<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/vidal0712.html">The "Corporate Ethics" Red Herring</a> by Matt Vidal on <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/">CounterPunch</a> examines in more depth the fallacy of <span class="reference">free market capitalism</span> in use today throughout the world, but most fanatically in the U.S. The President's (and most other legislator's) pinning of the blame for the latest huge corporate scandals on select individuals is a simplistic interpretation at best, and a deliberately disengenuous one at worst. <iq>This classic bourgeois response---an obsessive focus on individuals and personal ethics---diverts attention from more fundamental problems in the structure of the US economy.</iq> The problem with capitalism in general, and U.S. capitalism specifically, is not a lack of <iq>ethical standards.</iq> It is that <iq>the first and most fundamental principle of capitalism is to 'maximize profits.'</iq> Additionally, most political rhetoric about capitalism deals only with the <i>theory</i> of capitalism, not the reality of its implementation, i.e. <iq>the capitalist markets of reality work much differently than the free markets of the theory.</iq> Any discussion of the U.S. or global economy that in any way suggests that free trade is involved in any large way is wrong. <bq>In economic theory what it means to have a "free market" is that there is perfect competition, which means two fanciful things. First, everyone has complete information about all of their options and the outcomes of all potential courses of action. Second, and more importantly for our purposes, it means that there is no power in the ., there are no monopolies or oligopolies but an infinite amount of small buyers and sellers.</bq> Instead of this, we have companies that <iq>maximize profit</iq> by consolidating and moving towards monopoly. We have <iq>Exxon-Mobile, Wal-Mart, Ford, GM, GE, Disney, AOL-Time Warner ... [with] ... massive market power. Indeed, Exxon-Mobile, GM and Ford have revenues greater than the national budgets of all but a few of the world's nearly 200 countries.</iq> Obviously, there can be no free market with players of this size. Especially when the players are supported by the most powerful military in the world. The U.S. government actively uses tax dollars as foreign aid that is earmarked to be spent by foreign nations on the goods of U.S. companies. Indeed, the current refined, civilized, advanced form of capitalism doesn't even consider people or their needs: <bq>... when maximizing profit everything, including workers, is a "factor of production." In other words, as quickly as profit is elevated to sacrosanct status, everything else---from product quality to the workforce to responsibility itself--- becomes a cost, to be reduced, displaced or avoided if possible. Profits over people; profits over environment; profits over community...</bq> The corporations work to extract every possible dollar from every possible person. With the need to consider basic human need removed from the capitalistic equation, the patent becomes a powerful weapon to wield. <iq>Pharmaceutical companies, for example, charge prices on patented drugs hundreds of times what they would otherwise be.</iq> All of these factors taken together necessarily (with brutal logic) <iq>generate specific types of incentives that place profits not only over people but also over ethics</iq>. This isn't surprising once you understand the principles and see them for what they are. <bq>The economy is structured in its very essence to privilege wealthy individuals and corporate profits. Just as the US economy systematically generates low-wage, dead-end jobs (and hence poverty) so it structurally generates the corporate leaders who will seek profits and personal rewards by any means, whether by polluting rivers, busting unions, sweating teenage girls in developing countries, or accounting tricks.</bq>