The 5 Most Horrifying Things Corporations Are Taking Over
It's true that a part of us dies every time we see Dr. Dre doing Dr. Pepper commercials, but in reality we've pretty much accepted that "selling out" is a part of life. Everybody needs to get paid, right?
But sometimes corporate sellouts involve more than cringe-worthy ads and intrusive product placement. This is when selling out starts to get just a bit horrifying.
It's kind of hard to trash talk mercenaries when The A-Team made it clear that next to being an astronaut fireman, there's just about nothing as cool as being a soldier of fortune. Still, it's one thing to hire a four-man army of mercenaries to get your watermelon crop to market, but it's quite another to hire over 100,000 private contractors to run everything from security detail to weapons training to air surveillance of your enemies.
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Guarding opium harvests.
The Sellout:
When the U.S. military is stretched too thin, private firms like Blackwater and DynCorp have graciously offered to fill in the gaps. They're kind of like substitute teachers, except instead of kicking up their heels, reading trashy romance novels and snacking on CornNuts, these substitutes are kicking up their heels and doing some Abu Ghraibing, accidental murdering and sex slave trafficking.
Since 2000, Blackwater alone has received at least $600 million in contracts from the CIA and over a billion dollars from the federal government. In all, 90 percent of their total revenue comes from United States government contracts. So what do they do with all that money? The exact same thing the military does -- security, training, humanitarian aid and jogging in time to singsong rhymes.
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And buying wicked cars for their phat cribs.
The problem, though, is oversight. Normally, the military is accountable to the government; the minute a marine screws up, a whole can of procedural hell is opened up.
Not so with private security companies, which was why when Blackwater contractors killed 17 unarmed civilians in September 2007, no one was quite sure what to do about it. And why when a former employee was accused of murder, Blackwater founder Erik Prince said all they could do was fire him. And probably why the same accused murderer was free and available for other private contractors to get him armed and back in the Middle East within months of the incident.
Via Qwiki.com
Ahhhh, good times, guys. Good times.
Not only are the repercussions of dirty dealings murky for private contractors, but also for a while there the guys were pretty much immune from Iraqi law. The fact that private security companies have to start playing by some vague rules that aren't exactly spelled out is the good news. The bad news is that once official troops finally start getting out of Iraq, the number of private contractors is expected to triple.
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"I've got an idea, guys -- why don't we just pay them by the war crime?"
The idea behind privatizing things that used to be run by the government is that private companies tend to do jobs more efficiently. Walmart gets you through the checkout line way faster than the DMV gets you a new license.
So, when privately run prisons started popping up, it seemed to make sense; if a corporation can guard, house and feed prisoners more efficiently than the government, why not let them? It will save everybody money and if it makes life harder on a bunch of criminals, who gives a shit, right?
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"Wait, it doesn't cost anything to set those chains on fire, right?"
Well, here's the thing ...
The Sellout:
As a society, you kind of want there to be fewer prisoners. Prison is about the most expensive possible way to deal with a person who is doing something you don't like. But if you're a company getting paid by the prisoner, well, you want the opposite.
So, remember Arizona's controversial anti-illegal immigrant law, which required immigrants over the age of 14 to carry their papers at all times? And how getting caught without proper documentation would get them up to 20 days in jail on the first offense? Actually, illegal immigrants are probably relieved about the 20-day thing, since the first version of the law allowed for up to six months in jail.
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And they have to share a cell with Rod Blagojevich's hair.
Now, we're not interested in debating immigration policy or border safety. But chew on the first draft of that law for a second. Six months in jail, when it costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $62 a day to house an inmate, and when Arizona claims to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 460,000 illegal immigrants. Someone was going to have to house a whole bunch of unNorth American Americans.
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"Can we just stick them in some shitty slums and harass them when they try to leave? Has anyone thought of that yet?"
It's a good thing a for-profit prison company had a plan! They didn't just have a plan, they were the driving force behind the law itself. According to this investigation, the Corrections Corporation of America, a publicly traded billion-dollar company that imprisons people for profit, helped draft SB 1070 because "immigrant detention is their next big market."
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They added, "We're also considering fucking up some babies."
Before the bill was ever introduced to legislators, before you or anyone in Arizona heard of it, a group of businessmen and interest groups wrote it, named it and voted on in at the Grand Hyatt hotel in Washington, D.C. -- not even in Arizona.
And don't think that just because the CCA had a heavy hand in writing the bill that they nobly recused themselves from campaign donations or lobbying legislators, because of course they didn't. Even better, a solid year before the bill passed, representatives from the company started pitching a prison to house illegal women and children, since women and children are clearly Arizona's number one perpetrators of mayhem.
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Oh yeah. That kid means trouble.
What's so wrong with prisons that make a little money? Nothing, except for two small things. One is that private prisons are pretty shitty at their jobs. One private prison has been accused of using beatings as a behavior management tool. At another facility, an immigrant was left for 13 hours in solitary confinement after suffering some sort of mysterious brain injury. He died not long after, and family and friends are still in the dark about what happened to him in the first place.
Unfortunately, we'll never know.
Other private prisons are accused of cutting corners to the point where the corners are no longer corners -- they're just dilapidated knobs. They cut guard pay, food quality, drug rehab programs, medical care and basic necessities like toilet paper because, hey, why not?
Let's say you're an investigative reporter. And for shits and giggles, let's say you work for Fox News. Now, let's say that you are investigating an agriculture company, and you discover the company has a stupid amount of synthetic bovine growth hormone in its milk. Which is interesting because milk containing that particular hormone is banned all over the developed world (except in the United States). So you make your report, do your consequent 83 edits required by your news station, then, presumably because your boss is the devil, you get asked to make it so the hormone sounds as harmless as apple pie. Naturally you threaten to report your station to the FCC. Then, for the sake of a good story, let's say you're fired and subsequently blackballed from the media.
Via Prwatch.org
We'll say that, hypothetically, you're these two people.
Or, pretend you work for the news program 48 Hours and you do an expose on a certain big shoe company's (Nike's) labor practices. When you try to update your report with a timely follow-up, you're denied. When you try to respond to a nasty Wall Street Journal piece about your report, you're denied. Two years later, the same station that aired your report cuts a deal with Nike and lets their sports reporters sport Nike-labeled parkas while reporting on the Olympics.
The Sellout:
In both cases, major corporations, specifically Monsanto and Nike, influenced the editorial content of news programs. In the Fox News case, the story of Monsanto's hormone-enhanced milk was hyped to the nines by the station, until Monsanto found out about it and wrote to the president of Fox News. The reporters on the story, who refused to downplay the presence of the hormone, were fired, but their story was aired in the end -- wait, actually, the Monsanto version of their story was aired. In 2003, the Florida Court of Appeals agreed that, yes, news media does have the right to lie about everything. After all, why should politicians have all the fun?
As for Nike, in 1998 Nike sponsored CBS coverage of the Olympics in Japan, and part of the deal was that reporters would wear Nike swooshed parkas while reporting. The same parkas that were presumably made in the sweatshops Roberta Baskin of 48 Hours had exposed two years earlier.
Naturally, Baskin was pissed. Especially since the upper brass hadn't let her follow up her Nike story with relevant updates or rebut attacks on her investigation. To be fair, CBS claimed the sponsorship in no way affected their coverage, and they did digitally remove Nike labels from subsequent broadcasts. To be fairer, Roberta was demoted, then granted a request to leave her contract. She quit CBS and went to ABC where, on her first day, no joke, she got a letter from Disney addressing her as a "fellow cast member."
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"This just in: the president has been shot. But first, The Princess and the Frog!"
Well we are all doomed!!!! Neural surgery private corporation: lets see if we cross this neuron with this neuron they will be slaves to buy our products (evil laugh).
ReplyDown with overpowered corporations! Down with privatization! Corporations are often evil, because most of the time they care only about profits, no matter how immoral that may be. Let the corporations be, but don't give them too much power,or we wil all be doomed.
ReplyThat is for sure!
That's a scary thought. Wasn't one of the reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire was because they contracted their army out? It was too spread out so they had to keep hiring foreigners...?
ReplyShit...
That's why I suggest we build giant rafts and live in the oceans.... I heard the companies don't like oceans, it ...it must be the water ... swing away!
ReplyGovernments and corperations are not too disimilar really. I think of them as two sides of the same crappy coin. Both would love to control our daily lives and know everything we are up to and both would love to gain something from it. Both often collude to cover up, hide things and premote various lies as facts and facts as lies. Really, we can't win, but we can try and remove the absolute power the both have. But the power corrupts and good people are too far and few between these days to trust with it. :/
ReplyThey have already controlled our lives partially!!!! You can't mention religion in schools or the public because it supposedly promotes it. Smoking is also completely banned in Indiana. Our supposedly undeniable freedoms are being taken away and denied more than ever!
People are much more familiar with government intrusion than corporate.
Isn't NUMBER 4 how death race got started?
ReplyThe Pennsylvania "Kids for Cash" scandal is probably another example of #4.
ReplyForgot to mention that the companies try to get their drugs that do not even work (or actually exacerbate the problems) prescribed by doctors because they fund their own trials and lie with statistics, using "relative" benefit rather than actual benefit. Made-up example: A medicine is tried against a placebo. The placebo helps 1 out of 100. The medicine helps 2. So the company advertises it is "50% effective", when it is really only 1% effective. In some cases, it is actually less than 1% effective. So you get charged tons of money only to get the negative side effects, but not the benefit. Plus, because of "user fees", the FDA is bought out. One of the directors said something like "I will not approve medicine if it is not from a a big company" Meanwhile virtually no doctor studies nutrition, which can fix most problems nowadays.
ReplyAnd who made the bill that introduced these "user fees"? Big Pharma ofc.
Placebos are actually pretty effective. More so than 50 years ago. It's thought that people trust pills so much that if they're told what the study's for, they'll figure out what the pills for and see those affects and exaggerate them. Or something like that. The point is, it's harder to see if a drug clearly works, especially ones with nebulous effects like anti depressents
#1 explains why there are cases where the scientists aren't allowed to know who funded them.
ReplyI died a little inside reading this.
ReplyThat interview with Roberta Baskin could totally be turned into a drinking game, you know?
Replyhow the f**k is government controlled medicine better than private?.....have you seen the info on healthcare in every country except the U.S?
Reply Hide All See All 7 RepliesThat... it's better? To the point where over 40 countries have life spans longer than the US? Not following you.
WTF? It's cause og the lack of govt. healtcare it's been s****y in the US. Govt. healtcare is about helping people. Private healthcare is about making money. of course talking about the US govt I can understand the paranoia.
No our health care is not the best and most afordable. But it's worth pointing out that the costs aren't any lower in Europe, they just get passed on to taxpayer. This also helps explain why so many of those countries are going broke. And although you'll pay a lot more here, you won't have to wait nearly as long. Last time I checked, the wait time for oral surgury in the UK was six MONTHS. Hence people giving themselves root canals.
Yes, we have seen the info on healthcare in all those other countries. It's better AND less expensive than in the US. Which is why I'm wondering if YOU have actually seen the info.
European countries do use a significantly lower proportion of their GDP on healthcare and get better results.
Forget seeing the info, because both sides of the argument can show you falsified information. Have u ever talked to anyone about healthcare in other countries? People come from Europe to America for our healthcare. We have good healthcare here, better than anywhere else, but ONLY IF YOU HAVE MONEY. Its f*****g ridiculously expensive. I had kidney failure last year, and I now owe a hospital $71,000. I should have gotten medicaid to cover it, but the hospital "lost my paperwork" and medicare only covers up to three months retroactively. I didn't find out that it was "lost" until I started getting billd for $71,000. Yeah, they took awesome care of me, I'm not dead, and now I'm healthy as a f*****g horse but my credit is fucked. So we do have awesome healthcare here. But only if you have money. If the government could somehow provide that standard of medical care, that'd be awesome, but I really don't think they will. Anyway- This is what I don't understand-we have medicare here in NY. If you don't have insurance, states have their own health care programs. So why do we need federal healthcare? I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but I'm honestly asking what's the difference btwn federal and state healthcare?
Ocrisia, the plural of anecdote is not data. Those numbers may not tell the whole story, but they tell far more of it than a few people you've talked to.
Otherwise good post, that's the trade off between the different systems. I would think that in nations like Canada, you'd see private insurers and private practices that will rush you for enough money
"Normally, the military is accountable to the government; the minute a marine screws up, a whole can of procedural hell is opened up."
ReplyROFL
This is like saying the mercs are accountable to their shareholders. Give me a break. Accountability only counts if you're accountable to the person you HARMED, not a bunch of people who don't really give a s**t what you did as long as it gets them what they want. Not to downplay the atrocities that paramilitary mercenary corporations are responsible for, but if you think the military is in some fantastic way more "accountable" you should pass what you're smoking to their victims. Oh, shit, those guys are dead, nevermind.
As a capitalist, I have little problem with privatization. Just saying. The government is just as, if not more, inclined toward corruption, manipulation, and human-rights abuse as corporations. Corporations are, at least in theory, accountable to the government, while the government has no higher power. Corporations must cater to shareholders and consumers in the same way that a democratic government must keep its voting population content, so both corporations and governments are democratic to some extent.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesIf the examples given in the article remained in the hands of the government, what's to keep the government taking advantage of them in the same manner as corporations do? State run news sources could hardly be considered to be honest: Iranian, Soviet, and Chinese news agencies are notoriously biased, despite the lack of corporate sponsorship. Government doctors have been responsible for some of the most heinous atrocities committed in the past century, as evidenced by Japanese POW camps in WWII, which were far worse, as far as I know, than the Germans', Nazi concentration camps were administered by government doctors like Josef Mengele, Soviet doctors committed similar crimes, and even in America, throughout the 50s and 60s, government doctors performed experiments on non-consenting poor/black/homeless/crazy people (See MKULTRA;eugenics). Was it private contractors who faced the warcrimes tribunals at Nuremburg? No, it was government officials of Germany who, with the consent of the state, carried out policies that killed millions of people.
My point here isn't that privatization is good, per se, but that it is irrelevant. Human beings are inherently imperfect and prone to make mistakes and give into temptation or emotion. Privatization is merely a superficial shift of power from governments to corporations,which is really just a transition from one category of powerful men to another, equally corruptible group.
That's just my opinion,off the top of my head, as well as I can articulate it in a comedy website's comment section.
The government is accountable to the voters. The corporations are accountable only to themselves.
@ Lord Magus - The corporations are supposed to be accountable to the government.
"Human beings are inherently imperfect and prone to make mistakes and give into temptation or emotion.
This explains it all.
Why can't we just pass laws that forbid companies like Nike from using cheap labor. Am I missing something here?
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesUhm, we did. With labor laws after the Industrial Revolution, when hiring children to clean up cotton/get their fingers cut off became a minor issue. Pretty sure they covered that in history class.
And so, to get around that, companies scrambled through the loop-hole we call outsourcing. The cool thing is that India, China, El Salvador, Pakistan, etc don't have those pesky labor laws! So companies can still pay laborers only a margin of their profit, and when I say a margin, I mean a really f*****g small margin.
U.S. doesn't have jurisdiction overseas. Case closed. All we can do is prohibit outsourcing (not gonna happen) or give tax breaks to companies for not outsourcing (which we already do).
Or alternatively, just stop buying from stuff produced through outsourced labour.
Haha good plan. After all, only criminals disobey laws...
The US had the luxury of passing the Industrial Revolution laws after they got through their "we need children to work so that we can support our family" phase of cultural development. Outsourcing and child labor is not going away and is, believe it or not, not a bad thing. If you immediately take worldwide child labor out of the picture, dozens of economies across the world will collapse.
It would be extremely American of us to get through the harder stages of development as a country /using child labor/ only to refuse other countries that right. You can already see the benefits of child labor in other countries paying off in areas like China, which is rapidly moving up to superpower status and getting away from the need to rely on menial labor solely. Denying other countries the right to move out of the cellar globally speaking would be a crime.
@HiddenFacedMatt Name one thing in the U.S., other than guns or food, that isn't outsourced.
If you want a reason why privitizing prisons is a bad thing, go read the manga "Riki-Oh".
ReplySince the debate continues, I will re-post my previous comment which I think summarized my thoughts and of several others nicely:
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesThe trouble I have with my fellow Americans is the cocoon world with which we live in. Things like social class and REAL leftist ideas have been excluded from arguments and the thought process because of 50 years of exceptional wealth (much of the time at the cost of poorer societies). For the rest of the world we sometimes act and think like spoiled valley girls, and most of the time it's very true. The same goes for the rational/nerd/masculine brained people of the current generations of young people (I'm in my late 20's). We can be very smart and believe we can outsmart the system, but we lack conviction in our beliefs and suffer from a naivete of the capacity of evil of the system. This whole article has to do with ACCOUNTABILITY. As bad as government is, it has SOME accountability (elections, freedom of information, laws etc.) that private industry doesn't. The problem is that the 21st century institution (the corporation) has LESS accountability than the modernist institution (nation state government). Concentration of power must always be avoided, we in the states have always seen the threat that government is but ignore other sources of power. Who has more power over your life, the white house or the fortune 500?
Translation from Commiedouchese to English: "Communism is, like, totally awesome, you guys, since there won't be any companies in the first place if we, like, apply it!"
And Conkem's reply to a well thought out and sensible post was... ach, well you can read the pathetic ettempt yourself.
This ilustrates the sides in this debate pretty clearly, as if more evidence of that was even needed.
Subversion101 illistrates his side of the debate pretty well. Conkem does not.
True. The government does have more accountability as long as they get caught red handed. But if they can pull it off and the average citizen does not see it for the sham it is, there is no accountability.
How would you know a purposeful action by them from one that is actually an uncontrollable mishap?
People b.s. each other all the time.
After looking at the comments, I would like to say that socialism is not a bad thing, as a matter of fact its quite good. I see no downside bigger than the enormous clusterfuck that capitalism has caused to this country. (This is not trolling, these are my beleifs)
Reply Hide All See All 9 RepliesI used to think the same way, until I realised both systems are crap. Total capitalism requires complete trust in corporations and the rich, while total socialism requires complete trust in government. I am not comfortable with either of these.
Koztah nails it.
The United States, as well as any modern country, has a "mixed economy". It is not capitalist and not socialist, but rather, a combination of the two. The trade-off between Socialism and Capitalism is that Capitalism favors economic growth, where Socialism favors economic stability. Stability and growth are both favorable traits, so a mixed economy attempts to take the beneficial qualities of each system. The current recession is nothing more than a fluctuation in the cycle of economic growth and decline that has been exacerbated by an incompetent application of Keynesian philosophy.
Koztah is wrong to say that Capitalism requires trust in corporations or rich people. You only have to trust a corporation if you choose to purchase their services, whereas in a command/Communist(and to an extent, Socialist) economy, you have no choice but to trust the state.
I think youll find its the incompetent application of Friedmanite policy over the last 30 years. Additionally in most cases one company makes most if not all of a given kind of prooduct so you cant evade them as easily as you seem to think.
Socialism, in theory, is the best kind of government we could have. The problem is humans by nature are greedy. A pure socialist or communist government, if it could be pure, would be amazing. But there are always people who want more, and so that's why it has failed so many times. If human beings could stop being s****y money hungry pieces of s**t, maybe we could all live in a utopia. But we never will, because we're always going to have douchebags.
Social Capitalist.
BALANCE. It's all about BALANCE; it's that way with everything in life. We have all seen examples where being to left or to right is a bad thing...
Governments can be made directly accountable to the public through democratic practices though. Corporations can only ever be indirectly accountable either through government oversight (having an institution that itself requires oversight responsible for oversight??) or just by hoping 'the market' fixes itself.
It would be an insane and impractical bureaucratic mess to have the government run everything, so private entities are necessary, but I think its extremely important that each one has a limited sphere of influence to make sure competition is their main concern and they can't ever game the system in their own favor. And some things (like the ones named in this article) really should not be subject to the profit motive.
Would you like to know what the downside of socialism is? How about 75 million dead chinese? How about piles of human skulls in cambodia? How about the population of Ukraine being reduced to eating the corpses of their starved children to survive? Mankind has produced no greater evil in all of its long history than socialism.
None of these evils are exclusive to corporations. The same exact bribes, abuses, conflicts of interest etc happen in government run institutions. The difference is that corporations can be sued, as well as criminally charged; governments by and large can not.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesPretty sure you can sue the government just fine...
In fact its easier since government has to obey national law.
When government runs everything, our government can more easily turn to a dictatorship. When we all rely on government for everything, for health care and food and money and everything else, we stop having the power to disagree with it for fear of losing the things we need to survive. That may not happen, but it could, and if we are completely dependent on government for everything, it's a lot easier for it to happen. There has to be a line somewhere. If government runs everything, they stop being accountable to anyone but themselves.
Sure you can sue a corporation, but unless you can afford to pay a lawyer what they can afford to pay one, good luck with that. Even if you win, all they can give you is money. It won't bring the loved one who died from their malfeasance back. In my mind, the only thing that has a chance of leveling the playing field is the Internet. A good publicity s**t storm is about the only way Average Jane like me can hope to get a giant company's attention.
Yeah, Disney calls all its employees cast members, working in the store, theme parks, whatever. Its a way to remind you who you're making a profit for.
ReplyIn my experience companies that call their employees "cute" names (so far I've seen cast members, associates and 'members') do so to confuse employees who don't know their rights with regards to labor laws. This allows the company to violate the "smaller" laws without getting caught and to confuse people as to whether they can form a union or not.