A corporation is owned by several people - sometimes thousands - called  shareholders. Because no business can successfully operate with more than two or three "bosses", corporations hire managers to run the company for them.  So now we have two groups of individuals, management and ownership.  Sometimes they are the same people and sometimes not.

As a result of pressure from nineteenth century  "robber barons", the government ruled that a  corporation was an individual, with all the First Amendment rights of expression and speech that any other individual in this country has.

Unless the corporation is owned by single person or a church or a municipality, it exists only to make money. It’s answerable to its shareholders - and all they want to see is their share’s value go up. It is run by  management who who also want to increase their income - salaries, bonuses, etc.

The difference between a simple company and a corporation, is that when a company borrows money, it pays a fixed interest rate and has to pay it back.  Generally speaking a corporation doesn't borrow money, it sells shares.  When it makes lots of profit, it can issue more stock, i.e. borrow more money.  A corporation never has to pay back this money.  It only has to pay a small percentage of it's profits to each shareholder.  This is called a dividend.

Part of profit-maximizing involves finding the cheapest labor available - even if that labor is on the other side of the world and will take any job for only a few cents a day.

The educated anti-sweatshop crusader understands these wages are far more than anything else offered in a Third World country and that most of these workers are lucky to even have a job.

Having ready access to lots of money, corporations are usually able to do things small companies cannot.  There is nothing wrong with this.  The problems come when a corporation’s profit-maximizing nature drives it to pay workers less than a living wage and offer them poor working conditions...If they can get away with it, corporations will put out an inferior product to make more profit.  They will not improve their product unless they can increase their profit thereby.

A corporation may be a legal individual, but unlike a human being, it has no soul, no conscience, no ego.  None of the qualities that operate upon an individual that cause him to want to be liked by him employees and desire to put out a quality product- even if he makes less profit.  Corporations aren’t immoral - they’re amoral. They’re devoid of morality. They answer only to their creditors. Because of their size, their actions  have  a very big impact on our society.

Former employees of Enron Corp. were surprised when the executives of the company effectively stole their money. As is common for corporate employees, they had much of their retirement savings invested in company stock.

The stock did very well because they and everyone on Wall Street knew that Enron was the largest power trader in the world, that it owned more gas pipelines than any other company, and that it was the largest financial supporter of President Bush’s political career.

Enron's executives painted a picture of reliability to everyone with its life savings riding on its success and assured the company’s financial future could not look more optimistic.

What none of these people knew, - except the executives - was that Enron was earning billions of dollars less than it was paying, and it now seems clear that Enron’s executives went to great lengths to hide it from the entire country.

Enron Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Lay told his shareholders the company was in fine financial shape.

He and his executives continued to encourage their employees to keep their stock as they sold off what shares they had before the company’s crash came.

They made out with millions of their employees’ money.

Imagine arriving to work one morning to find a memo saying something like this: “Attention all employees: Whatever retirement funds you may have previously had, have been reduced to $4,500. Please clean out your desks by the end of the day.”

Why won't the Big Three auto makers invest significantly in proven engines that can give fuel efficiency of hundreds of mile per gallon?  Because they don't have to and their is no reason to spend money creating a new product when the product you are currently making is producing plenty of profit.  The auto-makers only turn out a new product to compete with another auto-maker, not to improve the quality of life of the people.

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