Corporate personhood again
Earlier I made the point that proper leftists should be USING the idea that a corporation is a person, instead of trying to delete the idea. If a corporation has the same rights and responsibilities as a person, then you can prosecute a company for murdering other companies through LBOs or regulatory capture. LBO is direct murder, regulatory control is murder through a hitman impersonating a policeman.

Using the same literal connection might help to understand a couple of puzzles in recent years.

Puzzle 1: Why did insurance companies and pension funds allow ZIRP to happen? Insurers and pensions, taken together, are larger than the banks who gained from ZIRP. They have plenty of lobbyists. They could see EASILY that ZIRP would destroy them.

Puzzle 2: Why did insurers allow Obamacare to happen? Predicting business risk is their CORE SKILL. Why didn't they use it?

Puzzle 3: Why did football companies encourage their players to insult their OWN AUDIENCE for a year before they finally figured out the problem?

In personhood terms, all three are intentional corporate SUICIDE. Why does a company ... or a whole class of companies .... voluntarily choose to lose its own profitability?

The standard myth of capitalism says that corporate persons are cold rational machines, acting solely to increase their own profits, while human beings are squishy irrational randomizers, acting on the basis of momentary hormone secretions.

I don't know if that was ever true, but it's completely backwards now.

Living people are no longer willing to die for a cause. All the causes that formerly commanded love and devotion have betrayed us and fucked us over and over and over and over. Fuck them.

This rational cynicism doesn't apply among corporate persons, who are still romantically ready to die for SOMETHING. In these specific cases the SOMETHING seems to be Deepstate, but I don't think that's necessarily the only True Faith or True Lover.

Labels: the broken circle

  ¶ 3:14 AM