michael Moore]

From: Terry W. Colvin (fortean1@mindspring.com)
Date: Sun Jul 27 2003 - 17:11:38 MDT

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    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 >
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