Dilbertization of overly eager shareholders and boosters of the neocon corpostate aborning is going to become my new hobby. Naomi Klein does a really nice job of summarizing exactly what's going on in the well-spun world of neocon brand management.
"There is a reason Bono is so admired in the Administration that the White House might just choose an Irishman. As frontman of one of the world's most enduring rock brands, Bono talks to Republicans as they like to see themselves: not as administrators of a diminishing public sphere they despise but as CEOs of a powerful private corporation called America. "Brand USA is in trouble...it's a problem for business," Bono warned at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The solution is "to re-describe ourselves to a world that is unsure of our values."
The Bush Administration wholeheartedly agrees, as evidenced by the orgy of redescription that now passes for American foreign policy. Faced with an Arab world enraged by its occupation of Iraq and its blind support for Israel, the US solution is not to change these brutal policies; it is, in the pseudo-academic language of corporate branding, to "change the story."
Hopefully, at some point in the spirit of Sarbanes Oxley which seeks to hold management accountable for truth in performance reporting, we'll shrug off all the rhetorical corpospeak distracting us from a cold, clinical, and ruthless audit of what the corpobeast is really up to, before we find ourselves holding the bag like bunch of Enron patsies and stooges...,
Posted by at March 12, 2005 12:48 PM | TrackBackCorporations exist for the benefit of their customers, without which they perish.
This is simply incorrect. Corporations exist exclusively for the benefit of their shareholders, and, as you so clearly know, the character of the proprietor-class tends to be sorely deficient.
In an organically competent view of the world and our place in it, it is the hallmark of conscience/consciousness that one deliver value to one's clientele. We've spoken of syneidesis before;
the distinctive and highly significant teaching that this very sense of I, the very experience of being an I, the very feeling of I am is the reflex of the divine call into a communion of relationships ordinarily known in its faded and fallen state as syneidesis or conscience. We will return to this later when we examine the ultimate status and significance of ethics
The corpostate is utterly devoid of syneidesis, it is the very destroyer of syneidesis and that is why it is the Beast. Without which it is preposterous to speak of evolution, dignity, or destiny, less'n you speak of the inevitable Ozymandian destiny awaiting this bloated and cancerous corporate pox upon creation.
It will indeed serve no other purpose than to feed the Moon.
Here ends your recommended daily allowance of ecclexia for today Cobb...., (o:
Corporations exist for the benefit of their customers, without which they perish. The consumer society is based, fundamentally on the idea of convenience, and convenience is the handmaiden of incompetence. If the great masses of people could do for themselves, they would obviate corporate power. This is the reason that there are no corporations in China, people understand and live under feudal arrangements and their interests do not go beyond village life.
Americans are not constituted of that stuff. So to suggest that we could survive without the corporation is pure folly. You could sooner wish yourself a pair of jeans out of thin air, than get the American consumer to sew his own. The only cure to the corporation is organic competence, and that is an artifact of a dying world. The corporation is the vehicle which achieves best, the social values of contemporary people, it is an inevitable product of social evolution, and it is as deeply embedded in the fabric of human dignity and destiny as are religion and education.
On the other hand, there's always the Moon.
Posted by: Cobb at March 12, 2005 02:07 PM