In Reply to: Who is the real villain? posted by Alan on June 14, 2004 at 07:56:24:
I highly recommend the book entitled "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power" There is also a documentary of the same name based on the book. The following review is from amazon.com.
In The Corporation, author Joel Bakan paints the world's largest and most powerful companies as greedy psychopaths whose relentless drive for profits is destroying lives, damaging communities, and endangering the planet as a whole. We all pay a price for the corporation's flawed character, he argues, with devastating consequences that include the deadly cloud of lethal chemicals that killed thousands at Bhopal, India, in 1984, and the Alaskan oil spill of the Exxon Valdez in 1989. Bakan, a professor of law at the University of British Columbia, believes the lying, scheming selfishness of the world's dominant economic institution must give way to more human values. The manifesto has spawned a documentary film, also called The Corporation.
In the book, Bakan tells compelling stories of corporate malfeasance with the help of a corporate spy, a labour activist, and a member of the Arctic Gwich'in Nation. He tackles the issues of sweatshop labour, vehicle safety, and marketing to children. As an ultimate example of corporate hypocrisy, Bakan points to the chasm between the Enron Corporation's cleverly crafted do-gooder image and its actual operations. "Unfortunately, this paragon of corporate social responsibility, Enron, was unable to continue its good works after it collapsed under the weight of its executives' greed, hubris and criminality." Bakan ends by listing ways to harness the pathological self-interest of the corporate leviathans: Corporations are our own creation, he argues. They have no lives and powers beyond what we, through our governments, give them. The change, he says, will come from all of us. --Carolyn Leitch