Green Presidential Candidate to Speak at N.C. State

David Cobb, the Green Party candidate in last year's presidential election, will speak Friday evening at N.C. State University on the history of corporations and their impact on the U.S. economic, social, political and class systems. The talk will take place from 6:30 to 8 p.m. in 323 Mann Hall. For a campus map, click here.

For background reading on corporations' effects on society, check out the May/June issue of World Watch. The magazine of the Worldwatch Institute has launched a series on the evolving corporation, and the first installment – titled "When Good Corporations Go Bad" – compares corporations' relationship to society with the mutualism and parasitism found in nature.

The evolution of the modern corporation has led to increasingly parasitic form of relations between corporations and their societal hosts, according to author Erik Assadourian. With shareholder pressures and other demands, "most corporations today focus almost entirely on maximizing profits for their shareholders, and they do so primarily by externalizing as many of their social and environmental costs as possible," he writes.