Re: We are guilty when

>Jill wrote:
>>>But blaming ... or a corporation, doesn't get me many places.
>
>Tully replied:
>>I do not agree that you shouldn't complain to the above when you see 
>>their behavior as destructive and wasteful. ...

At 08:06 14/09/99 -0400, Tully wrote:
>If all of us would clean up our own acts, we wouldn't need to go to 
>congressmen, since the wasteful and destructive corporations wouldn't 
>survive our lack of support.  Its all our own faults!  What we must do is 
>motivate others, show them what they are doing, but mostly we must provide 
>examples ...

At 08:29 14/09/99 -0500, Jill wrote:     ... I think it is
>more because I find the Quaker philosophy of "that of god in every man"
>(which I try to translate into other words to fit my cosmology and
>egalitarian senses) is a good one. ... if I affirm their feelings and 
>show them better ways of behaving, trusting that they want to do well, 
>then we get much better results.  The same is true of friendships, ...
> why not corporations.  You assume good motives, talk about the 
>unforseen consequences of those good motives, and ways to remedy them.
>Monsanto is the big challenge for me here.
>  I can not find any good motives. 
> ...
>It would be more efficient to change the corporations, as there are fewer 
>of
>them, and they have a large influence, ...

**  I'm personally with tully on this, with the extra reason that no entity
should have that much nearly-unfettered power (and not-buying reduces their
power), but a general boycott would not happen because the vast majority of
people don't want to concern themselves with such esoteric matters.
**  So it seems that the two ways of _changing_ corporations: persuading
the people in them to change, and applying the sort of control the
government used to have over them about 120 years ago (e.g. disbanding them
if they acted against the public interest or no longer followed their
original charter), are all that can be done to have a measurable effect.

**  We do have to watch them carefully; there are small evidences of
change, perhaps introduced by individuals in them who are trying to turn
them onto a more (economically and ecologically) sustainable path,
monitored by skeptical directors (I'm guessing all of this) to see whether
this new direction can bring more customers, _but_ the more likely
explanation of these changes is "greenwashing"; simple PR attempting to
"clean up the corporation's image".

**  As I said at the beginning, I look at all this with the Olympian
detachment of buying nothing from corporations; I buy almost nothing
anyway, so don't have to ask myself whether I'm having the wool pulled over
my eyes or whether I should be supporting tentative moves in the right
direction.

**  Perhaps it is my civic duty to spend more! In support of certain new
initiatives by certain corporations I have personally researched. Too much
effort, I'm afraid. I find it so easy to spend virtually nothing instead.
(Less than US$900 per year buying everything I use {_very_ little energy,
it's mainly the food of a very restricted diet}, and sharing the costs of a
paid-for small house.)

David.
(David MacClement) d1v9d @ bigfoot.com (remove nospam spaces)
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/3142/Pg1-AD11.html#top
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