If corporations are engaging in a "capital strike"

[badtoworse]

37. A slanted, broad brush generalization and basically, a crock of shit

Do all Socialist or Marxist governments have the same human rights record as Stalin's?

I've worked for 8 different companies over a 40 year period and none were even close to what the article described. Most of the experience was in the electric power business, both domestic and international. Yes, we were certainly trying to make a profit - that is why we were hired, but every company I've been involved with had a set of core values that flowed from morality and the ethical treatment of our staff, our clients and the public.

The highest priority at the companies where I've worked has been and still is the safety of our workers. Power generation can be dangerous and we go to great lengths to provide our operators with the best training, safest operating procedures and most effective personal protection equipment available. We would not have done that if we just looked the other way and assumed the workers knew the risks when they took the job.

Respect for the environment is a similarly high priority and anyplace I've ever worked complied with the spirit of the law (filing reports with the environmental regulators and doing the cleanup), even when we knew there was no way we would have been caught had we not done so. I'll spare you the details, but I will say that I've never seen a situation where anyone attempted to cover up even a minor incident. If you article were true, we would have gotten away with whatever we could, but we didn't even try to.

I could go on about the support the local communities (charities, food banks, etc.), the training to deal with coworkers, partners, clients and the public honestly and fairly. For the last year, I've work at an investment bank advising them on investments in the energy sector and I'm amazed at how far the bank goes to insure that its clients' interests are the highest priority, i.e., higher than the bank's.

A couple of anecdotes: In the mid-90's, the company I worked for bid on a taking over a power plant at a copper smelter in southern-Peru. The plant had a substantial amount of friable asbestos that was a clear hazard to the men working there (Yeah, there are some corporations whose safety standards are low). We included the money to remove the asbestos in our bid, not because we were legally required to do so (we weren't), but because it was the morally right thing to do. Asbestos removal is expensive and we lost the bid, but no one had the slightest regret or had any second thoughts about it. Another time, we bid on a project in the Middle-East and became aware that one our foreign partners had made questionble payments (bribes) to a local official - we were out of that consortium the same day. If every corporation were as you described, we wouldn't have done either of those things.

The bottom line is the article you posted is bullshit as far as I'm concerned. Are there bad actors in the corporate world? Of course there are, but most (at least in my experience) have a moral compass. That "banality of evil" comment was particularly insulting - people in the corporate world aren't Nazis. I've worked with scores of people well enough to know if they are moral and ethical - the vast majority are and the inference they aren't is crass