In front of the skyline of a derelict city, a man in a torn suit and a few children in similarly ragged clothes are sitting at a campfire. The man says: “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”.
"Responsible" performance of a role in an organization doesn't put one above judgement for one's actions, at all, which may, though correct from a very narrow perspective, be horrible. The most obvious & crystal-clear examples would Godwin the thread, but I trust the idea's simple enough not to need illustration by example.
>Fiduciary duty being the highest moral imperative
But it's not. That's what laws are for. If you're just going to expect people to be moral voluntarily you're going to have a bad time, because there inevitably will be people who have lower standards of morality than you'd want.
The idea that corporations should regulate their own behavior without the threat of force/punishment? I agree. Self-regulation is a thing you lobby for in order to prevent actual regulation.
partially. the idea that the market is _the most important_ thing, and that companies know best about how to optimize, and that any time anyone tries to modulate their behavior for the social good - it turns out to be counterproductive.
I'm sorry but environmental litigation is not a simple thing any corporate officer shrugs concern for. They simply try not to know about those things or offload the risk to third party's etc.
If that is the only possible result with corporations, then continued human survival is not compatible with the continued existence of corporations.
It is possible that e.g. benefit corporations may do a better job than standard corporations, but I have my doubts that it is possible to make corporations consistently account for negative externalities under capitalism.
Not only irresponsible but a signal of corruption. Corporations should be controlled by laws and their enforcement, not the arbitrary political whims of the people working in them.
And in one sentence, you have explained why actually-free market capitalism must not be allowed to exist, and instead must be heavily regulated to allow other stakeholders to have a say in the operation of any company.
In that statement is inherent the fact that unless you put a dollar figure on an item it does not matters to capitalism. this is not a criticism of capitalism, just that how this works. what needs to happen is that we provide a value assessment for 'common goods' like not polluting the rivers or atmosphere. then and only then capitalism will start to care about them. one way of doing that is to create instruments like carbon taxes which models cost of 'making life worse for everybody' which is currently assumed to be zero.
The USSR was a state capitalist system, not sure where you got the 'communism' ideea. Something vaguely socialist happened during the original bolshevik revolution, but Lenin quickly put a stop to that and restored economic/industrial control from the soviets to the state.
Russia today is a capitalist, kleptocratic oligarchic state, highly dependent on fossil fuels.
Sure, but "communist state" is a technical historical term that is simply the shorthand tag for countries similar to and influenced by the USSR. It originates in propaganda about communism (or socialism) related to these countries, but otherwise has little to do with communism or socialism as ideological/economic systems.
The propaganda origin is two-fold. Russian propaganda used these terms to ingratiate itself both with the revolutionaries who fought against the Tsar, and with European workers' parties at the time, trying to create a positive association between communism/socialism and their regime. As the disaster of Lenin and Stalin's takeover of power and totalitarian control started to become clearer after the war, the terms started being used by European and American propaganda machines to create a negative association between the Russian disaster and communism/socialism.
The fact that this was used for propaganda and did not reflect actual beliefs about the working of these systems is visible in the way the USSR's claims about being a democracy were never taken seriously, while its claims of being socialist/communist are presented as unassailable.
To be clear, socialism has a very simple definition - "workers' control of the means of production", or, in more modern terms, "democratic organization of the workplace". Basically an economic system is socialist if most/all enterprises are worker-owned co-ops, in contrast with a capitalist system, where most/all enterprises are owned by those with capital. The USSR and most other communist countries were totalitarian regimes where those in power exerted control over all enterprises, with workers at the bottom of the hierarchy, having even less say about the direction of their work than they do in capitalist systems.
Communism as an ideological term refers to a more extreme form of socialism, where not only do workers have control of their own work, but resources are actually pooled and the entire community has a say in the direction of each enterprise, including those that don't directly work in that enterprise. It is a far more idealistic model than socialism.
It's important to also note that socialism can easily happen in a free-market system, except that labor and enterprises can't be bought and sold - only goods and services. Communism is less compatible with the idea of a market, as it implies much more direct cooperation between stakeholders.
