Business: “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power” (Author: Joel Balkan)

Get the book here…
Get the movie here…

For those of you that read my own posts concerning management you may wonder why I write so passionately about its failings as well as its dehumanizing bent towards so many in the US work force.

It would be easy to say that after 35 years in the Information Technology field I have had my fill of dysfunctional management and you would be correct in in this perrception.

You could also say that I am just another disgruntled IT professional that has nothing better to write about and you would completely wrong. I have plenty I can write about but on TECH NOTES, I write for the professional IT technician and technical manager, the latter I hope will either get some insight from my writings or already agree with them because they are among the few that are attempting to manage their projects properly while maintaining a good level of morale among their staff.

Nonetheless, I have little use for today’s modern corporation since none of them offer anythng towards the betterment of Humanity in any ethical, sociological, or morale sense of the word.

Corporations were origianlly designed to be scams no better than your typical “snake oil salesman” of yesteryear. Once banned for 200 years in Europe until re-established in England in the 19^th century, such institutions for a short time came under very severe restrictions by the English government which kept them in line for the most part.

However, over time and a result of the shrewd machinations of their owners, corporations evolved into the modern institutions that rape and pillage the economic landscape we are concerned with today. Their sole motivation for existing is to make a profit for their investors and\or owners. Any statements to the contrary are simply lip-service to the hopes and aspirations to those who are forced by our societal infrastructure to work for them and the consumers who use the products they produce.

“The Corporation” is both an excellent read authored by Joel Bakan, a noted Canadian Jurist, as well as a noted documentary film. Either or both should be read (and\or viewed) by professionals concerned by the current economic traumas that are currently plaguing the United States. All of it, fostered by the insane policies of presidential administrations since Ronald Reagan, have been created by these institutions in a very successful attempt to transfer monies and the subsequent power to the elite few.

As the “BookList” review of Bakan’s book shows below, there is very little to recommend these entities for the health and welfare of any society.

“Bakan, an internationally recognized legal scholar and professor of law at the University of British Columbia, takes a powerful stab at the most influential institution of our time, the corporation. As a legal entity, a corporation has as its edict one and only one goal, to create profits for its shareholders, without legal or moral obligation to the welfare of workers, the environment, or the well-being of society as a whole. Corporations have successfully hijacked governments, promoting free-market solutions to virtually all of the concerns of human endeavor. Competition and self-interest dominate, and other aspects of human nature, such as creativity, empathy, and the ability to live in harmony with the earth, are suppressed and even ridiculed. Bakan believes that, like Communism, this ideological order cannot last and that corporate rule must be challenged to bring balance and revive the values of democracy, social justice, equality, and compassion. This eye-opening look at a system “programmed to exploit others for profit” has been made into a provocative film documentary that could be the next Bowling for Columbine. David Siegfried”

If anyone disagrees with my contentions than I offer up the current sub-prime mortgage mess which was initiated in the United States but has spread to both the UK where Black Rock Bank has fallen prey to the same problems as well as the European continent.

The sub-prime mortgage trauma is considered by some analysts to be the largest financial swindle in US history (only upstaged by the US government and its war machine) since all of its underpinnings were well known by the institutions that encouraged such securities and their development.

The Federal Reserves recent chairman, Alan Greenspan, was the primary, central-banker, motivator behind the creation of such financial instruments with his exhortations in the 1980s that financial institutions should be “creative in their thinking”.

All of this has been continuously and well documented.

The end result of such activities has been the seemingly irreversible decline of the United States as a viable financial entity where foreign investors no longer want to invets their monies but are currently forced as a result in changes over the years to the original Bretton Woods international financial systems developed after World War II.

Michael Hudson, a noted and highly respected economist, makes no bones about our decline in his recent interview for which the transcript can be found at http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney06212008.html

Joseph Stigletz, the former chief economist, at the World Bank has made similar prognostications along with Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, a former senior economist with Reagan Administration.

None of this is new or even newsworthy anymore and Americans have seemingly accepted the current state of affairs as inevitable except for a handful that are knowledgeable enough to understand it.

As it concerns the Information Technology field, the results of such corporate scams as offshoring are slowly beginning to haunt those who created them as many such companies are expecting an unprecedented need for talented IT personnel while most such talent has already left the shores of the United States thanks completely to those same corporations that encouraged it to depart.

This turn of events will be a boon to current IT professionals that still want to work in the field and for those who would like to enter it upon graduation from university. However, the downside with this inevitability is the fact that continuing to work for such companies will only promote their continued life expectancy.

Many will merely continue to enable that which has come to destroy us…