Olivia Chestnut
2.24.2014
SOC 102
Corporations and Social Problems
Corporations have far more power than most Americans know of. Large and powerful corporations dominate the American economy. Corporations have a lot of power and influence in the government, it’s possible that they have more influence than government. With so much power and control, corporations are involved with many factors of everyday life. Corporations are involved in food, jobs, water and even our healthcare system. With so much power and control comes problems. Corporations cause major issues in all of these areas.
What most Americans don’t know is that their food supply is being controlled by a select few corporations. There are four food corporations that control 80% of the market; Monsanto, Tyson, Perdue and Smithfield. In the film, Food Inc., Tyson was reported as being one of the largest meat packing companies in the world. As seen in the film, one of the industrial chicken farmers under contract with Perdue gave a look into what industrial chicken farming looks like. The chickens were kept in overcrowded conditions that didn’t allow them to move. Many of the chickens died as a result of their accelerated growth and cramped conditions. The chickens were also fed antibiotics that are no longer working to prevent dangerous diseases. Corporations like Tyson and Perdue are producers of a large amount of food, in a small amount of land for a cheap price. Corporations have government agencies that are supposed to protect the consumer in their pockets and these agencies are allowing unsafe food products to be sold to consumers. Also in the film was the interview of Barbara Kowalcyk whose 2 year old son Kevin died after eating a burger that was infected with ...
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... drinking water such as Bolivia and Ghana. In the documentary, Flow the experience of poor Bolivians was shown. The water corporations provided unclean drinking water that was full of pollutants. The water cost more than the poor could afford. As a result the citizens rioted and protested against the private water company.
I think the solution for better healthcare is for the government to regulate the system better. The healthcare system is one of the areas where government is actually needed to run smoothly. The healthcare system is clearly broken and doesn’t work for anyone. The government needs to take the power out of the private insurance companies’ hands and have better control over the system. I wonder why free healthcare works for other countries but it hasn’t been tried here because it’s clear to me what we have now isn’t working and needs to be fixed.
During the late nineteenth century, the court and the constitution blatantly favored large corporations. They did this through the interpretation of the United States Constitution, particularly the Fourteenth Amendment, as it pertained to corporations. This led to the decision regarding the Wabash vs. Illinois case and in turn to the creation of Interstate Commerce Commission.
The role of corporation has a large impact on 21st century society. Coporations place in modern society is omnipresent, consumers are conditioned by the corporate advertising. In Rushoff’s Once Removed: The Corporate Life-form, corporatism is defined as “a way to suppress lateral transactions between people or small companies and instead redirect any and all value they created to a group of investors” (p. 1). Corporatism in today’s modern society is becoming more and more present, as large businesses have seemed to continue taking over smaller “mom and pop” businesses. Everything we own relies on corporation, everything is produced by large companies on global scale. We receive electronics from China, garments from India and Thailand, and oil
America is facing a healthcare crisis! In town hall meetings across America, brawls have broken out during speeches given in an attempt to promote government run healthcare. When looking at the big picture, healthcare is only a small portion of the current problems, but a very big one, in the eyes of Americans, considering how it affects every citizen. The healthcare system in the United States is experiencing hard times, but does that mean, we, as Americans, should just step aside and let government take over? Absolutely not! Government will claim that the numbers of uninsured Americans are high because of the prices insurance companies charge, but are these numbers correct and who makes up these numbers? What will a government run healthcare service provide as far as doctors and treatments are concerned? Where do we think the money to run government healthcare will come from? Americans can help turn the economy around by eliminating this healthcare crisis from the list of many. Americans should stop government from passing such a bill for government run healthcare, and let government know exactly what we need and how we need it done.
Health Insurance is one of the nations top problems, the cost is rising for premiums, and many businesses just cannot afford it. As Americans many of us have the luxury of health insurance, but far too many of us have to go without it. This is something that always seems to brought up at congressional debates, but little is done about it. “In 2013 there were 41 million people reported with out health insurance coverage, this is too many considering those people probably were sick at some point through out the year, and they couldn’t afford treatment.” We need to find someway to make sure that every citizen of the United States is able to have affordable healthcare for themselves, and their families.
Today, it is generally perceived by the public that the single and sole objective of corporations is to maximize profits (Bartlett, 2015), reflected in President Bill Clinton’s radio address in 1996 during which he stated “the most fundamental responsibility for any business is to make a profit”. This belief could be substantiated by the statistic that the profit margins of American corporations have risen from the 1980s to 2008 (Blodget, 2012), shown by the increase in nominal GDP of the United States over the period (Yardeni, Johnson, 2016). Given the above, it could be deduced that most businesses do indeed have a single objective of profit maximization and therefore tend to pursue short-term gains at the expense of all other considerations.
Today, the American consumer is unknowingly eating animals that have been raised in torturous, contaminated living conditions, raised on chemicals and synthetic food, and slaughtered inhumanely. In the documentary Food Inc. the directors take you behind the scenes in what really happens on these so called farms, all controlled by four meat packaging companies. (Food Inc. Robert Kenner. Magnolia Pictures. 2008. Documentary.) Showing you the tainted living conditions the cows, chickens, and pigs are residing in while being fed foods that are not only a part of their natural diet, but also filled with hormones. Farm animals also endure monstrous acts from the workers, many animals won’t even see the light of day until they’re being led into trucks
Every year a citizen that is employed or non-employed suffers from not having proper healthcare coverage. In most developed nations they have universal coverage that covers their citizens and their families. Apparently here in the U.S, healthcare is a controversial problem for our economy and even a bigger problem funding these benefits for our citizens. Now the main question that citizens are asking is "If most developed nations have universal coverage, why doesn't the wealthiest nation which is the U.S have it?" (Ponnuru)This is an issue that no one but the government can let us know what's really going on at the moment, but results are always popping up as misguided quest or funds being lost. Healthcare needs to step up their game because time is really being wasted.
If I were to ask people, “Do you see anything wrong with the food system in America?” the majority of people would respond “No”. After all, America is the best country on Earth. How could the alleged best country on Earth be running on a tainted system that only cares about profit? It was not until I did my own research that I uncover the many, many flaws. After watching the documentary Food Inc., it is very evident that the current system providing the nation with food and food safety is broken. In order to amend the current system, there needs to be changes in three key areas: the government, the producers, and the consumers.
In the documentary, Blue Gold: World Water Wars, it follows several people and countries world-wide in their fight for fresh water. The film exposes giant corporations as they bully poorer developing countries to privatize their own supply of fresh water. As a result of the privatization, corporations make a hefty profit while the developing countries remain poor. Blue Gold: World Water Wars also highlights the fact that Wall Street investors are going after the desalination process and mass water export schemes. This documentary also shows how people in more developed nations are treating the water with much disregard, and not taking care of our finite supply. We are polluting, damming, and simply wasting our restricted supply of fresh water at an alarming speed. The movie also recognizes that our quick overdevelopment of housing and agriculture puts a large strain on our water supply and it results in desertification throughout the entire earth. The film shows how people in more industrialized nations typically take water for granted, while others in less industrialized nations have to fight for every drop.
A corporation was originally designed to allow for the forming of a group to get a single project done, after which it would be disbanded. At the end of the Civil War, the 14th amendment was passed in order to protect the rights of former slaves. At this point, corporate lawyers worked to define a corporation as a “person,” granting them the right to life, liberty and property. Ever since this distinction was made, corporations have become bigger and bigger, controlling many aspects of the economy and the lives of Americans. Corporations are not good for America because they outsource jobs, they lie and deceive, and they knowingly make and sell products that can harm people and animals, all in order to raise profits.
The big companies that produce food fast food are very strict with their rules of how the animals must be treated, fed, and taken care of. The farmers that raise the chickens must follow the rules of the companies or they lose their contracts and income. The food industry was having farmers put chemicals in the chickens food, in specific, to cause the chicken to grow faster and be ready to become a meal for someone quicker. The industry knew that people would rather have something that is quicker to produce than slower. This mystery chemical being put into the chicken feed was horrible for chickens, and ended in the farmers having to go in to the chickens living quarters and cleaning up several wheel-burrows full of chicken corpses. If this chemical is killing some chickens that are being raised for human consumption, then why is it allowed for us to be eating them? The chemicals in the chicken bodies are not natural and should not be in their bodies for a reason. This really convinced me to start really thinking about the food and chemicals along with it that I am putting in my body on a daily
history at over half a billion was caused by a salmonella outbreak at an Iowa farm with such unsanitary conditions as “[chickens] forced to pile atop their dead and rotting cage mates as they laid their eggs” (Carlson). In 2007, the U.S. imported 3 million broiler chicken from China, which had been “fed pet food containing toxic wheat gluten [which was then] sold to restaurants and supermarkets all over the [nation]” (“Food Safety”). Humans are being affected on a greater scale in recent years by factory farms because of a lack in sterilization and the sheer amount of product produced. The U.S. alone butchers more than nine billion animals per year, and globally there are over seventy billion deaths for meat, dairy, and eggs. Public health is jeopardized when pollutants in such excess are released from these farms, and often municipal water systems are forced to remove waste at a costly expense to prevent contamination of drinking
I wish the United States would introduce the health systems that already works fine in the most European countries. The health care there is either cheap or completely free. Well, it's founded through taxes, but you do not have to pay the hospital bill. Unless you decide to go to a private clinic or hospital.
Frontline’s Documentary, The Trouble with Chicken, depicts the quite literal trouble with chicken as it appears to be more of a food hazard than the public previously thought. Tougher, antibiotic-resistant bacteria is appearing on chicken; specifically, increasingly dangerous salmonella strains are left undetected in the chicken that is being sold to the public. The USDA’s jurisdiction and control, or lack thereof soon comes into question. It is revealed that poultry inspection guidelines are extremely outdated and cannot keep up with the massive amounts of poultry processed daily.
Today, only 13 slaughter houses are in control across the entire nation. These houses are filled with low costs to maximize profit to keep their economic monopolization running. These slaughter houses are run by four main companies, Monsanto, Tyson, Perdue, and Smithfield who also all happened to decline interviews for the film. “The dominant companies only ambitions are to protect each other” (Parr). After 25 years of practicing trade that goes back to the root of farming, Parr was sued by Monsanto for offering a service that might help a farmer save seeds. Nevertheless, this then lead to Monsanto running Parr straight out of luck, and straight out of business. Another farmer, Joel Salatin of Virginia’s Polyface farms, says “the nutritional value of American food products is increasingly in doubt” after witnessing these complications himself (Salatin). Monsanto and others are allowing lower paid workers without guaranteed hours, income, or benefits to replace full time employees, only to scam the American people and gain