I am linking to a powerful TED talk about the state of American food and health. It is particularly revealing at showing the absolute contradiction between putting profit ahead of everything and the complex moral relationships that make up human existence.
I have spent several years teasing out the complex threads that enable many well- meaning people to equate corporations with the market and with ‘free enterprise.’ This equation has blinded us to the rise of an inhuman force that preferentially elevates the worst among us to positions of power in the economy and politics, and is bit by bit destroying this country. These are strong statements, and I am still a bit overwhelmed with the information I need to bring it all into focus, not because there is so little but because there is so much.
One crucial fact is that any CEO who allows humanitarian sentiments to interfere with maximizing profit is, from the perspective of Milton Friedman and those who think like him, stealing from shareholders. Further, he or she open themselves up to unfriendly take over bids by people worse than they are- as we saw here in California with Pacific Lumber and Houston’s MAXXAM corporation.