 In clusters, as long as one firm owns the hardware or software needed for a production process, the other firms don't have to waste their own capital buying that means a production as well. Collaborative commerce also reduces the cost of negotiation. Employees have nothing to lose or fear from working with one another, and either side has to give ground or exchange trade secrets or information. The knowledge is simply transferred. Beyond this, the social infrastructure is created in clusters and makes it easier to correct informational asymmetries that can limit the applicability of collaborative commerce. As trust develops in clusters, inner firm cooperation increases, resulting in strong improvements in revenue and employment. Less time is spent protecting information from competition aligned for more productive labor and less wasteful managerial monitoring. Trust limits opportunistic behavior, reducing uncertainties and perceived risks. If you know that your counterpart at the company across the street is collaborating with you, you are much less likely to withhold information from that person. Turning to small businesses and economic development, small businesses are an integral part of economic development as they give local citizens the opportunity to manage or own their own enterprises and help key profits within a community. While outside ownership in large firms usually sense a substantial portion of surplus far away from where the labor that produced it is actually located. In terms of contributing to household incomes, small firms provide income maintenance for people without many options as well as providing for income growth through asset accumulation and the development of valuable skills. Small firms also increase community members' confidence and representative local and regional institutions. People involved in the ownership of a business develop feelings of responsibility and see the benefits of participation in governance, which results in the creation of institutions that accurately reflect people's wants and needs. Small locally owned firms proportionally create more new opportunities for the poor, for women, and for people in isolated rural areas than do large businesses. And demographic change is positively affected by small firms, the development of which has been linked to decreasing birth rates towards a more sustainable replacement level as well as a reduction in rural to urban migration, which as we all know is a very large problem for many developing countries. New research suggests that in times of recession, large employees disproportionately lose workers while small companies as a group fare better. It was found that large firms, after adjusting for their larger share of the workforce, account for a greater slice of job destruction both during and after recessions, whether it be through layoffs or through simply not hiring workers that they would have otherwise. Small businesses are able to engage in very specialized activities, which yield much higher returns. The approach of small businesses enables producers to focus on aspects of the production process that they are able to do extremely effectively, relying on others that they are linked to via markets to undertake other functions where they may be less skilled. One example of this is the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy, which is made up of small, highly specialized firms that generate above-average wages, revenue, healthcare benefits, and paid time off. As mentioned in the intro, small businesses play an important role in both the self-confidence and empowerment of the individual. They recognize the dignity of the individual and spread the vision that change at the local level is in fact possible. As local firms flourish, their owners are able to enact meaningful change in their communities without having to rely on the charity of foreign investors and non-governmental organizations, loans from which you usually have some severe strengths attached. And now I'd like to turn to my colleague, Mr. King, to conclude our portion of the argument. Thank you. I would now like to shift the discussion towards corporate power and its effects on social welfare. Fear of monopolistic behavior and acknowledgments to the dangers that big business poses is not a new phenomenon. During the end of the 19th century in America, these fears materialized in the antitrust legislation of the day. Advocates of antitrust legislation recognize that monopolistic behavior decreased social welfare because of the inequality of power that arise between consumers and manufacturers, which led to unfair business practices and outcomes for society. The basis of this legislation can be found in the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. And while laws of these nature are still in place today, the sheer power and wealth of large businesses have found or rather created loopholes to get around them. Shifting our attention towards taxes, in 2010 the top 100 companies with $5 trillion in revenue and $500 billion in pre-tax earnings paid less than 10% in non-deferred federal taxes. If these companies had paid the 35% tax rate designated by U.S. law, an additional $140 billion would have been collected. This is approximately equal to the total budget deficit of all 50 states. And to give a few examples, last year GE paid no taxes. In 2009, Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits and paid no taxes and received $156 million rebate. And over the past five years, Carnival Cruise Lines made more than $1.1 billion in profits but paid taxes at a rate of 1.1%. This is possible because big businesses are able to afford to keep their money in tax havens and are able to book profits in countries that have low tax rates. Big businesses also have the ability to lobby for tax laws with loopholes as GE has done and can hold assets under front-men, dummy corporations and conduct multi-layered transactions that create anonymity. It is very simple to see how big business can in fact hold social welfare hostage. Adam Smith described in his day that the principal architects of power were the owners of society and that they made sure that government policy would attain to their interests no matter what the consequence on society. A modern and updated version of Smith's maxim can be seen in the political economist Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of politics. This theory describes how the election process in America has become a time for investors to get together to select the next designer of policy. This is manifested in campaign donations and advertisements and as we have seen with the last political election the candidate who spends the most on advertisements is the most likely to win. Another recent example is healthcare reform where public opinion was strongly in favor of a public option however this was against big business interests and we all know how that turned out. Corporate welfare is government assistance for free or below market rates. U.S. corporate welfare is embedded in the tax code and largest corporate welfare payments go to the wealthiest corporations who also happen to be the biggest campaign donors. If big businesses do not have it their way they have the leverage to support alternate candidates or threaten to relocate which as we've already discussed can be devastating on communities and for social welfare. In 1997 the Marriott Corporation threatened to relocate out of Maryland however talks magically ceased once they received a $30 million tax subsidy. No new jobs were created and no guarantee that they would stay in the future was made. And in central and eastern Europe transnational corporations have been lobbying the brand new capitalist democratic societies for low tax laws and low wage laws and flexible labor rules which has left these companies with deficit of development funds while these corporations constantly threatened to move further east. The economist Michael Jensen has shown that when large businesses make money losing investments the cost falls on all of society. Investment capital represents our limited stock and national savings and when corporations spend it poorly our future well-being is compromised. Small businesses do not have the luxury to make dangerous risks and cannot fall back on bailouts as large businesses can and big businesses can also escape regulation as seen with the financial crisis as well as BP and the oil spill in the Gulf. Large businesses such as oil corporations and other development corporations have also been seen talking with administrations as seen before the invasion of the Iraq war. Large businesses also use their power to literally infiltrate government through the revolving door as seen with the military industrial complex and the financial industrial complex. Corporations can easily outspend critics and through the media lobbying they convince Congress and the public that their programs have a public benefit. The magazine The Nation has documented the media lobbying complex that exists where scores of profiteers have appeared as unbiased and objective observers to issues that they have a financial stake in and thus a conflict of interest. In-depth coverage is sparse these days on mainstream media and what is covered is instead dictated by unaccountable executives and investors. Small and independent media outlets serve their viewers to work to keep those in power accountable and to inform the public with unbiased news. And before I conclude I would like to briefly turn to the findings of an economist named Cathy Fogel at the University of Arkansas who set out to find out the correlation between big business and social welfare and what she found was that countries that opt for big business sector stability appear to exhibit both worst health care and slower economic growth. Measures of the quality of countries education show no correlation with big business stability and worst pollution correlates with more stable big business sectors. More stable big business sectors are actually correlated with worse inequality and she concludes that because there is no clear evidence of big business stability contributing to laudable non-economic policy goals she might entertain other reasons politicians may value big business stability and this goes back to the corporate welfare and power I was just describing earlier. So in conclusion it is clear that small firms are more likely to increase social welfare. Big businesses while capable of doing good have access to enormous power that can undermine democracy and tip policies in their favor rendering social welfare an insignificant afterthought. Thank you. Thanks guys, hopefully you have some answers. So my group we're arguing, let me pull up the PowerPoint first that big business is healthy for... Just the microphones. That big business does in fact promote social welfare. We're not necessarily against all the small business and say they're all evil however big business does promote social welfare and small businesses would not survive without big businesses. But before moving on we also want to define big businesses as you did and that's any large business any corporation, sub-chapter F's corporations or partnerships with assets greater than 10 million dollars and social welfare similar to yours we're taking a broad view and that extends beyond economy although economy, healthy economy is obviously very important. We talk about standard of living, the environment, the available social services, measurements like crime rate, drug use and the aspects of society like religious and spiritual. So it's quite broad. So to begin, oh and also we wanted to add here that a corporate social... Since we're talking about corporations we want to talk about corporate social responsibility which is simply making a profit. You can read. Let me just hold on here. Do this. How I start the show. Okay, that's better. Simply making a profit but also abiding by laws, regulations and customs of a country and a responsibility for environmental concerns, for working conditions and protecting human rights. So to begin I want to argue a few things. Number one that large corporations do have a lot of power. They have a lot of capital but what that also allows them to do is carry out big research and development. Schumpeter said this and I think he's right, that research and development which is what ends up providing this country and this economy especially with infrastructure that then small businesses can use and the economy can flourish on are all undertaken by large corporations that have large capital. The first and best example of this is the very first big business which was the railroads. The railroads before becoming consolidated into a few big companies were a bunch of smaller railroad companies. They have too many interests at play, competition. The gauge and the railroad were different and it just didn't work out. The routes were too expensive and when it did become consolidated into a big business it transformed our economy because the railroad was actually built. You can get from New York to California and there were tons of linkages throughout the whole economy that benefited from this. They also revolutionized finance, capital management and business organization. Another example looking back is AT&T and the telegraph before that, something else that our economy was built on and that was made possible by having big business as well. A small business just would not be able to carry out that type of infrastructure project and that wired the entire nation and let our economy grow and translates into social welfare not only from a healthy economy but people can talk to each other, all sorts of benefits. More contemporary examples, talking about technology. I'm looking at Google and Microsoft who both have extremely wealthy companies. Google is scanning all the books and we can get almost any book on the internet. I think that contributes to well-being. They have cars without drivers. They can take part in all this type of research and development because they're not so risk-averse and they have the capital available to do so. Microsoft as well is another example of that. My next point would be that smaller and medium-sized firms feed off of big businesses. This is an important point for me because there's a reason that we had to bail out the auto industry and that wasn't just because Obama has some affinity for GM. It's because that would have a ripple effect through the entire economy and the thousands of smaller businesses that supply GM would go out of business as well.