All Hail Our Reptilian Corporate Masters
In a previous era, the role of the Court Jester was to use humor to tell uncomfortable truths to the king. Courtesy of the Onion:
20,000 Sacrificed In Annual Blood Offering To Corporate America
WILMINGTON, DE—The nation looked on in reverence Friday as 20,000 citizens were decapitated, dismembered, and burned alive in the name of Corporate America, continuing the age-old annual rite to ensure bounteous profits in the coming fiscal year.
“Corporate America has always provided us with plenty,” said High Priest James N. Cahill, who opened the ceremony by plunging the horn of a bull into a fair-haired child’s abdomen and using the freshly spilled blood to write the current value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average upon sacred parchment. “JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, and all in the great pantheon of publicly traded entities will continue to watch over us so long as we appease them each year with human lives.”
Comments are closed.
Responding to blackadder’s comment in the prevous thread:
My use of “Tea Baggers” was a deliberate insult to republicans. Matt’s quoting of the Onion article which refers to “Reptilian Corporate Masters” does not single out a particular political group, but rather, as Matt points out, the rich and powerful. . . who, I daresay, can take the hit.
You can’t really be claiming that satire at the expense of the powerful, is “conduct unbecoming” a catholic blogger, can you?
Are we to be that deferential to wealth?
phosphorious,
“Reptilian Corporate Masters” is not a quote from the Onion article. It’s a line Matt has been using for a while now (see here).
Incidentally, I don’t know if Matt knows this, but there are people out there who believe corporate leaders are literally reptilian alien shapeshifters (e.g. David Icke). So even as satire I’m not sure the phrase sends quite the message Matt intends (perhaps Matt understands the origin of the phrase and uses it as a sly bit of self-deprecation, in which case I withdraw my criticism).
Ah. . . I was not aware of that.
However, it still seems to be well within the bounds of permissible satire. Unless we are to believe that the powerful are not a suitable target for satire.
You depend on large corporations whether you will admit it or not. You wouldn’t be typing a blog post on a computer without a large corporation. You probably wouldn’t have food or health care without large corporations. You wouldn’t have a car, or probably a job.
Fear of large corporations is irrational and is often rooted in jealousy or misunderstanding. A large corporation is a group of people who work together. Sure, wealthy people who are responsible for running large corporations are fallen – just like you and me. They do not give what they should give, and they should be chastised for it. But this Onion article, given away by the fact that it’s not funny whereas most of their other stuff usually is, is merely a confused feeling that represents irrational and misplaced anger.
It’s not about “loving wealth” or “loving rich people”. It’s about having a good perspective and a reasonable head on your shoulders.
No one is saying there shouldn’t be large corporations, Zach. My point is that they have too much power.
That article is only unfunny to those who will not under any circumstances criticize wealth.
“You depend on large corporations whether you will admit it or not. . .”
Mabe, maybe not. I depend on trade and business and technology, but a “corporation” is a specific legal entity created by the state.
I’m not sure I depend on that in any essential way.
There was once a time, Zach, when even good, mainstream Republicans (of the patriotic “progressive” variety, like TR) believed that “concentrations of wealth” in corporate monopolies were “dangers to democracy” of the same sort as overweening, “nanny state” government bureaucracies. It was written into one of the major decisions of the Supreme Court of the Progressive Era by Justice Louis Brandeis. In the Age of Reagan and his plutocracy-coddling heirs, that very reasonable conclusion has been abandoned, and, as a result, we have the enormous disparities of wealth that are corroding American democracy. Corporations, yes–but an “even playing field” of competitiveness for them, too. Isn’t that what your vaunted “capitalist system” is all about?
The core issue is not the corporation per se – I happen to run one myself. It’s the modus operandi of most corporations is to act in the best interest of their shareholders. In most circumstances, especially public companies that are equity-backed, their job is to make the most money for their shareholders at all times. It’s not about ethics or benefits to society, unless they are a means to an end. If I, as a CEO, saw an opportunity to make the world a better place, and chose to distribute a significant percentage of our profits to that cause, I would likely be fired the next day. Why? Because that’s not my job. My job is to make money and grow the company. That’s it.
Not all corporations run this way – there are charitable corporations and private corporations where the shareholders have a specific mission statement and are less focused on making money, but when it comes to large corporations, it’s very clear what their true nature is.
So even though large corporations do provide an economic benefit to society, they do so as an entity not structured for the benefit of society, but rather the benefit of the elite few which hold their stock. The natural end of such a system over time is for society to become so top-heavy that the world will be controlled by a select few mega-corporations whose shareholders will rule the world as a plutarchy. Everything that you fear about government control will happen – only worse – if corporate growth is allowed to proceed unimpeded.
Want an eye-opening read?
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6674234/Citigroup-Oct-16-2005-Plutonomy-Report-Part-1
Blackadder – my use of the phrase “Our Reptilian Corporate Masters” is along the same lines as the usefulness of pointing out the nakedness of the emperor. That’s a very different thing than people trashing one another in my comboxes (by using the phrases “democrat party” and “teabaggers”).
What I find interesting is people who invoke subdidairity to bash government but don’t realize that it also applies to the private sector. See Pius XI on the evils of a large and dominant financial sector.
You make a good point. If corporations should be limited in power, then so should government.
Everyone is fallen. Corporate executives are sometimes very good people, sometimes very bad people, just like the rest of us. Just as the poor don’t deserve to be bashed for being poor and unsuccessful, so also the rich don’t deserve to be bashed for being rich and successful. Rather, Christian charity needs to obtain toward all. Therefore I don’t buy the “corporations are evil” argument.
Now some will say, it’s not that corporations are evil, it’s just that they’re too large and rich and powerful. Large quantities of size and wealth and power in a single entity are bad for society per se, regardless of whether they are run by good people, bad people or morally indifferent people.
But if that is the argument, then it’s inconsistent not to apply it equally to the government, which is larger, richer and more powerful than any twenty corporations.
As a practical matter, the federal government is not richer than corporate America – quite the opposite.
I didn’t say it’s larger than “corporate America”, I said it’s a helluva lot larger than any corporation.
It does apply to government, however corporations and government are not the same and should not have precisely the same rules applied. The difference, as stated in my post above, is the nature of their purpose. A democratic government is a structure whose modus operandi is to serve the best interest of the collective people. A corporation is a structure whose modus operandi is to serve the best interest of a very limited set of individuals. In that sense, it must be kept in check, lest a corporation begin to oppress society in favour of its shareholders. Unregulated capitalism will result in the same totalitarian regime, only from corporations rather than governments.
Right wingers assume that such a limiting force will naturally evolve out of a free market. Left wingers assume that such limitations must be enforced by a regulatory body. Both positions are true, and both philosophies are required depending on the economic trends involved. The reason why America is strong is because of the oscillation between left and right. My fear is that the minute one side gains too much weight, the structure will topple. The Tea Partiers are a perfect example of how the system is starting to unbalance itself.
I think a corporation is basically the same as a democratic government, in that the shareholders are analogous to citizens. The corporation has obligations to its shareholders, and the government has obligations to its citizens. The corporation has no obligations to non-shareholders, and the government has no obligations to non-citizens (of course both have moral obligations insofar as they are made up of individual moral agents, but I assume we’re talking about legal obligations here).
The corporation is itself a citizen, in a sense, and like a citizen entitled to the protections of government, and just like any other citizen, should be restrained within the limits of the law. I don’t know any conservative who thinks otherwise.
I do think that limiting forces naturally evolve out of a free market, since corporations can’t make money if they have no customers with money. Similarly, if the economy collapses, the money and assets of the corporation become worthless. So corporations have an interest in having prosperous customers and a thriving economy, and I see no reason to assume they will not, in general, act accordingly.
Obviously there are times when people, and corporations, do bad things, and times when they act foolishly, resulting in harm to themselves and others. But this applies to people in government as well as to people running corporations.
I’m with you in your second paragraph, right up to the last sentence. I don’t see how people expressing a preference for certain policy positions portends danger. Naturally, it disturbs people on either side of the political aisle to see large numbers of people expressing a preference for the other side. But one of the perils of democracy is that your side doesn’t always get to win.
The idea is to trust that the Constitution will keep them within bounds. If you’ve lost faith in that, then you’ve lost faith in democracy.
Zach, Fear of large corporations is irrational and is often rooted in jealousy or misunderstanding. A large corporation is a group of people who work together….
Really now? Since the Supreme Court Ruling where Corporations are now literally allowed to buy off our elections, do you really think the point you are trying to make here is a good one? Yes, people should fear corporations. They have the power because they have loads of money. They can shift policy now buy funneling that money into the interests that serve what they want. More money for them.
Even Adam Smith believed in the “regulatory” power of the Enlightenment despots over whom he, like most of the “philsophers” of the so-called “Englightenment” enthused, and he saw their “free market-favouring” regulation as a NECESSARY adjunct of the economic system he was propounding. What he wanted to end was “mercantilism,” but NOT the power of “enlightened” monarchs to “regulate.”
Otherwise, as he correctly foresaw–a century before Marx–his “free market” system would eat itself and the society alive, through unregulated monopolization of economic power. (Marx, a brilliant nihilist, rememeber WANTED that society “eaten alive.”)
That’s what we have today: the “market” (the veritable ENGINE of what John Paul II called the “culture of death”) is EATING HUMANITY ALIVE–destroying the planet, corrupting democratic politics, turning the noble profession of politician into a hucksterism, eviscerating the education process of all noble intellectual and scholarly disinterest.
Those who like this don’t really understand what is valuable about Western Civilizations and worthy of “conservation.” They are the new “cultural Bolsheviks” of this age. It is PERFECTLY appropriate that the “neo-conservative” foreign policy they espouse is rooted in TROTSKYISM.
Digby, I only got half of what you wrote but I agree with all of it because you wrote it. I know very little about corporations but I do know that they are composed of people who are very driven and competitive. In other words, they are driven by the primitive instinctive structures of their “reptilian” brains whose basic impulses are survival and pleasure. These impulses then are sent to the neocortex areas of the brain in human beings who then respond according to their conditioning to give them the best strategies for survival.
The value system that runs the lives of corporations and human beings is based on how the developement of self-awareness either inhibits or encourages the development of empathy towards other human beings and the whole world.
Empathy is what enables us to see the world and its inhabitants as living and feeling creations which must be treated with the highest respect. Empathy is what creates solidarity.
Reptiles do not have the ability to have empathy. They will eat their young.
Oh, I see. Reptiles eat their young. People who run corporations are reptiles. Therefore people who run corporations will eat their young. Flawless logic. Though perhaps not quite charitable.