You find government owned transit better in this regard?
But for now it's so disgustingly false to claim that companies are less accountable than government that it's hard to believe such a claim is not intentionally dishonest.
Second, my point was that FOIA doesn't bring as much transparency as you might hope.
Third, the question of accountability is two-fold: to whom and to what extent? Governments and companies are accountable to different groups and to different degrees. But just as the government of Brunei is not accountable to a randomly selected American, a company of which you are neither customer nor shareholder is not accountable to you. Given that companies rely more on consent that governments, the degree of accountability to shareholders is perhaps greater.
Thus I submit that measuring accountability purely in degrees is... incomplete.
[1] http://myfloridalegal.com/pages.nsf/Main/DC0B20B7DC22B741852...
And very few top-level employees of very large publicly held companies consider themselves accountable to a very tiny elite group of wealthy shareholders. I don't think that this is what people mean when they use the word 'accountable' though. If you want to stretch the use of the word that far, you could say everyone is equally accountable because they are accountable to themselves, or religious people are more accountable because they consider themselves accountable to God while Atheists don't. I think it's fair to assume when someone uses the word 'accountability' in this context they mean to society as a whole.
I would also reject the notion that companies rely on consent more so than governments; they are dictatorships run top-down by generally a single manager who commands his underlings. Companies and governments are enormous bureaucratic organizations which have enormous impact on the societies in which they operate and the people that live in them. Government has checks and balances and voting and are required to publish information about their operations and are open to being changed by the general public (through voting). Companies are secret private dictatorships which do as they please without regard for the wishes or needs or desires of the general public (only when those wishes happen to coincide with a profit motive; a rare happy accident) and publish nothing about their operations by design.
I think it's quite fair to make the claim about relative transparency/accountability, that governments beat companies always; governments are required to try, companies do not even pretend to try (in fact the most profitable companies actively refuse to try). I think you have a very good point about how transparent this minimal transparency is in government, but the fact that it even exists means governments beat companies hands down every time.
Beyond that, how do you define "society as a whole"? Where do you draw the line? Is Joe's Local Coffee Shack accountable to random fishermen in Indonesia? Is WalMart? To what extent should a country that you are neither a citizen of or a resident of be accountable to you? How is this different from shareholders and non-shareholders?
Governments are not required to try. Many don't. Publicly traded firms pretty universally are required to provide a degree of transparency to everyone. They also provide greater transparency to shareholders and are very directly accountable to shareholders... who can and have organized takeovers of companies.
Perhaps you say "accountable" and mean "I, personally, have power over whatever organization is convenient"?
Society is defined exactly in the way that you know it should be. Asking whether or 'society' for Joe's local coffee shop includes Indonesian fisherman is simultaneously saying you understand what society is and that you refuse to admit you know what it is. It's intentionally misunderstanding others for a rhetorical purpose, i.e. arguing in bad faith and you know it. Cut it out.
Western democratic governments are required to try. You're right dictatorial regimes operate more like large corporations and can do as they wish -- they are possibly even worse because they tend to include death camps as well. So if when I say 'government is generally more transparent than private industry' your response is 'what about the Syrian government', well, fine, you've made my point.
Publicly traded firms (a minority of 'industry') are "accountable" to a tiny group of the wealthy hyper-elite in that they have to publish very specific technical details about their accounting. That's quite a stretch.
I wish you luck with your rhetorical games, but I shall not be playing them with you any longer. Perhaps someday you'll stop and wonder why the revolutionary change you wish for hasn't happened. If you've become wiser, you'll realize that the answer is that the revolutionary is you.
Snapchat. Twitter. And to a lesser extent, Uber if they're unable to reach profitability once its determined they'll have to recategorized drivers as employees.
Stupid money can make quite a few bad decisions before it catches up, even worse if it effects public policy in the process.
Whether the company is profitable is irrelevant here.
- a private company is accountable to its customers, otherwise it will die (assuming there is choice of service providers).
- government's customers (citizens) have NO choice - they are stuck with the same people, despite elections. So the government's "accountability" is for the birds.
Being 1 of ~8 million isn't significantly better than being 1 of ~150 million, in terms of accountability.
But it's a faulty argument, anyway. It's not a single citizen that holds a government accountable, it's the masses, and the media, etc.
You need to fill out a form for reimbursement which asks EVERYTHING, including your gender!