corporat-greed

Talk about corporate greed and everything is really crucially beside the point, in my view, and really should be recognized as a very big regression from what working people, and a lot of others, understood very well a century ago. Talk about corporate greed is nonsense. Corporations are greedy by their nature. They__e nothing else _ they are instruments for interfering with markets to maximize profit, and wealth and market control. You can__ make them more or less greedy; I mean maybe you can sort of force them, but it__ like taking a totalitarian state and saying __e less brutal!_ Well yeah, maybe you can get a totalitarian state to be less brutal, but that__ not the point _ the point is not to get a tyranny to be less brutal, but to get rid of it. Now 150 years ago, that was understood. If you read the labour press _ there was a very lively labour press, right around here [Massachusetts] ; Lowell and Lawrence and places like that, around the mid nineteenth century, run by artisans and what they called factory girls; young women from the farms who were working there _ they weren__ asking the autocracy to be less brutal, they were saying get rid of it. And in fact that makes perfect sense; these are human institutions, there__ nothing graven in stone about them. They [corporations] were created early in this century with their present powers, they come from the same intellectual roots as the other modern forms of totalitarianism _ namely Stalinism and Fascism _ and they have no more legitimacy than they do. I mean yeah, let__ try and make the autocracy less brutal if that__ the short term possibility _ but we should have the sophistication of, say, factory girls in Lowell 150 years ago and recognize that this is just degrading and intolerable and that, as they put it __hose who work in the mills should own them _ And on to everything else, and that__ democracy _ if you don__ have that, you don__ have democracy.