Hooray for sponsorships

[pakman]

Take a look. What is with all this corporate sponsorchip lately? I fear that my kids will grow up calling the Wrigley Field, Sanford Park. They will never know that US Cellualr Field was once called Comiskey Park. So instead of selling the names of Soldiers Field, the Bears whored themselves to BankOne. I used to work at BankOne (it's not what you know, but who you know...sometimes helps), and I met a lot of good people there and had a great time. But I disagree with a lot of their current moves, like this one.

The Chicago Bears Presented by BankOne Corp.? BankOne Ballpark in Arizona? There are countless other parks, arenas, and stadiums that have been branded, and countless that still "need" to be. Corporate branding, I think, has gotten out of hand, as Mr. Sheridan points out in his article. Even the black paint under a football player's eyes now comes with corporate decals.

High school sports teams and the high schools themselves can't escape branding. Remember all the Gatorade or Powerade drink coolers the team had? Coaching camps were sponsored by these companies. In Colorado, a number of schools have Coca-Cola, Pepsi, or McDonalds all over the walls and cafeterias, and schools in other states are continuing the trend. In a book titled Fast Food Nation, the author discusses how various food companiesare trying to get there names on everything. How they want to get product loyalty and control every aspect of a person's eating choices from cradle to grave.

I fear that it will be absolutely impossible to escape corporate branding and sponsorships, but it is possible to limit your exposure.

(that feels better)

[Occhidiangela]

And it seems that in this case, it speaks with a thunderous volume.

Golf tournaments have long fallen to the disease of replacing tournament names with corporate logos as a means of squeezing more money out of sponsors to jack up the purses.

Greed, said Gordon Gecko, is good. Can't say that I agree.

[gekko]

Capitalism at work, folks. The US fought for years to convince the world that capitalism is the one and only way to go, and we're seeing the results here at home (I include Canada as my personal living space and also most of Europe in the word "home" there).

Sponsorship is one big one; the other thing I find unbelievable is attaching capitalism to freedom. The idea that purchasing items, and thus feeding the economy, is fighting terrorism is ludicrous to me, but some people absolutely believe it.

It's as Occhi says: money talks, and it's rivaling democracy for power and volume these days. With almost anything that happens in politics, world events, and everything these days, if you trace the strings back far enough to end up at a big pile of money.

gekko

[Occhidiangela]

The "free trade" basis of American democracy goes back to the nation's founding roots, and the attitudes of the founding fathers. The exercise of personal sovereignty is enabled by economic self-sufficiency, or so the story goes, but vital social programs are enablers to upward mobility in an "economic meritocracy" that perpetuate that very same goal.

Capitalism unfettered hardly makes for a coherent social framework, as the aristocratic models of the feudal age show us. Those who claim that "pure capitalism" exists anywhere strike me as being overly simplistic, and anyone who argues that pure capitalism can cure social and political ills are, IMO, quite simply wrong for the reason of the failed aristocratic system shown by history. Land, a very old form of capital, was their basis of wealth.

What capitalism provides, in an impure, regulated form, is an engine for possible economic advancement in a 'meritocracy' and a flexibility within an economy to change based on variable forces. Command economies simply don't work, unless being a warfare state and stifling growth are an aim. Capitalism can go hand in hand with democracy, or republican forms of government, just as socialism can, depending on what trade off are made at the ideological level.

The more regluated a capitalist system is, the more likely it is to trip over itself in inefficiency, however, unregulated capitalism holds the pitfall of monopoly control of most markets, which in turn stifles innovation and social mobility. A balance is needed.

Back to wealth as a foundation of democracy. It has been argued that democracy cannot flourish if folks operate at an economic subsistence level, since they are easily influenced by even small 'handouts' of despots or manipulative leaders. See the vitriol regarding the cynical pursuit of the 'Black Vote' by various political parties. Thus, when the "Spread of Democracy" hits an area without an economic engine, or without an artificial economic engine of aid or cheap credit, Democracy struggles due to the influence of well being on the political process. My favorite case in point is Haiti.

I find your juxtaposing freedom and capitalism in your post to be poor fit. They seem, from the historical record, to fit together pretty well, but not in a "pure" form.

[Chaerophon]

I have to be honest, Occhi, I've never heard of the term capitalism used as a descriptor of feudal "economies". Just curious as to your reference there. Clearly these economies weren't market-based, so I'd just like to know what your definition of 'capitalism' entails. As far as I would define it, capitalist systems require market principles of labour and trade that at least moderately adhere to the Smithian "laissez-faire" model as a means of creating mutual benefit among individuals through competitive self-interest. It would seem that a 'command' society would fall outside of this realm given the absence of competition as a limiting factor over the nobility's monopoly control over regional means of production (particularly given the subsistence living standards of the average serf and his relative inability to travel as a result). Clearly you approach capitalism with a different notion in mind; perhaps the notion that those who control a society's capital stock tend to disproportionately reap the benefits of production?

Anyways, I found your proposition interesting. :)

[Occhidiangela]

My own synthesis, again. And those who owned the capital ran things. Some might call that, in the modern sense, fascism, with the fusion of the state and industry, but it strikes me as what could happen if capitalism is taken to a pure extreme: corporations become government.

Land equated to wealth, those with the land were the wealthiest, generally, until the rise of the merchant classes, and those with the wealth, the aristocracy, ruled, as did The Church, which also owned land. The family/corporation who ran the economy was also the government.

If you think of land as capital in the light of 'a means of production' like a 'food factory' it sort of translates to the classical definition of capitalism where those who built and owned the infratructure were the capitalists. In some feudal models, the workers were to a greater or lesser extent 'owned' by the land owners, so they had it both ways: they owned both the infrastructure and the labor. The raw materials were in agrarian economies self contained, however, raw materials would be traded for as well.

Consider the present term of 'wage slave' as an opposite of an entrepeneur or independent businessman. The term evolved, IIRC, in the 1800's, and I recall it being tangentially related to the concept of The Iron Law of Wages.

[Guest]

pop and candy vending machines in public schools.

Maybe that will chear you up a but :0

[Guest]

... is that theoretical capitalism is supposed to operate in an infinite pool. In an infinite pool a monopoly simply cant exsist.

Of course the world is not an infinite pool so we add regualtions to compensate for it, and it seems to work better than anything ekse we have thought of.

A feudal society might seem to resemble a some capitalist societie, but its really because the failure points capatilism are similar to successes in feudalism.

[Occhidiangela]

I refer to "pure" capitalism rather than "theoretical" capitalism. I understand what you are getting at, but for what I was discussing "pure" capitalism seems to me a bit more likely a possibility due to it not requiring infinite resources. Boom and Bust will still occur.

Pure capitalism has been modeled for years, and its suggested effects, in dozens of science fiction and speculative fiction novels and short stories wherein the Corporations become Governments, set up conditions that evolve into a system where economic 'city states' have their own private armies, for example, and Corporate Security are your cops. In short, rather than 'Might Makes Right' you get 'Money Makes Right.' Given the RL model of the Doges of Venice from the Renaissance, it is not all that far fetched of an idea, though much of their wealth derived from trade/retail rather than production.

The outcome is that the average Joe becomes little more than a wage slave, but his wages are part of the economic engine that keeps the Capitalists at the top thanks to their wealth.

[Guest]

The end situations you describe are true but the reason is the rampent monopolies(even a partial monopoly distorts capitalism) in our system.

of course the nature of our physical and finite world gaurantees monopolies so that is why we have regulations.

Good regualtions try to compensate for our finite size and for the limits on our interaction due to our physical world.