New capitalism, or just another way to...

[Tero]

..fool consumers into thinking the corporation is a good guy?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/simonmainwa ... ce-brands/

[Hermit]

[Brian Peacock]

Article posted three years ago.

Customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their use of social media tools to share what they care about and the smartest companies will see this as a business opportunity. The process has begun but it needs our support.

And companies have become increasing sophisticated in how they present their good news, good works, and their intrinsic fabulousness. But does...

• "Like us on Facebook, and win a chance to be entered into our prize draw and a chance to win a year's supply of Waldos and Widgets."

..actually fool anyone, bring social kudos, or make their business any more ethically sound or any more profitable? Seems more like a way for the marketing dept to audit their self-asserted awesomeness to me.

[Tero]

I've seen many "like" Target on Facebook, but not WalMart.

[Tero]

Pitchforks are coming
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... ats-108014

[Brian Peacock]

From the link...

At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent.

But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.

And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.

If only the rich were actually getting with the message of The Spirit Level. Unfortunately they think that squirrelling away some piles of money will insulate them from the horrors of a society they will still have to operate and raise their families within. What is outlined here is akin to what Hobbes called 'the war of all against all', a situation in political systems are degraded to the point where they hold no authority and have the means to regulate or mitigate the excesses and deprivations of citizens, where each citizen must secure whatever they can for themselves without the support or protection of a functioning and ordered society...

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, not culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3207