Entry 547, on 2007-06-03 at 20:42:11 (Rating 4, Comments)
This is an alert! The following is a classic anti-corporate rant... I'm so sick of the evil of big business. If all the big corporations in this world disappeared tomorrow I would be prepared to put up with the temporary disruption to get to the better world that it would create! Well, realistically that's probably not true, because the western world is so locked in to the corporate model that it probably wouldn't survive.
The reason I'm launching into this rant is two news stories I have seen and heard recently. The first was concerning our old favourites, the tobacco industry, and the second was concerning the latest enemy: the music industry.
The tobacco industry surpass any measure of evil I have ever heard. They are the biggest mass murderers on the planet. Worse than the Nazis, worse than Stalin, even worse than the Catholic Church at its height! Last century they were responsible for 100 million deaths, and next century the prediction is for an even billion! Yes, tobacco use is growing in the world, because as the western world catches on to how they have been exploited by the tobacco companies, the big corporations move on to the developing world and kill people there for profit instead.
Internal documents now reveal that the companies knew that tobacco was addictive and caused cancer by the 1950s at the latest. They deliberately put health warnings on the packets because that was helpful in their "informed use" defence in lawsuits. They deliberately targeted young people with campaigns that helped them get over the initial aversion to cigarettes so that the addictive properties could take over.
Compared with that the music industry seems totally benign, but in some ways they are just as bad. Their representatives in the RIAA are harassing innocent people and trying to destroy new ways of distributing music wherever they can. They warn that the music industry will be destroyed by on-line piracy (who associated the word "piracy" which originally meant murder, plunder and destruction with something relatively harmless like copying software and other media). That sounds bad, but its really good. We want the music, not the industry. If the industry was destroyed we would have more equitable means of distribution and sales. That's already happening, and it might be bad for the music industry, but its good for music.
So I think evil is the ultimate destination of any organisation which gets too big and powerful, in an area like business where profit, suppression of competition, and dishonest self promotion are already prevalent its hardly surprising that we get this sort of end result.
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