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Monday, October 24, 2005 :: Ben G | splinters by emailThe Corporation � Our Psychopathic Rulers I've just finished reading The Corporation by Joel Bakan, a highly absorbing examination of the malignant over-reaching influence said institution has over all our lives. There's a film to go with it I haven't seen yet. Okay, so "Big Corporations Are Nasty" is hardly scoop of the century material, but this is an extremely well-sourced, wide-ranging and compelling narrative explaining just how thoroughly we're being frigged over. The facts about General Motors alone provide you with ammunition to reel off for a few years. The most memorable insight is that the corporation is a legal individual entity, with the rights of a human being, but with none of the capacity for punishment a man or woman has. You can't arrest a corporation. You can only fine it, currently at such a level which can be, and is, safely ignored. So on they go. The corporation is a creature which by its very existence can have no other goal than maximising its own profit for shareholders, and nothing can stand in its way. The directors could be the fluffiest and saintliest people in the world; it matters not. The final line, the bottom line, the profit line, will always be the first and last consideration, no matter what it takes to achieve that. Bakan makes the astute observation that an entity which stops at nothing to achieve its ends with no regards for the consequence is a psychopath. So we're governed by psychopaths. That can't be prosecuted. Nice. The other memorable observation is that the corporation, far from being an eternal "fact of life" is a comparatively young invention. First emerging in the 17th century, they were in fact suppressed by the British government in the same era when it saw the breeding ground for corruption they caused. It wasn't until the 20th century they really took off, and it wasn't until the end of the 1970s that they finally became so powerful as to convince governments to remove all restraints on them, with the results we see around us. Indeed, as Bakan observes, even Adam Smith, the great grand-daddy of the free-market himself saw the institution as inherently corrupt. He argued against any company which passed the buck onto it's shareholders, negating any responsibility for the directors themselves, and that "negligence and profusion therefore must prevail, more or less, in the management of such a company." He wouldn't have been surprised about Enron. I wonder what the modern day Institute which bares his name would have to say about that? [permalink] | [0 comments]
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