From sentto-1246573-6201-1020505402-dannyman=toldme.com@returns.groups.yahoo.com Sat May 4 02:43:24 2002 Return-Path: Delivered-To: dannyman@catch22.org Received: from n13.grp.scd.yahoo.com (n13.grp.scd.yahoo.com [66.218.66.68]) by pianosa.catch22.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 1E0A12EA for ; Sat, 4 May 2002 02:43:24 -0700 (PDT) X-eGroups-Return: sentto-1246573-6201-1020505402-dannyman=toldme.com@returns.groups.yahoo.com Received: from [66.218.67.193] by n13.grp.scd.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 04 May 2002 09:43:22 -0000 X-Sender: dannyman@pianosa.catch22.org X-Apparently-To: tuna@egroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_3_2); 4 May 2002 09:43:22 -0000 Received: (qmail 35428 invoked from network); 4 May 2002 09:43:22 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.218) by m11.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 4 May 2002 09:43:22 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO pianosa.catch22.org) (64.81.48.19) by mta3.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 4 May 2002 09:43:22 -0000 Received: by pianosa.catch22.org (Postfix, from userid 1006) id 5FBC72C5; Sat, 4 May 2002 02:43:21 -0700 (PDT) To: tuna@yahoogroups.com Message-ID: <20020504024321.V27725@pianosa.catch22.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i X-Loop: djhoward@uiuc.edu From: Danny Howard X-Yahoo-Profile: dannyman MIME-Version: 1.0 Mailing-List: list tuna@yahoogroups.com; contact tuna-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list tuna@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: Date: Sat, 4 May 2002 02:43:21 -0700 Subject: [tuna] the fucking corporation thing Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0 required=5 tests= Content-Length: 5128 Lines: 111 well, i feel restless, so here goes. i'm not a lawyer. i don'tr know a civil trial from my ass, and i don't really care. and i'm not an economist. in fact, i feel pretty ambivalent about money, perhaps because my father's a disgusting long-haired hippie who put lsd in my water supply. so, you have to approach this shit with some detached sympathy for what i'm about to express, as a simple man, who is a closet socialist religious fanatic. in the old days, if people wanted to form an enterprise that was larger than any one of them could afford, they'd pool their money together, and split ownership. maybe at first this was a really big teepee or something. i don't know. they built the teepee because people needed a place to sleep and smoke peyote. they wanted to give back to the community. let's say they had to hire somebody to run the teepee for them. okay, if this guy turns out to be an asshole, you know who to go to - the council elders who bought the damn teepee and hired the fucking asshole. now, let's come forward to modern capitalism. all this being responsible for the teepee shit was kind of a drag, because villagers were always coming up to complain about the assjole running the teepee, and the other investors were always arguing over how much equity they had invested versus the short-term capital appreciation, and the fair-market value of these assets that were to be transferred to a third party, but he smelled bad, so everyone else was making rude comments about the smell of his camel, and, well, see, this implementation don't scale. so, instead, you have CORPORATIONS! corporations give you rules of dividing up the value of an enterprise, and how you pick the guy to run the teepee, and how you figure out capital appreciation, and blahblahblahblahblah. corporations are also nifty in that they limit your liability, so if you have a defective teepee that burns down and kills people, the only assets that can be sued for in court are the corporation's assets. all you stand to lose is the value of your corporate equity. okay, so, let's fast-forward to the modern day, where the mission of the corporation is to make the stock price higher as fast as possible. the whole original idea of like, employing people and providing goods and esrvices in the economy is this distracting sideshow to the actual important thing which is your stock price. so, we have two problems: workers and consumers can take it in the ass, because they're not the important constituents. and you have a bunch of simple-minded investors playing the biggest crap shot of all that is the stock market, winning and losing fortunes every day because it's more fun to run a portfolio that will inevitably underperform the market than it is to have a real job in one of those fucked-up corporations. let's say it's a bad quarter, and the way teepeeglobixinc is going to pull a profit and meet their revenue thingamajig so the price is whatever is to burn down the teepee, make it look like an accident, and collect the insurance money. so they do that, people burn to death, women and children and babies. it actually backfires because it was a dumbass idea from a pr point of view. now, if the village elders that hired the asshole who made that decision saw that come to pass, they'd take that shit very personally. they'd dismember the asshole who killed women and children, and they'd make great sacrifices and shjit to the gods to atone for the sins that were the consequences of their clouded quest to put people before profits. but in a modern corporation, if it gets out, you frame some middle-management guy to take the fall, the company folds, people lose their jobs, and all those fucking daytraders lose a chunk of their portfolio. but, it used to be about giving the people a place to sleep and smoke their peyote, man! where's the atonement for sins? where's the responsibility. i know it'd be a fucking logistical nightmare, especially if you think you know what the fuck you're talking abouty, but i think it'd be neat if people invested their wealth in enterprises because they were not only viable, but because they ennobled the spirit and mae a significant positive contribution to the society. this of course, is a heretical statement against the church of the unfettered, self-correcting, sanstified capitalist system as we know it today, but i think it'd be a neat thing if people were interested more than a short to medium term return on investment in the stock market, and were more primarily concerned with the greater benefit of humanity. but don't expect me to go running through the temples of capitalism casting out the money changers, because even i know it's a hazy, "best case" notion that would be hell to being to fruition, and i have more effective things to do with my life. so, fuck you for taking my raw ideas as if they were the dogma that i seek to impose on you and your fucking system. -danny -- http://dannyman.toldme.com/ -- Three Rings http://threerings.net/ Your use of Yahoo! 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