Hakan Falk wrote: > [snip] > Politics/corporations that are naive, careless, based on short term > profits and irresponsible, YES, but greedy no. I see the quarterly > profit fixation in US as more of seeking social acceptance than greed. > It is also a historical burden from the great depression.
Yes and no. Part of it is, to be sure, a psychological leftover from the great depression. But a bigger part of it is the construction of the Public Corporation. A couple of years ago a friend of mine wrote a good rant against public corporations. It's posted somewhere in his weblog. <http://baylink.pitas.com> If you can find it you're better than I am. The gist if it is this: The Public Corporation has become bad because the stockholders are only interested in their stock performance and nothing else. The CEO of the corporation is required to be concerned only with the bottom line. On the positive side of the equasion, if a CEO produces good performance and good proffits for the corporation he will get fat bonuses. But if he fails to produce high proffits and high stock prices then the stock holders can sue him. Not just fire him, but sue him for damages to recover money they think they should have made from their stock. And in some cases they can even file criminal charges and put him in jail. For this reason CEO's will ruthlessly do whatever they can to increase the corporation's proffits even if it means selling worthless products, ruining the environment, destroying people's lives, and corrupting governments. It is a system of institutionalized greed that has gone far beyond the original intent of the public corporation. This is perhaps painting public corporations with a broad brush, but it is more often than not accurate. And the American mantra of the late 1980's and early 1990's was "Greed Is Good". And now years later we are paying the price. Sorry, Hakan, but I have to disagree with you. Naive, careless, based on short term profits and irresponsible, YES, but greedy _YES_. AP -- Aviation is more than a hobby. It is more than a job. It is more than a career. Aviation is a way of life. A second language for the world: www.esperanto.net Processor cycles are a terrible thing to waste: www.distributed.net Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
