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Posted

As a group, probably, though the devil is not a member of the board. I just believe it's people doing evil deeds, motivated by money. Then, most go home, pet the dog and love their family like other people.

When they crunch the numbers at work it is only their stock price that matters. The team around them is a mob pushing them to abandon principles to achieve competitive goals. The non-stock holders who get hurt are the collateral damage of their bunker buster greed bomb.

Unethical behavior is "normalized." Including taking risks with people's health and environment, covering up resulting disasters and scandals, shipping jobs overseas for slave and child labor, manipulating the law and legislation, etc..

I watched the Oscar winning film NETWORK again and found it even more relevant today than in 1976. Getting screwed over by the oil industry, the prostitution of news and television, American assets being bought by foreign nations, and, of course, Americans being "as mad as hell and not going to take it anymore".

Whether you're politically left or right you're "mad as hell" at someone or something.

But the "mad" speech is generic and undefined. The speech of real substance, that should be screamed out of every window, is "The Corporate Cosmology of Arthur Jensen" delivered in the CEO's lecture:

...You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today.

...

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale.

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If you want money to "trickle down" put it in Mother Teresa's pocket, not Donald Trump's.

but, you say, "Mother Teresa never built anything. I say, think again, apprentice breath! Mother Teresa built 610 missions in 123 countries. She just wouldn't fly back and forth between her projects in a private jet. The world doesn't need more Trump building. What the world does need, now more than ever, is more Teresas.

or, you say, "how about that pioneer of proprietary profit that people all over the world lit candles for when he died -- Steve Jobs? Where would we be now if it wasn't for his keen sense of corporate greed?" I say, we would be exactly in the same place we are now, except you might not be able to play piano on your cell phone and your computer might not be as portable.

Sure, Steve Jobs was ahead of some curves. But the truth is, somebody else would have arrived at the same place a few years later. Truth is, if Jobs hadn't built his fiercely guarded proprietary hardware and software, we might now be much better off and further along with open source technology and products. Bill Gates is a shrewd businessman also, but of the two hi-tech entrepreneurs, Gates shared more of his work, and ultimately, more of his profits as a philanthropist.

You know who would have made a great project manager for open source technology? Mother Teresa. We probably would have had an electric car that anyone could afford 30 years ago! Instead of the i-Phone and i-Pad we might have the we-Phone and we-Pad. And all of them might already be in 3D now because they would have been collaborative efforts by, not only some of the sharpest minds in the world, but likely by a more psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually balanced group of contributors with a different set of priorities that could result in a better product and better world at the same time.

But why speculate? Ask any computer technician/geek/guru what operating system has been the most stable, secure, and efficient for the past 30 years. Their answer will not be Jobs' Mac or Gates' Windows. It will be the free, open source Unix/Linux operating system (Uni, meaning one, as in Universal -- as in Universal Healthcare -- which we don't have -- despite our 3D glasses.

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