Tag: corpocracy

Efficiently incommunicado

This is some commendable cogitation on the part of the Canadian Cincinnatus:

[W]hy was the British Empire so efficient? For there
is no doubt about it, it was. A mere thousand bureaucrats in the Colonial
Office managed an empire so large that the sun never set on it, an empire that
included a subcontinent. How was this possible?

One
reason, I think, is that the colonies weren’t informatically connected. No
phones, no text messages, no Skype, no e-mail, no conference calls, no
webinars, no meetings. Therefore, no micromanagement. For reasons of necessity,
all decisions had to be pushed down to the lowest possible levels. This not
only had the effect of minimizing bureaucracy but it also meant that the
character of the Empire’s decision makers was more solid.

Contrast with this Richard Nixon speaking to platoon leaders in the field in Vietnam.  Bureaucracy can be a killer even in very small organizations and also relates to the r/K metaphor; once the job becomes sufficiently easy and risk-free, the change almost dictates the mass entry of the Rabbit People.

One of the things that strikes the reader of Imperial British history was the youth and astounding arrogance of the men who ruled its colonies.  Their belief in their own superiority was, to a certain extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy.  My favorite example from the era was the officer who steamed something like a hundred miles upriver from his army, showed up at the gates of a garrisoned, walled city with about twenty men, and demanded its surrender.

Since it never occurred to the enemy commander whose army had previously been defeated that anyone could possibly be so insanely arrogant as to make such a demand without having his victorious army in the near vicinity, the city was surrendered at once.  And yet, it wasn’t actually crazy, it was a straightforward calculated risk based on the idea of the enemy’s interest in his own self-preservation. 

American Red Cross goes AWOL

Only now are SWPLs beginning to discover that charities that pay their executives compensation comparable with the private sector not all that concerned about actually helping people in need:

At a press conference this morning on Staten Island, a host of local
officials, including Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand,
gathered to highlight the needs of the hard-hit borough in the aftermath
of Hurricane Sandy. And, although many pols spoke, no one was more
impassioned than Borough President James Molinaro, who called the Red
Cross an “absolute disgrace” and even urged the public to cease giving
them contributions.

“Because the devastation in Staten Island, the lack of a response,”
Mr. Molinaro said to explain his comment to NBC after the press
conference. “You know, I went to a shelter Monday night after the storm.
People were coming in with no socks, with no shoes. They were in
desperate need. Their housing was destroyed. They were crying. Where was
the Red Cross? Isn’t that their function? They collect millions of
dollars. Whenever there’s a drive in Staten Island, we give openly and
honestly. Where are they? Where are they? I was at the South Shore
yesterday, people were buried in their homes. There the dogs are trying
to find bodies. The people there, the neighbors who had no electricity,
were making soup. Making soup. It’s very emotional because the lack of a
response. The lack of a response. They’re supposed to be here….They
should be on the front lines fighting, and helping the people.”

Clearly Mr. Molinaro doesn’t understand how this works.  Private sector executives don’t feel the need to be there helping anyone, so why should their American Red Cross counterparts be out there either?  The function of the American Red Cross is to collect millions of dollars and then distribute that money throughout its bureaucracy.  It has nothing to do with helping anyone except themselves.  Doesn’t everyone know that?

For the record, this is NOT true of other national Red Cross organizations.  But the big name American charities make even Wall Street executives raise their eyebrows and marvel at their rapaciousness.  At least Goldman Sachs has the decency to honestly swindle its clients out of their money rather than lying about how they’re going to help disaster victims with it.

Star Wars is dead

Not that George Lucas hasn’t methodically gone about ruining his creation for decades, beginning with The Return of the Jedi and those damned Ewoks, but the sale of Lucasfilm to Disney pretty much guarantees that the franchise will never, ever, return to its erstwhile glory.  This take on the acquisition by a Slashdot commenter named Doctor Jest summed it up rather nicely:

Mark my words…. Episode 7 will be all goddamned Ewoks. And
Chewbacca will have a perm and PTSD from the final battle. Then we have
to have the token black guy/chick… forget Billy Dee Williams. We’re
getting Will Smith or his bratty little kid. C3P0 will finally come out
of the closet and admit he’s been taking it up the exhaust pipe from
IG-88 for years. R2D2 will be turned into a karaoke machine…. Luke
will become a homeless religious nut while Han Solo and Leia will have six
kids on galactic welfare… and the evil Ritt Momney will threaten to
close the youth center Han and Leia run unless the duo can field a
tiddlywinks team in time for the big tournament on Yaavin IV. Meanwhile,
the Emperor’s clones will become the universe’s ugliest choir.

Now
I know the franchise is truly dead. Thank goodness I got it on Blu Ray
before Disney got their slimy dickskinners on the franchise. Disney
fucked the Muppets… (I believe they killed Henson because he was
having second thoughts on the sale… ok, so I made that up… but
Disney’s fucking evil!)

It’s sad, because Disney used to be a wonderful organization itself.  Now it is the evil vampire squid of the entertainment world, mindlessly devouring and excreting out the stinking remnants of one entertainment franchise after another.  It was never going to happen, but imagine how much creativity could have been unleashed if George Lucas had released Star Wars under the LGPL.  Instead, we’re going to get gay Ewoks singing musical numbers and Hispanic princesses wielding lightsabers and going on intergalactic voyages with sparkly alien vampires where they defeat the evil Ritt Momney and Pand Raul in the process of learning the important lesson that the ultimate truth in life is to be tolerant of others who are different… unless they are Republicans.

A sickness in Britain

After literally years of coverups by the BBC and the police, Scotland Yard finally appears to be something about the infestation of celebrity pedophiles in Britain:

Police are on the verge of arresting up to a dozen household names accused of sex abuse but missed an incredible seven chances to trap paedophile Jimmy Savile while he was alive, it has been revealed.  Scotland Yard is to act ‘within days’ as it emerged the pervert DJ abused at least 300 people because he was allowed to rape and sexually assault victims unhindered for decades.

Savile is believed to have had accomplices and celebrities named by victims – some huge TV stars – will be quizzed over serious sex assault allegations as police warned: ‘we will come for them’.

It’s informative to compare the BBC’s general lack of interest and insistence on absolute proof before permitting any mention of the situation to the public with how it behaved when covering similar child abuse cases committed by Catholic priests.  In light of this and Penn State, we’re rapidly learning that the problem isn’t the priests per se, it is with the bureaucracies that are more interested in protecting the interests of the institution than the children with whom their members come into contact.

And, of course, it tends to support my philosophy of never trusting any man who is inordinately interested in children.  Normal adult men find children to be tedious and teenagers to be obnoxious.  They tolerate them, they don’t actively seek out their company.  It never surprises me when a trusted, much-loved man who “just loves children” turns out to be a predator, for as with Willie Sutton and his banks, pedophiles will always go where the children are.

Note too that the police have been lying about their previous inaction:  “[D]espite their action now, police blew more than half a dozen chances to arrest Savile while he was alive.  The Met, who had previously said they had no record of complaints about the pervert’s campaign of abuse, have now confessed that one woman spoke to them in the 1980s as did another lady in 2003.”

How long will it be before the FBI finally begins to overturn rocks in Hollywood and investigate the gay pedophiles infesting the film industry?

Don’t Like, don’t Want

Rather like politicians, the very last companies one should trust with one’s data are those who go to the most trouble to gather it:

When Facebook Inc. (FB) filed its proposal Feb. 1 to go public, it touted the effectiveness of ads linked to customers’ friends, citing research from Nielsen, the audience-counting company.  Barbara Jacobs, an assistant director for corporation finance at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, was skeptical, as she and her staff vetted the filing to ensure Facebook had disclosed all material information to investors. The claim appeared to be drawn from marketing materials, not a Nielsen study, she wrote to Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman, 42.

She gave him an ultimatum: Produce the study and provide Nielsen’s consent for use of the data — or don’t use it, she wrote to Ebersman on Feb. 28. Facebook dropped the reference after initial resistance.

Facebook isn’t the most evil company in the world, but they were birthed in iniquity and things have only gone downhill from there.

If corporations are legal persons

Why are they never held accountable for their criminal actions in the same way that real people are?

NEXT week, the Supreme Court will hear a case with many potential ramifications for American and international law, and for corporate responsibility for human rights around the globe. The justices will be asked to decide whether the corporations to which they have been extending the rights of individuals should also be held accountable for crimes against human rights, just as individuals are.

The story behind the case begins in 1980, when my colleagues at the Center for Constitutional Rights and I helped obtain the first semblance of justice to the family of a slain 17-year-old Paraguayan youth named Joelito Filártiga.

A police inspector general in Asunción, the capital, had tortured the boy to death in retaliation for his father’s opposition to Paraguay’s brutal dictatorship. But the case was decided in New York, far from Paraguay, where the crime had occurred and where justice had proven impossible for the Filártiga family; the boy’s murderer was ultimately ordered to pay the family $10.4 million in damages.

The precedent-setting case was made possible by a remarkable decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which allowed it to be brought under a long-obscure law enacted by Congress in 1789. Known as the Alien Tort Statute, the law has been interpreted to mean that foreigners who commit heinous crimes abroad in violation of international law can be held accountable in the United States if they are present or do business here; the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality in 2004.

Since that decision, dozens of successful alien tort claims have been brought in American courts — at first against individuals, and eventually against corporations. As a result, many foreign victims of egregious crimes — ranging from torture and slave labor to the execution of loved ones — that were sanctioned, endorsed or commissioned by corporations have found justice in our courts.

Yet in September 2010, a divided Second Circuit — the very court that had rendered the Filártiga decision — held that only individuals, and not corporations, can be sued under the statute. That ruling, in a case known as Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, came less than a year after the much more famous — and criticized — Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which removed restrictions on political spending by contributions and wildly expanded the concept of corporate personhood.

Together, these decisions have triggered a wave of outrage among advocates for human rights, which see in them a signal from the courts that corporations have extensive rights but few responsibilities under American law.

Since we are living in a bank-run corpocracy, I tend to doubt the Supreme Court will be inclined to permit corporations to be held liable. And this will go a long way towards demonstrating the necessity of ending the facade that corporations should be given the rights of real people.

Three strikes for corporations

Karl Denninger has an idea for forcing corporations to abide by the law:

Our current “justice system”, in short simply makes fraud a business model that has costs dramatically smaller than what the offenders can steal through their misconduct. Judge Rakoff is exactly correct in refusing to endorse this model, as despite the claims that this is an “effective” model for discipline of wrong-doing we have decades of experience with it now and all it has produces is serial re-offenders.

Were this a violent criminal context we would have protests on the courthouse steps demanding “three strikes” and similar laws, and we’d get them, exactly as we did years ago.

It is well beyond the time that we should have a “three strkes” rule for corporate misconduct and put a stop to the “neither admit or deny” negotiated settlement.

If individuals can be locked up for life on the basis of three felonies, then obviously it makes a great deal of sense to shut down a corporation after it commits three felonies as well. Corporations only exist by the action of the state and they are terminated by a subsequent action of the state on a regular basis.

While regulators could theoretically keep corporations under control, the historical fact is that they are rapidly captured by the very corporations they are meant to police and transformed into an insurance policy. Imagine how often banks would be robbed if each time someone robbed a bank, they were forced to pay a fine equal to about five percent of what they stole and told not to do it again… or they would pay another similar fine.

The present system of fraud and theft legalized after the fact isn’t good for the nation or the economy, and it isn’t even beneficial for the corporations in the long run. Veal may make for a nice meal, but if you eat all the calves, you’re not going to be eating beef for very long.

Kelo, six years later

A classic example of why government should never be permitted to seize private property for any reason:

Kelo Aftermath — The Final Indignity

As regular readers of this blog know, the redevelopment project that gave rise to the wretched U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. New London, never came about. In spite of the city’s boasting about the quality of its plans, nothing was ever built on the Fort Trumbull site from which the city displaced an entire unoffending, well maintained lower middle-class neighborhood. Though the formal taking took place in 2000 and the U.S. Supreme Court gave its approval to it in 2005, the city’s project has been a failure, with 91 acres of waterfront property sitting there empty and overgrown by weeds.

Still, despite the loss of the tax base, the forced seizure of the neighborhood was probably worth it. After all, even weeds are to be preferred to those ghastly lower middle-class people who drink beer, call in to vote on American Idol, and indulge in lawn ornaments. Brrrrrrrr! But wouldn’t it be tremendously interesting to see local governments start applying Kelo to eliminate low tax revenue neighborhoods that just happen to be vibrant?

What free market

If you needed any more evidence that Americans do not enjoy a free market, look no further:

“Attempts to undermine the legitimate currency of this country are simply a unique form of domestic terrorism,” U.S. Attorney Anne Tompkins said. “While these forms of anti-government activities do not involve violence, they are every bit as insidious and represent a clear and present danger to the economic stability of this country. We are determined to meet these threats through infiltration, disruption and dismantling of organizations which seek to challenge the legitimacy of our democratic form of government,” Tompkins said.

Von NotHaus, 67, faces up to 25 years in prison during sentencing, which hasn’t been scheduled. The government also is seeking the forfeiture of about 16,000 pounds of Liberty Dollar coins and precious metals valued at nearly $7 million.

This is insane on at least three levels. First, if anyone in the country is going to be arrested for financially-related domestic terrorism representing a clear and present danger to the economic stability of the country, it should be Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. They, more than anyone, have put the nation on the brink of economic and political collapse. Second, if the Neo-Keynesian economic policies being pursued by the federal government are correct, then more money circulating in the system is beneficial to it regardless of whether they are Federal Reserve Notes, Liberty Dollars, or Donkey Kong’s Coconut currency since it increases the money supply. Third, our legitimate Constitutional form of government doesn’t permit the use money that is not gold and silver. Fourth, if America did have a genuinely democratic form of government, Americans would be permitted to utilize any form of currency they happened to desire.

On the other hand, it is obvious that Von Nothaus left himself vulnerable to counterfeiting charges by consciously imitating the look and feel of U.S. coinage. It would be interesting to know if they would have been able to successfully charge him with counterfeiting if he had produced silver coins shaped in triangles and rectangles that bore no similarities whatsoever to the federal ones. And on an economic note, it may amuse some of you to know that the first time I glanced over the article, I read “infiltration” as “inflation”.

The future is free

To virtually no intelligent observer’s surprise, Rupert Murdoch’s paywall is failing:

My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself—who have free access to the site—are not going beyond the registration page. It’s an empty world. The wider implications of this emptiness are only just starting to become clear. A Murdoch and Fleet Street veteran with whom I’ve been corresponding about the paywall reported to me on his recent conversation with an A-list entertainment publicist: “What was really interesting to me was that this person volunteered a blinding realization. ‘Why would I get any of my clients to talk to the Times or the Sunday Times if they are behind a paywall? Who can see it? I can’t even share a link and they aren’t on search. It’s as though their writers don’t exist anymore.’”

What the professional journalists and their corporate paymasters have forgotten is that they are on the wrong side of not one, but two issues. Everyone knows that the corporate media are on the wrong side of the cost equation. But what they don’t realize is that the corporate media are quite often on the wrong side of the quality equation as well these days.

Now, my daily readership of 7k blog readers is absolutely tiny compared to however many people visit the Fox News and Sunday Times sites, but is there anyone who would put the track record of a single economics writer for one of those sites against mine? And if you start factoring in other independent economics writers like Mike Shedlock, Karl Denninger, and the Mises Institute collective, you can see how the cumulative free readerships not only rival the corporate readerships, but enjoy a substantially higher quality of material as well.

Given the influx of corporate investment from places like Mexico and Saudi Arabia, we can count on the mainstream media product to become more and more irrelevant, while the free media that is a marketing adjunct to its producers’ primary careers continues to improve in quality.