a corporation is a government sanctioned excuse to be as selfish as possible. it sounds bad but thats really what capitalism is all about.
the problem is that people can be really harmfully selfish to other poor foreigners who they dont know and corporations can get extremely powerful.
they can get more power than any person due to limits on the liability of the investors and the ability to combine multiple investors. they can get more selfish due to the disconnect between who gives the orders and where the orders are being carried out.
i imagine its easier to order your friends in latin america to do your poor-exploiting dirty business than it is to actually go there and beat them up yourself. if you are the one single guy who made that decision, you can make it and then forget it. and all of the people you ordered will struggle with it and will eventually decide that they must follow the horrible orders so that they dont get fired, for their family and their financial security.
if the people who made the decision had to implement it themselves, then the people implementing it would be implementing it for the sake of profits, or a cushy little bonus, not for their desperately needed job security. its a lot easier to hurt people if it means you keep your job and not hurting them means you immediately become impoverished. its a lot easier to make the decision to hurt people if you dont see them and you never will and you have no need to think about your orders again once you give them.
corporations arent evil, the authority who lets them get away with ever doing anything that isnt for the greater good is. they have been given special priveleges in order to stimulate the economy, which im sure they do to some extent.
the problem is that stimulating the economy does not neccesarily mean instant greater goodness. everyone in the repugnicant party seems to either think so or lie about how they think so.
for instance, oil executives had to sit down in front of congress recently to explain how and why almost-record high gas prices coincide with record high gas company profits. the assumption that i hope was mentioned is that the purpose of allowing corporations the rights that they have is not to provide opportunities for them to make more profits but to create more american good, sometimes that means no price gauging.
repugnicant ted the shriveled slime snake stevens, however, quickly denounced the silly idea of making them take an oath to promise not to lie, saying that, unlike any other extremely important hearing (ie the National Crisis of Steroid Abuse That Everybody Totally Cares About) that idea is “OUT OF ORDER!!!”
turns out, contrary to what they “testified”, many, if not all, of them WERE at some super secret meeting with scumsacks like dick cheney. i wonder what that meeting was about and how they all forgot that they had gone.
when i asked them, they said it was about unicorns. and i can tell you now that i totally believed them. because im as smart/dishonest as the american government. is the govt retarded or dishonest? which would make you more embarassed? enraged? violently revolutionary?