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Theben
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Dance Dance for the Revolution!
Jan 1970
time: 00:32
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quote:
Originally posted by JohnT
I just don't understand how people can spend their lives worrying about Coca-Cola and US Steel when governments, Right and Left, have shown a far superior ability to control, destroy, and kill than even the most rapacious and greedy corporation. Even more bizarre is how these people turn to government, despite its thousand(s) year history of brutality, to "save" them from the corporations. |
Maybe because people feel connected to the govt, and not to corporations? We* have no ability to influence corporations; there is no vote, no publicly elected officials, and no corporate mindset equivalent to nationalism. You could argue that we vote with our purchasing power, but that lasts only as far as the particular product is not monopolized, which all corporations eventually lean towards.
*-the non-shareholding public, which is most people.
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JohnT
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Capitalist
Mar 1999
time: 00:32
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quote:
Originally posted by Spiffor
...since all informed people just know the corporations always dispose of their dump in the most responsible way. |
Again you put words in my mouth. Having never debated you before, methinks this is likely a common occurance given that you have done it no less than three times in this one thread.
I didn't say that corporations "dispose of their dump in the most responsible way", not even close. What I said was that I was interested in numbers, facts, statistics that help buttress an argument, not hypotheticals nor extrapolations involving taking actual events, multiplying by 10, and saying "See!"
Had anyone bothered to do a couple of minutes of googling, they would've found plenty of data to support their arguments.
Endgame.org, hopefully a sufficiently anti-corporate site for the likes my opponents, claims the following:
quote:
In the U.S. alone, it is estimated that 10,000 deaths occur each year due to routine industrial accidents; another 100,000 deaths occur due to occupational disease; and 30,000 deaths and 20,000,000 serious injuries due to unsafe consumer products. |
Other sites have wildly differing figures - one of Naders sites claims 66,497 industrial deaths in 1992, another (a lot more loopy (lots of rants about Bildebergers, the Tri-Lateral commission, and LETTERS IN ALL CAPS)) claimed 5,000/year, but the most common figures in the anti-corporate sites were roughly equal to that above.
However I should note that the US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics states that the number of people killed on the job ("routine industrial accidents" in the above quote) averaged around 6,000 for the past 7 years - of which, nearly 20% are the result of non "industry-caused" traffic accidents and 16% are the result of homicides and violent assaults by persons on persons (here are the year 2000 stats if you care to check my math.) So 1/3 of all "occupational" deaths in the US have nothing to do with the occupation. Please note that these figures include deaths from long term injuries and afflictions, including "occupational disease."
Thie above holds true for the few years that I checked, so I can (almost) safely say that the 10,000 figure quoted above from endgame.org can be discounted by 1/3 for the simple reason that the peoples jobs or their employers were not the primary cause of death. (Yes, I know: if they weren't on the job, they wouldn't have gotten into an accident.  ).
Their other statistics don't hold up either. 30,000 deaths from unsafe consumer products is what they claim, but the US Consumer Products Safety Commission National Electronic Injury Surveillance System states that an average of 7,000 people a year die from consumer products - and no, I didn't bother to check how many of them were attributable to user error, but I'm sure that a large portion of them are.
OK, so we have 13,000 deaths a year directly attributed to corporations here in the US, regardless of fault. Now how about the government?
According to this site, the US governments (State and Federal) have killed from 282,000 people to 1,634,000 people, with the mid-range estimate being 575,000 (over 88 years). This comes to an average of 6,534 people, slightly over 1/2 of the 13,000 figure above*.
However, let's again note that a significant percentage of occupational (36%) and consumer product (?%) deaths are not the result of a malevolent corporation, but are either common accidents that can occur regardless of whether you're on a job or not, or are the result of negligence by the user. If you discount the figures you come to the conclusion that here in the US, corporations are, at worst, only slightly more dangerous than our governments.
*For democratic governments (France, the UK, the US, etc) in total the average shoots way up to 65,377 (though I admit the man might've skewed his statistics against the democracies by including the last two years of WW2 and stopping at the end of the Vietnam war).
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Dr Strangelove
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IIRC in Africa in the 19th centuries corporations did indeed kill hundreds of thousands. The mines of the Belgian Congo were particularily notorious. The would send gangs out to Africa villages to forcibly "hire" laborers, then cart them off to the mine where they were worked to death. Resisters were shot. The situation in Angola was nearly as bad. In east Africa the ivory traders of Zanzibar were reputed to have killed up to one million Africans in order to sustain the ivory trade. Oh, and don't forget about the slave trade. Infact it was the scandal of these corporate excesses that became the cause-or excuse- for the gigantic land grab by the major European colonial powers in the 1880s.
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JohnT
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Capitalist
Mar 1999
time: 00:32
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quote:
IIRC in Africa in the 19th centuries corporations did indeed kill hundreds of thousands. The mines of the Belgian Congo were particularily notorious. The would send gangs out to Africa villages to forcibly "hire" laborers, then cart them off to the mine where they were worked to death. Resisters were shot. The situation in Angola was nearly as bad. In east Africa the ivory traders of Zanzibar were reputed to have killed up to one million Africans in order to sustain the ivory trade. Oh, and don't forget about the slave trade. Infact it was the scandal of these corporate excesses that became the cause-or excuse- for the gigantic land grab by the major European colonial powers in the 1880s. |
Dammit, dammit, DAMMIT! I had a very nice history of the slave trade (nice as in informative, lots of pages (about 700, iirc) charts, graphs, data, stuff like that) that actually had statistics for "type of entity" (for want of a better phrase) who purchased slaves. Anyway, from what I remember well over 1/2 of all African slaves were purchased or captured by representatives of their various governments, including government-chartered corporations - especially those of Portugal and England (who was the largest slave trader of all). About the only government that didn't profit from directly trading slaves was the Spanish - but even they granted monopolies (asiento's) to favored interests to participate in the trade as long as the traders were sure to pay their slave-tax.
If I find the book, I'll get the numbers. My apologies for asking people to take me at my word.
Last edited by JohnT on 30-11-2003 at 07:48
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Dr Strangelove
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quote:
Originally posted by JohnT
Anyway, from what I remember well over 1/2 of all African slaves were purchased or captured by representatives of their various governments, including government-chartered corporations - especially those of Portugal and England (who was the largest slave trader of all). |
just because a corporation is government chartered doesn't mean it is an entity of a government.
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