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Edited on Tue Jun-28-11 12:39 PM by kenny blankenship
The way corporations are structured and compartmentalized is designed to eliminate moral responsibility and criminal liability for the corporate owners, while requiring managers (including CEOs and VPs) to maximize profits, by whatever means, or face replacement. When egregious decisions come to light, upper management can claim that lower management never fully informed them of the damaging consequences, while lower management can't be held accountable for decisions that weren't theirs to make. The owners of course have no criminal liability whatsoever. They can freely admit they had no idea what the company was doing and cared even less, as long as it made them dividends and the share price was rising. They can only lose the value of their stake in the company, which they would rarely lose in full, since they usually have time to distribute their shares to someone else who's willing to take the risk, who in turn can find another bagholder when the shares continue to decline, and so on. Criminal culpability and financial liability circulate endlessly away from the guilty parties, becoming more and more diluted and deferred in the process, and never hit home in a way that provides a sense of justice or deterrence. The Sheriff's deputy goes from door to door, following the directions of the last contact -Him? he went that-a-way-, only to find that the wanted suspect isn't there either. When someone is finally found to accept the summons or be arrested, the charge has been knocked down from negligent homicide to a parking ticket. The social product of this legal dynamic is mass amorality and a corresponding mass apathy.
The fact that the President kills many innocent people isn't necessarily an indication that he is individually without empathy or remorse, like the serial killer. He could be a psychopath, but even if he is not he is still under orders to maximize profits for the owners. He has a responsibility to carry out the global strategy of the major shareholders of the government, who are made up of large profit seeking corporations and very wealthy individuals. He kills institutionally, as a corporate officer, putting his feelings aside. The "psychopathic" structure of the corporation is there to surround him and take the burden of conscience away from him. Only politically can the President be held accountable for actions amounting to mass murder. But there he is surrounded by a protective wall of excuses: He can only act on what his Pentagon advisers are telling him. He is not an officer directing troops in the field, and their abuses are not his fault. He has to continue policies begun by his predecessor, even though he abhors them, for the sake of stability and the integrity of our alliances. Lately, it seems the instinctual moral deflection so well perfected in corporate life has largely desensitized us, as rung-holders in whatever corporate enterprise and pecking order we serve, to the crimes of high political office as well. If one voice in this pecking order should rise in criticism of actions taken by the political corporation and its CEO, the voice of the group immediately reasserts conformity and seeks to implicate the critic: Well you voted for him, didn't you? So you can hardly complain about what he does now! He can't prosecute the crimes of his predecessor-that would mean his successor would in turn prosecute him! Notice how this last excuse simply assumes that the new President is committing prosecutable crimes as well, but values "getting away with it" at an absolute priority over seeing any justice done. And these are the "good guys", or so they claim.
When you reach this point of mass amorality and apathy, it is time to admit the whole thing is rotten, and make plans accordingly.
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