WIP

I started thinking of this when I saw a few episodes of the show "Mad Men," which is set in the early 1960's at the time when major breakthroughs were being made in product promotion. The advertisers understand more about psychology and behaviour than most of the experts working in academia. And if we consider that we are approaching the anniversary of 9/11, what did George Bush tell Americans to do to fight the terrorists? It wasn't to declare war, or buy war bonds, or to give blood...instead it was to go shopping! Get out there with your charge cards and buy more crap! That says more about how our system works than anything I've heard from economists in the last 20 years.

The global cooperation that's needed is a joint pushback against the power of the large multinational corporations that control many governments and set global trade and economic policies. It's not as if civilization always existed with continual economic growth. We can, and should find ways of breaking the cycle of consumer-driven economics. If we don't...well then collapse is the eventual alternative. Here's some numbers I'd like you to explain then, courtesy of the Worldwatch Institute's summary on climate change issues: * In 2006, the world used 3.9 billion tons of oil. Fossil fuel usage in 2005 produced 7.6 billion tons of carbon emissions, and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide reached 380 parts per million. * More wood was removed from forests in 2005 than ever before. * Steel production grew 10 percent to a record 1.24 billion tons in 2006, while primary aluminum output increased to a record 33 million tons. Aluminum production accounted for roughly 3 percent of global electricity use. * Meat production hit a record 276 million tons (43 kg per person) in 2006. * Meat consumption is one of several factors driving soybean demand. Rapid South American expansion of soybean plantations could displace 22 million hectares of tropical forest and savanna in the next 20 years. * The rise in global seafood consumption comes even as many fish species become scarcer: in 2004, 156 million tons of seafood was eaten, an average of three times as much seafood per person than in 1950. The renewable resources depleted, like wood, seafood, and meat production are being done so at unsustainable levels. Commercial fishing is expected to be virtually done for in our lifetime. And non-renewable resources cannot be replaced to begin with. I'm still waiting for that explanation for how a growing population, with growing environmental demands can keep going along the present course in a finite world. This is not an either/or choice, since the forces we have set in motion by increasing atmospheric CO2 levels are going to run a natural course of increased melting of sea ice, and increased global temperatures over the coming decades. The only question is how big of an increase we, or our descendents will have to deal with. If we just let things go and do nothing about man-made contributions to greenhouse gas levels, the next generations will have to try to adapt to 7 degree F increases in global temperature at the end of this century. We don't even know what effect that will have on the world ecosystems, let alone further increases. So, at some point, future populations will not adapt, and the cockroaches will inherit the Earth!

I read Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb and other books by the Club Of Rome group. They made it clear that their future projections were based on the present trends of the day, but your conclusion is bogus, since the declines in birth rates and the Green Revolution in agriculture did not provide a solution to the Limits to Growth...only ways to delay the final reckoning. Take a look at the stats from World Hunger, which shows the decline in the malnourished population reached its lowest level in the mid 90's. Since then after successive declines in overall grain output, it spiked to over a billion in 2009, dropped below 950 million last year thanks to better world wide harvests, and will show worse numbers this year due to flooding and droughts in major food exporters. And, as mentioned previously, declining groundwater and freshwater levels, topsoil loss, rising oil prices, indicate that we are living in the peak of a food producing bubble similar to the peak oil bubble that we are just coming to realize now with $1.35 a litre gas prices.

Exactly! Every so often, the crazies come bubbling up to the surface, but Harper is a shrewd political operative who realizes that the religious right base he is trying to cultivate, is not large enough or influential enough to make up for the losses suffered if the so-cons were set free to try to set social policies...like they are in the U.S. right now. If the Canadian religious right grows enough in size and influence, and the liberal press continues to wither away and be replaced by rightwing talkingheads; then abortion will become an issue here. Harper has to keep these bible thumpers onside for Conservative grassroots campaigning, so I expect that a Conservative majority government will see some bones thrown to them on abortion....but nothing as bold as what the tea party crazies are doing across the border right now.

It is time to consider that capitalism does not support democracy, but is instead an adversarial force that has to be constrained by a democratic society, or we end up with oligarchy...which we are pretty damn close to now, if not already there. Just to digress a bit, consider the mantra of George Bush I, Clinton and Bush 2.0 about how encouraging "free enterprise" in China and other former Communist nations would advance democracy.....it hasn't happened, and it won't happen! Because if a country is already a dictatorship, the introduction of liberal, unfettered capitalism will encourage those with resources to buy and game the political system. Milton Friedman's experiment with free-wheeling capitalism in Chile, did not encourage the rise of democracy any more than it has in China or Russia, or most of the former Iron Curtain nations, as well as the Western friendly dictatorships in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Democracy works by each individual having an equal vote; while corporate capitalism works on the principle that each share of stock has an equal vote; therefore those who own the most shares control the corporation and choose the board of directors. And if that corporation is given personal rights granted to real citizens, and reward certain candidates with campaign donations; promises of future compensations after leaving office; creating third party political advocacy organizations to advance their agendas; consolidate control of mainstream commercial media....well eventually you end up with a system that they have in the U.S. and we are fast approaching...an oligarchy of business elites with politicians who are no more than puppets to molify or pacify the public with the illusion of having a real say over important issues that affect our lives. Fixing the system will require more than adjusting tax rates. "Free trade needs to be scrapped in favour of Fair Trade, both for our sakes, and the poor nations of the world that are presently exploited by large multinational corporations. Then, we can take on some of the dogmas of corporate personhood.

Your analogy is similar to creationists like Kent Hovind or Ray Comfort, who argue that because they haven't witnessed new species developing in our time therefore it doesn't exist! I have some bad news for you about Robert Malthus -- he is fundamentally correct about population dynamics for animals who's continued growth goes unchecked. And, in spite of all the lofty rhetoric that our new technologies created by our big brains have put us in control of our natural environment, what we are starting to find out now is that new inventions, such as chemical fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation systems, and even genetically engineered plants that have combined to greatly increase crop yields over the last century, have not addressed that issue of limits to growth....only delayed the results! In fact, the situation for the human animal is a bigger problem than animals that exist in natural environments, because our ability to invent and engineer with natural resources has provided the capacity to use the Earth's resources at increasing levels. The demands of growth-based economic systems for continuous economic growth, fuels the drive to use more renewable and non-renewable resources. Some economic increase can result from information technologies and more efficient product development; but the overall trend is upward when it comes to using the planets resources. Now, what I want to hear from all of the libertarian capitalists and the happy clappy liberals who want a kinder, gentler version of capitalism, is what to do when the planet has no more new frontiers for exploitation? The run of severe weather worldwide, that has noticeably increased in the last few years, has demonstrated just how precarious the situation is for producing enough food to feed 7 billion people. The Food Bubble Is About To Burst Sure we will! The oil-based capitalism that you advocate has only delayed the inevitable. The problems mentioned above by Lester Brown, of the Earth Policy Institute have already taken effect around the world, where poor people spend more of their disposable income on food, have been more seriously affected by rising food prices. The uprisings in North Africa and the MiddleEast have more to do with food prices and food shortages, than Facebook or Twitter all of a sudden providing the means to overthrow unpopular dictators. Here in Canada, if you have a family to support, you will have noticed that groceries are taking a bigger bite out of your budget, while most of the media is fixated on rising gas prices.

So, that makes corporate tax cuts right, as long as there is a Liberal politician supporting them? Have you considered that multinational corporations have been blackmailing entire nations in the same way they do with smaller jurisdictions like provinces and cities, with their threats of moving somewhere else in search of lower taxes, cheaper labour, and special perks like sales tax revenues? It is time to stop the race to the bottom that so called "free trade" and reducing corporate taxes and investment income taxes have helped to create. This story that Harper is trying to advance about lower corporate taxes creating jobs might be plausible if it were not for the American example of the failure of supply side economics. Now Harper wants to give us the same joys! Lower corporate taxes will not be used for capital investment or creating jobs here. They will enrich the earnings of shareholders, and if any new jobs are created, they will be overseas! The corporate tax rates should be raised rather than lowered.

And have you thought about why it doesn't seem realistic? One big problem standing in the way of zero growth and degrowth strategies, is that they do not coincide with the economic wishes of large global corporations that run the world economic system. There seems to be no problems when it comes to expanding GATT and regional trade agreements, but that's about the only international cooperation we find these days. That's a big part of the reason that Zero Growth has largely vanished since the Club Of Rome of 40 years ago discussed the problems facing the world in the Limits To Growth report for the then distant future of the year 2000. How does any attempt at a global cooperative system make any headway (UN sponsored or not) when the only agencies of global power are all in the hands of the big multinational corporations: IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization or the OECD. McGill economics professor Henry Mintzberg provided an example of the corporate tail wagging the dog last week on CBC Sunday Edition, when he reminded us that European concerns about GMO foods were not handled by the World Health Organization, but instead by the WTO! As long as large multinational corporations control the fate of nations, it will be next to impossible to create any effective world bodies that can end wars, enforce climate change regulations, or stop the plundering of non-renewable resources! That depends on what kind of capitalism you want continued! If you're talking about what we have now, taxing waste and promoting conservations would help, just as taxing carbon would help factor in the externalized costs of coal, oil and natural gas; but that might slow down the race to destruction, but it would not be a permanent solution, since a growth based economic system would eventually be straining the limits of what the Earth's resources can provide. The only option other than gradual decline in resource use is to do what comes naturally, and push those upper limits until a crash causes a massive die-off and threatens extinction. This must be a riddle or something! Because the only dispute over how people will be affected by climate change is how badly we will be affected. The basic rule of thumb is that for every one degree rise in global temperature, there will be a 10% decline in agricultural output, and a 7% increase in the amount of precipitation in the atmosphere....which is why storms become more intense. And then there is sea level rise, which will start to take off later in this century as ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica move out to sea and flood coastal areas where much of the world's population presently lives. So what is there to be contentious about?

Yes, but we've talked about desalination before and there still is the problem of cost when doing desalination on a large scale. Unless you've come up with a zero point energy or cold fusion machine, the idea that continued misuse of fresh water resources can be carried on with desalination is ludicrous. And, desalination is not free of environmental impacts, even if it could be produced from free, clean energy, because desalination plants will still produce water pollution and kill marine life. The practical problems of cost can be witnessed in Saudi Arabia today, which has decided that it's dreams of mass irrigation projects to feed its growing population are too expensive, and has gone back to importing its grains from other elsewhere. I don't know much about hydroponics; but I do know that nutrient and mineral solutions have to be made to provide the plants with nutrients. It's not like hydroponic systems are providing plants free of any resource requirements from the natural environment. And since they seem to be exclusively indoor systems, how would this replace large scale agriculture? And then there is the problem that as human population has grown, and our food and resource demands on Earth have increased, that has correlated with a decline in available resources for other animal species...and so, we now find ourselves living in the middle of a mass extinction and loss of biodiversity equal to five major extinctions of the past. How many plant and animal species can be lost, before it impacts on the welfare of the human species? We may be finding out the answer to that question in the coming decades. You seem to have some idea that new inventions will find some magical formula that provides free food from a finite planet. At some point, blind faith in future scientific progress is just as delusional as blind faith in divine salvation.

The alternative is Zero Growth And even if they do, that doesn't make the problems go away. He's taking a little bit of artistic license there, since that first population crash took place before the arrival of Capt. Cook, and there hieroglyph symbols are mostly unknown. And yet we have the evidence that we are changing the climate to our detriment, and using up topsoil and fresh water at unsustainable levels, and yet nothing of substance is done to address the problems of high population and increasing resource use. That's why Jared Diamond finds the example of Easter Island so similar to the world situation today. The basics are simple: we have an economy dependent on continuous growth, a growing population that is using up natural resources at increasing rates...and we still live on a finite planet! That should explain most of what needs to be explained about the need to find a way to live on this planet without doing what most species do when they are unrestrained -- grow in numbers until lack of food and disease causes the population to crash, and threatens extinction. The fact that we are a species that has thousands of nuclear warheads, means that it would be a good time to use those higher cognitive centers in the brain to make a break from doing what comes naturally. See above. There were plenty of sources on the links page. The problem is that many of them lead to copyrighted material or require membership for full access, but the basic information about the problems has been repeated many times over the last few years, and the fundamentals keep popping up on a regular basis on many mainstream news sites. World Watch Institute Water: Will There Be Enough? Oh, don't tell you're "teaching the controversy!" The only facts that haven't been agreed upon are how fast the changes will occur. And the fact that climate models have underestimated the temperature and CO2 increases, meaning that we moving faster down the road to destruction.

And calling on an RCMP investigation provides an opportunity to bury any further developments on the story during the election. So, the Prime Minister says he never would have hired Carson, if he knew about all five of his previous convictions...one little disturbing factoid that crossed my mind is that Harper met Carson's 22 year old ex-hooker girlfriend, and never suspected anything unethical about the old fart! And he was still seen in 2010 at meetings advising top Government Minsters, and got lucrative contract for water. According to Greenpeace, documents revealed under the Access to Information Act, Carson was the point-man on behalf of a joint Government/oil company effort to expand tar sands development. That would be a more plausible reason why they kept him hanging around than lobbying for water contracts. The only reason why they threw him under the bus is because the scandal was found out, and providing the Opposition ammo to be used during the election. Yes, I wonder where the truth lies? Too bad past conduct can't provide a guide for us! Spare me the blather about Ignatieff! You know (or should know) that if the sides were reversed, it would be Harper hammering away at the unethical behaviour of the Liberal Government.....which is exactly what he did to win the Office wasn't it? And that's why I pay only glancing attention at political scandals. Governments try to get away with whatever they can, and Opposition Parties do whatever they can to use them for advantage.

What happened to Shwa and WIP? No answer? What is there to answer? You're playing the violins because you feel Bruce Carson may have emotional or mental problems....which is beside the point as long as conservatives demand retributive justice as evidenced by Harper's plans to build more prisons, instead of more mental health services. As for the Liberal Party use of the Carson Scandal: what do you expect them to do? They have one more example of Harper keeping smarmy, unethical people inside his inner circle until they are discovered and become a source of embarassment. Carson's lawyer says his client disclosed all of his past activities, while the PMO says they were not aware of all of his criminal activity, or attempts to carve out a piece of the action for his gold-digging prostitute girlfriend. The truth lies somewhere in that void, and attempts to flip the story and turn the criminal into the victim, is a pathetic attempt to bury the scandal during an election campaign.

And that includes previous threads on the topic? I don't believe there were any videos of the incident back in 1983, but the account that I read in Time Magazine indicated that it was a dangerous game of chicken that did not immediately end with the first attempted pass. It is still hotly debated whether the crew...there were two men in the armoured bulldozer, not just one driver...were aware of her presence; and the Israeli Government immediately exonerated the crew regardless of objections created by different witness testimonials. I should add that a big part of my growing irritation with pro-Israel/anti-Arab propaganda here is that it is becoming obvious that Israel is no longer interested in engaging in any sort of peace process, and is instead digging in and will determine permanent borders and ethnically cleanse areas to suit their purposes. Fine and dandy if that's what they feel they have to do, but why is our Government an unabashed, uncritical apologist for their government, instead of trying to keep a little distance and offer an independent perspective?

The decline in population correlates more closely with birth control use than it does with anything you can find in modernization. When women have free access to birth control and the abortion option, birth rate numbers drop. The stalling and rebounding in some countries in Africa, Latin America and the MiddleEast correlates with the reactionary return to power of conservative religious forces who ban their use. But even with the meddling of patriarchal clerics, when they become aware of the crisis in overpopulation, some of them...like the Ayatollahs in Iran, all of a sudden find ways to sanctify birth control. So, even in a theocracy like Iran, birth rates have been cut in half after realized the mess overpopulation was causing. It's funny how this natural evolutionary process of capitalist economics is considered so efficient, while no biologist would make a contention that the same process in the development of life is an efficient process....suboptimal design for example. The basic premise of free enterprise is questionable from the start, since unrestrained business desires to get larger and eventually large enough to build monopolies and take the "free" out of the free market.

And our present system of globalized, consumer-driven...or perhaps more correctly - debt-driven capitalism is an extremely wasteful system for supplying goods and services. Well, it's not good enough! Until I hear about new inventions that are going to reduce water use, soil depletion, while increasing crop yields, new inventions are not going to fix the problem....and most new technologies have increased resource use, not reduced it. They won't be solved as long as most people are ignorant of what we are heading towards, and policy-makers think they can solve the problems by tweaking and adjusting the dials of globalized capitalism. Jared Diamond asks as question in his book "Collapse" about the disappearance of the Easter Islanders who built those giant head statues that could be asked today: "Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were the Easter Islanders thinking when they cut down the last tree?" And the answer is probably that they would somehow get by and continue on what they were doing.....just like people today! The issue is not whether population growth will be curbed...it will be curbed one way or the other! The point that escapes all of the policy-makers focused on short term needs, is that the world's population is already three times a permanently sustainable level. The longer we maintain too high a population, that uses too much of our resource base, the more the sustainable population level will drop, because of a simple population dynamic called overshoot...wherein it was observed that isolated animal populations free of predators would not consume a sustainable level of food supplies, but instead overconsume until a total collapse of food supply caused starvation and forced migration from their ideal location. And guess what? Looking at simple resource availability statistics from soil erosion rates, declining water supplies, depleting natural resources...like oil...we are doing exactly what every other animal does which has been freed from the predator/prey cycle in nature. Current Population is Three Times the Sustainable Level So have I! And how long is 40 years, when we're talking about Earth history? Many climatologists studying the changes consider the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution about 10,000 years ago to be the beginning of what's called the Anthropocene Era; since the slow, gradual growth in human population, which often used slash and burn agriculture, correlates with the loss of forests and decline and extinction of many large animal species. Certainly the effects since the Industrial Revolution are more pronounced: atmospheric CO2 levels, which are now over 392 ppm, started rising above 280 at the dawn of the industrial age. CO2 levels over 300 can be correlated with the decline in sea ice, and large scale species extinctions really started taking off in the last century....which has seen the greatest increase in human population and changes to the atmosphere. So, putting this issue in proper perspective, saying 'I heard it 40 years ago...it's old news' is ignorance of where we are and how we got here. Some predictions have had to be adjusted down, like population growth rates, while others like resource use, and greenhouse gas levels are accelerating.

No...they are: NEW YORK -- A broad coalition of interests from oil companies, defense manufacturers and well-connected lobbying firms to neoconservative scholars and Harvard Business School professors has worked in recent years to advance a rapprochement with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and take advantage of business opportunities in the country, even in the face of the longtime international pariah's brutal repression of his people and his legendary belligerence. Yet Libya's opposition leaders say that such efforts have harmed the interests of the North African country by helping enrich Gaddafi's family and close allies at the expense of the majority of Libyans, serving only to prolong Gaddafi's brutal reign. They also blame U.S. policy for prioritizing national security interests over issues of reform and human rights, the lack of which helped fuel the country's ongoing violent upheaval. Soon after U.S. President George W. Bush dropped sanctions against Libya in 2004, when Gaddafi announced that he intended to give up weapons of mass destruction and expressed his eagerness to join the war on terror, U.S. and British oil producers and business interests jumped at the chance to expand into the country, which has been ruled with an iron fist by the unstable leader for some 40 years. Some of the biggest oil producers and servicers, including BP, ExxonMobil, Halliburton, Chevron, Conoco and Marathon Oil joined with defense giants like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, multinationals like Dow Chemical and Fluor and the high-powered law firm White & Case to form the US-Libya Business Association in 2005. The members of its executive advisory council each pay $20,000 in annual dues to the group, which is managed by the National Foreign Trade Council, a coalition that seeks to facilitate international opportunities for U.S. companies. Most of the group's members have lobbied the U.S. government since 2004 to protect their investments in Libya or to iron out business problems with the regime. The role of the USLBA, which calls itself the only U.S. trade association focusing solely on the United States and Libya, combines lobbying for the former outlaw state with advancing the commercial aims of the association's member groups. The nonprofit has sponsored policy conferences, briefing sessions and events featuring senior U.S. and Libyan officials. http://www.tfdnews.com/news/2011/02/24/82547-libyas-opposition-leaders-slam-us-business-lobbys-deals-gaddafi.htm

I never payed more than passing interest to the story of Rachel Corrie; what I am sick of, is listening to the Israel-does-no-wrong crowd trash her today because of her work as a peace activist. And from what I've read, there isn't any thematic tie-in with the Italian journalist who was killed recently, since he was executed by a Islamist splinter group, which has been condemned by Hamas and all of the major Palestinian organizations. He is being honoured as a hero.....so where is the double standard? Funny how that tank driver in the famous Tien An Mien Square video was able to avoid running over a lone protester who kept refusing to move for the tank. A somewhat similar incident happened in the 80's, during that brief period that the U.S. put peacekeepers in Lebanon, after the Israeli Invasion. The circumstances behind his actions weren't exactly clear, but a pistol-wielding U.S. Marine captain stepped in front of three Israeli tanks that tried to run through his checkpoint, and demanded that they stop their advance....and he didn't get run over either. All I know is that if you have the ability to stop your car, you can still get charged if you go ahead and run into some jaywalker who steps in front of you. The negligence of the jaywalker isn't the only determining factor.

People don't always have a lot of choice about their political systems...especially when they are autocratic dictatorships supported by foreign governments and corporate interests. And, I don't accept whatever it is you are intending with "cultural superiority". It is a step down the road towards permanent war...of the kind you are likely familiar with where you are living now! If you have nothing but contempt for the people who are living around you, there is no hope of reaching any sort of peaceful settlement. One question: would Saudi Arabia even exist in its present form without having the U.S. as its benefactor? It's been a simple arrangement since the 1930's...the U.S. supplies protection, first from the Soviet Union, and then from nearby threats in Iraq and Iran, billions in military hardware to use against their own people, and they supply cheap oil. In many of these countries, the growth of Islamists movements coincided with U.S. encroachment...mostly connected with oil politics by supporting crony dictatorships and building naval bases to control the shipping lanes. My point is that it is that real democracy is not imposed from outside, as in Iraq and Afghanistan. It should be up to them to decide how they want to live and be governed, and the less interference from the outside would do more to improve the chances of equality and democracy movements in the Middle East. Whether you feel its justified or not, I expect terrorism to keep coming as a response to aerial warfare conducted by remotely operated aircraft. We are entering an age of "terminator" warfare with an assortment of drone aircraft that can be used for a variety of military operations. Airplanes with no pilots, increase the likelihood of their use...as we are seeing under the Obama Administration, and it's just to easy and too risk-free to engage in this new kind of warfare. The only repercussions are likely to come in the form of terrorism.

If countries like Libya want to build something like a Canadian system, it should be up to them to do it; not for us to be part of engineering regime change for whatever purposes. The regime change supporters need to explain why we should be mobilizing about what Gaddaffi is doing to his people, while avoiding mention of what's going on in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, or even what's happening in Egypt now since the military has taken control. Why is it just places that happen to be floating on oil, where there is so much concern about human rights?

But it was okay for arms sales to Libya after he got on the good side of George Bush.

If Bruce Carson was a Liberal, would you present his criminal conduct, and just plain immoral conduct as a "sad story?"

I don't think there are near as many lawn signs as there used to be 30 or 40 years ago. When I was young, it seemed like every other house had a campaign sign out front at election time.

I've never called his office, but I've talked to a lot of people who went to him about issues other than unemployment insurance, and were happy with the attention they received. Even people who live outside of his riding are able to get help. That's been an NDP strategy for ages...since they don't get a chance to be part of a government, they make sure that they do good constituency work. Interesting you should mention that, since Christopherson started as a union local president...I believe at the International Harvester plant that used to be here. How many of the people who don't bother voting do you think like Harper? The non-voters are more likely expressing the view that our political system is mostly performance art that does not address real issues. What we need are more choices, not fewer! I believe the mainstream media and some business leaders behind the scenes who have a lot of influence, are trying to steer us down the road to a two party system like they have in the U.S. Having a rightwing party and some sort of center-left party might make it easier for media wags and pundits to do their horse race election coverage, and two parties will make it less challenging for corporate lobbyists to buy the political establishment; but a two party duopoly, regardless of whether the opposition is Liberal or NDP will do nothing but further reduce the input from the general public.

How about if we have the choice to limit the amount of commercial advertising (especially to children). And, you may think you're buying just what you need, but marketers gather every new, useful fact and strategy they can put together from psychology and sociology. They are aware that much of what we buy (especially younger consumers) is based on status needs and little else. When I lived in the suburbs, there were a lot of things I thought I no longer feel the need to buy.

So 'narrator has an Ipod' means that problems of resource depletion, and pollution from waste byproducts don't really exist. Really! Many of the world's largest corporations have annual budgets greater than many nations on the planet...so that makes them bigger than a lot of governments. But not as voluntary as it used to be, since Walmart and other big box stores have driven smaller retailers out of business. Eventually, that Walmart may be the only game in town.