@tryit: In the USA people are taught to give a company a lot of leeway and respect. If a company wants to do something, it's a yes first think later. That's a cultural thing. A kind of collective optimism that I lack, and that allows Americans to do great things quickly.
So I think if you say that corporations should go under on a forum like this I would expect the average person to not be very happy with you. They're probably not very happy with me right now. It's interesting, because it's an idea. And for some reason we attack people for having ideas instead of attacking the ideas. And tomorrow I change my mind. I guess that makes me a new person tomorrow. It happens all the time. I am very grumpy today, so right now I have a hard time 'caring' even though I really know I should.
The idea that a corporation provides (a small portion of the) money for a lot of people is not impressive to me, so it's easy for me to not think about the amount of people that would get in trouble if a large corporation would fall. But of course that's there. It's a real thing that would suck for a lot of people. The other side of the story is that I don't think we can let corporations get away with bad things just because they have all these well-meaning employees they can keep 'hostage'. Where do we draw the line, right? I believe we need to think about that, and not just default to "We cannot let this company fail because too many people are involved."
I do believe that continuously apologizing for corporate encroachment has led to corporations in the USA (and many more places in the world) to become so powerful that they are influencing elections and decisions, leveraging their positions in ways that are not fair for the common people. And I am frustrated about that. I don't know any other way to do anything about that than to bring down the whole corporation. Or at least make the situation so scary for them that they have to change course a little, because they are legally or financially risking too much by not changing course.
I'm a bit of a pessimist maybe when it comes to corruption in any system, but I don't believe that the law is still in the hands of the people. And I am concerned that even the online conversation may not be in the hands of the people 20 years from now if things continue to divide into the kind of executive/capitalist/inherited-elite vs. common people type situation. At some point you have to wonder (in more countries than the USA) "If we vote for this group instead of that group, does it matter if both groups are listening to the same small group of people who hold all the dollars?" I think we need to steer away hard from that situation. And today I tried to do that by writing a bad post. Oh well, some days are like that.
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