I'm going to address each one of those accusations thrown at the banks by that website you quoted, Greg.
I'd say the biggest problem with these statements are that they are a hodgepodge compilation of every bad thing done by every single industry. Some of these are quite important, but they are presented in a hopelessly misleading manner.
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give CEO's exorbitant bonuses.
Not to get technical, but it wasn't illegal. It probably
should have been, but it wasn't.
The banks definitely do bear responsibility for this, but if you really want to get technical, you ought to direct just as much of your anger at the U.S. government for its lax approach to regulation in general, and then for its total hypocrisy in making the banks take all the blame while deflecting its own.
Yes, the banks behaved in an irresponsible, shortsighted, and greedy way, but if the government had exercised appropriate oversight of the banking system, it would likely have noticed something wrong.
Finally, I'd like to remind you that the bailouts were necessary, since the total failure of the banking system would have been an unmitigated disaster for the global economy. I think that the executives who awarded themselves bonuses with bailout money belong in prison, but I fully support the bailouts themselves.
They have perpetuated gender inequality and discrimination in the workplace.
Yet they have made some pretty big strides. The United States is the eighth best country in the world to be a woman, according to Newsweek.
They have poisoned the food supply, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
I agree with this one, actually. Factory farming needs to be regulated through the nose.
They have continuously sought to end the rights of workers to negotiate their pay and make complaints about the safety of their workplace.
Depends on the industry, but there are definitely some that do that...Big Meatpacking, for example. That's kind of a case-by-case thing, though, and not something that can be used against the entirety of American capitalism...it just speaks to the unholy marriage of corporation and government.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
This is referring to college loans, I take it. Well, what if they didn't offer those loans? Here's what would happen: millions of kids couldn't afford college at all.
Also, last I checked,
higher education was not a human right, just K-12.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
I also consider globalization and outsourcing to be a tradeoff, not necessarily a uniformly bad thing. Yes, it screws American workers pretty much all the way, but it also means lower prices on goods and services, and an influx of money to poorer nations.
Workers in sweatshops still earn way more money than they would have otherwise, you know. If they didn't, they wouldn't put up with it.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
I will agree with you that this is a positively despicable arrangement, although I'm much more angry at the conservative court system.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
Again, something that
some corporations do that you seem to be blaming on
all of them.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
Kind of a vague accusation, and in some cases an ethical gray area, actually. Google, for instance, sells our privacy as a commodity, and I have no problem with the way they do it. On the other hand, that new pharmaceutical industry initiative to sell medical records crosses the line. Our privacy is a very complicated thing.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
Please elaborate.
They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
Okay, first of all, most industries have no choice in that matter. Usually the government can step in and
demand that a product is recalled.
There are a few industries where recalls cannot be mandated (like the meatpacking industry again), but even in those industries they often voluntarily pull dangerous products from shelves. In most cases, the lost money from the recall is worth it to prevent bad (or worse) publicity.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
I kinda pegged the Republican Congress as determining economic policy, not the banks. It may come to the same thing, as Tea Party-esque deregulations are merely a gangplank back to the same old abuses. But it does change who we should direct the anger at.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians supposed to be regulating them.
That is a failing of our political system, not our corporations. Wouldn't you exploit such a gaping loophole if you had one?
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
Big Oil and Big Coal do, yes, but there are also plenty of companies out there that invest in green technology. Whether that's genuinely in the interests of a better world or merely an attempt to garner good publicity is debatable, but sometimes just it's not worth it to try and tease an ulterior motive out of everything these people do.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people's lives in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantive profit.
The pharmaceutical industry does do that, but there is actually a compelling case either way. Pharmaceutical companies who don't protect their patents will have very little money left to create new drugs. If generic forms of medicine were automatically guaranteed for any drug on the market, no new drugs would get invented.
Personally, I'm in favor of strict lifespans for pharmaceutical patents. This way, the companies can release a new drug, rake in the cash for maybe five or ten years, and then lose the sole rights. This way, they would have an incentive to keep churning out new drugs instead of viciously defending the right to make old ones scarce.
Of course, we also need to give them an incentive to work on antibiotics, which are alarmingly neglected. Not one of our antibiotics is foolproof anymore, but working on developing new ones isn't profitable. It's time we implemented some laws to try to
make it profitable.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty book keeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
Well, the crooked ones do, but not all of them. As an example, think about BP. Its behavior was reprehensible, but it was an extreme outlier in the oil industry. Prior to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP was cited for over 300 safety violations, whereas the second worst offender in the oil industry had less than a dozen.
In general, the really rotten companies get called out on their shit. Though one could certainly argue that it doesn't happen enough.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
Well, the conservative media is pretty susceptible to contamination, sure. Mainstream media less so, but occasionally the conservative media contaminates it too.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
Examples please?
They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
Nobody in America, corporate executive or politician, set out with the explicit goal of killing innocent civilians. That's simply a sad reality of the way we conduct war.
On the other hand, when you're talking about defense, you could certainly mention the way that Halliburton defrauded the U.S. government under the avaricious eye of the Bush Administration.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.
Well then, maybe it's time the
government stopped building weapons of mass destruction? Don't blame corporations for stepping up to fill a request; blame the government for requesting it.
They have participated in a directly racist action by accepting the contract from the State of Georgia to murder Troy Davis.
Who is "they" exactly? "They" has become a pretty nebulous concept here.
I would say something about you trying to make me look as silly as possible, Mystic but I'd rather not waste my time.
He doesn't need to. You've made yourself look pretty darn silly on your own, by swallowing and parroting the arguments of some ridiculous online fringe groups.
However I will say this, I don't give two shits about any form of economy, Party, or government. I only care for Anarchy.
Because anarchy is a totally valid and effective way of organizing a society, amirite? It's not. It's just a war cry chanted by uninformed people who are pissed off at some form of authority.
We need authority, Greg. Without it, the world falls apart. We have to be careful how we organize this authority--who gets to wield it and how, for instance--and the subprime mortgage crisis speaks to how we messed that up. But it doesn't mean we should declare war on corporate America.
Here's the difference in how we think. If something is going wrong with the system, I'm not going to call for the system to be thrown out. Instead, I'm going to ask "
Why did it go wrong, and what could we do to prevent it from going wrong again?"
Here I'm using "something going wrong with the system" in a very broad way--it could be the financial system choking on its own greed, or it could be a busload of Mexicans being trucked illegally to Greeley, Colorado to be exploited in meatpacking plants, or it could be an offshore oil platform exploding because some executives wanted to save a few bucks.
You may not like big corporations, but it's thanks to them that everything you own is cheap enough for you to have bought. I'm not saying everything about the system is a necessity--we need more transparency in corporate practices, we need to place restrictions on lobbyists (but not eliminate them outright), and we need to give the government greater power and greater incentives to fight corporate abuses. But all in all, a world with corporations is a world of much greater productivity and abundance than a world without.
So don't try and tell me I believe in Socialism. I know what I believe and I stick to it.
Okay, fine. What
do you believe? None of these protestors or websites is awfully clear, other than their unconditional hatred of corporations. Supposing you took control of the country...what would you do?
