Showing posts with label corporations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corporations. Show all posts

8 September 2016

Libertarian right almost criticizes crony capitalism

The Blog


To demonstrate the libertarian right's failure to ever acknowledge wrongdoing by big pharma and their cronies in the US state, Kevin Carson criticized a recent Reason article.


The libertarian right-wing Reason article, while focusing blame on government regulations rather than the greedy corporations lobbying for regulations, discussed the scandal of Mylan N. V.'s high pricing of EpiPens - a type of medical auto-injector.

The high pricing happened because, as Carson explains, "FDA regulations are specifically tailored to Mylan’s product specifications so as to give it a de facto monopoly on the EpiPen". No one can compete, allowing Mylan to change any price it wants.

Authored by Nick Gillespie, the Reason article had stated, "Mylan isn’t taking advantage of customers. It is simply working a political system to its own advantages."

Kevin Carson countered, ") Mylan is taking advantage of customers by charging an enormous monopoly markup on EpiPens; 2) Mylan lobbies the government to create a rigged monopoly market so it can take advantage of its customers in this way."

Carson sees a persistent denial on the part of libertarian right ideologues to acknowledge how most successes of corporate capitalism depend on the "rigged monopoly" described above. He also draws attention to the way many right libertarians often criticize the market as not being "free" enough, yet cite the same US corporations who stifle competition as examples of success in the free market.

Full analysis: Say the Words, Nick. SAY THE WORDS!!


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31 May 2016

US regime "corporate rule" to continue

The Blog


With the final contest for the seat of United States President likely to be fought out between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the outcome will only be more continuous "corporate rule" by a hideous regime driven by endless greed.


This is the picture drawn by Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) writer Kevin Carson. Immanuel Wallerstein holds a similar position on electoral politics, viewing it as unavailing as any means of transforming the world-system.

Other political writers similarly diagnose the US "democratic" political system to be fake, much as its press freedom is a fraud and any meaningful criticisms of the regime's barbarism and war crimes are continuously redacted from newspaper and television by government cronies. The revolving door between all US corporations, "NGOs" and government departments makes them essentially fronts for the regime in Washington.

As concluded by Carson at the end of a clever analysis authored on 28 May:
...on all the issues most fundamental to keeping us from having [human-friendly economy of small-scale]  — the transportation subsidies, “intellectual property,” the global Empire and permanent warfare state — the two parties are almost indistinguishable. I don’t know — one party may give us a form of corporate rule that’s somewhat more bearable than the other. But either way it will be corporate rule, without a doubt.
Predicting none other than a continuation of endless war and the subsidizing of greedy corporations by the US regime no matter who wins the White House, Carson states of the Democratic and Republican parties respectively, "American politics isn’t divided between a Party of Working People and a Party of Big Business. It’s always been divided between two Parties of Business that serve two somewhat different but overlapping segments of the capitalist class."


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12 February 2016

Steve Topple on UK dark money

The Blog


Contributing an article to Common Space on 8 February, journalist Steve Topple criticized the relations between leading UK politicians, corporations, and tax havens.


Particular focus is on Bermuda as a tax haven in the article, with its role in protecting the wealth of unscrupulous corporations and British political campaign donors explained.

Offering a list of the worst offenders, which includes Google shareholders and Conservative donors "Lord Green (serial HSBC wrong-un and Tory crony), Lord Lloyd-Webber (all-round bad-egg and party cheerleader), and Lord Glendonbrook (donated £700,000 to the Conservatives in the past 18 months)", Topple noted that the Labour Party is also blackened by the same financial dependence on tax havens.

Exposing the unethical dark money obtained by Labour Party-affiliated think tank the Fabian Society, Topple wrote:
I wonder why beacons of social democracy the Fabians, then, have accepted £60,000 in donations from Cuadrilla (them of nefarious fracking ventures) – which is registered in Bermuda? Or £13,500 from corporate banking degenerates HSBC – who have eight subsidiaries on the island? Or £26,000 from Iglo Group (Birds Eye, Findus) - which at the time was dodging tax via Luxembourg and the Channel Islands?
Topple additionally criticized civil society organizations for talking about global wealth inequality while using investment over the stock market as a means of combating it, despite the stock market arguably being to blame for such inequality (if we ask the Occupy movement, for example).

In addition, the article mocked people's faith in the corrupt political system in the UK, arguing as follows:
Politicians can wring their silver-crossed palms, bestow us with platitudes, and give rhetorical diatribes about the scourge of inequality all they want, but the truth of the matter is that corporations are now the organ-grinders running the planet – we merely vote for performing monkeys.
The Mont Order, which Steve Topple is a listed member of, holds the same skepticism towards present forms of democracy in the UK and the US, viewing these as shallow performances to keep corrupt elites in power with false appearances of legitimacy.


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9 October 2015

Will synbio save us all from scarcity?

The Blog


Synbio has been the focus of an op-ed at h+ Magazine, where it is praised as potentially carrying the salvation of humankind.


Synbio is a shorthand term for synthetic biology, which refers to a field of biology involved in sequencing synthetic genomes to create new species from scratch. It was largely developed by a team under J. Craig Venter, who also made the achievements of the Human Genome Project.

From the Harry J. Bentham-authored article:
Like our bodies, our planet is no longer a sufficient vehicle for human dreams and aspirations. The biology of the planet is too inefficient to support the current growth of the human population. We face the prospect of eventually perishing as a species if we cannot repair our species’ oft-omitted disagreements with nature over issues of sustainability, congenital illness and our refusal to submit to the cruelties of natural selection from which we evolved. 
Once we recognize that the current species are flawed, we will see that only by designing and introducing new species can suffering, poverty and the depletion of natural resources be stopped. Once we look at this option, we find already a perfect and ultimately moral solution to the threats of climate change, disease, overpopulation and the terrible scarcity giving rise to endless injustice and retaliatory terrorism. 
The perfect solution could only be brought to the world by a heroic worker in the fields of biotech and synthetic biology. Indeed, this revolution may already be possible today, but fear is sadly holding back the one who could make it happen.
The article blamed a culture driven by profit at the expense of human needs, for preventing solutions to scarcity, disease, suffering and resource-driven wars. In the conclusion, the piece warned that if scientists do not break free from the immense corporate and industrial pressures not to share their inventions more quickly with the global poor, "we will talk about direct action to break free the scientific gifts they refused to share".


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1 September 2015

Abundance's own rentier parasites?

The Blog


Antistatist technologies enthusiast and accomplished writer Kevin Carson exposed the real behavior of corporations that claim to triumph latent network-based management and production made possible with new technologies.


In a defiant post called "Uber: NOT the Networked Successor Economy You’re Looking For", Carson pointed out that in reality, corporations such as Apple, Uber and Lyft do not create anything. Rather, they stifle other people's creativity and undermine humanity's yearning for an alternative economy driven by networks and peer-to-peer production.

Instead of creating anything, such corporations make network technologies available that could have made corporate hierarchies and the state obsolete, yet then they extract rent from them by getting the state to protect them by enforcing the suffocating idea of intellectual property.

According to Carson, intellectual property is being used as a last-ditch defense by management hierarchies who feel that new network technologies will oust them. These organizations spend less time inventing new technologies that could empower networks and individuals and make them independent of hierarchy, than they spend trying to maintain dependency so that people will not be able to use such technologies without going first to such corporations.

This situation was not necessary, Carson argues, and it will become increasingly apparent that it is not necessary as a result of new network technologies that shall "render the corporate form entirely superfluous". Carson pointed to "the rise of the open-source hardware, micromanufacturing and peer production movements" as the best observation supporting this conclusion.

While today, one cannot obtain the needed technologies to network without first going to a corporation, this is the result of deliberate steps keep to corporations in power. The entire current global mode of production has been corrupted by corporate hierarchies desperate to entrench themselves, in order to extract rent from works that they do not rightfully own - the most apparent of which today is the Internet itself.


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