Posts Tagged corporations
No, corporations REALLY ARE people
I’m told there has been some kind of big stir in America because Mitt Romney said “corporations are people”. Take this for example:
In his quick, casual reply—corporations are people—Romney had seemed to give something away, though it wasn’t immediately clear what. The press chose to play the episode as a “gaffe,” as ABC’s Jake Tapper described it, a moment in which the weakness in Romney’s political pitch, the gap between his own privileged experience of the world and that of working-class voters, had been exposed. MSNBC, in a spate of giddy incredulity, seemed to keep the clip on loop for a week. But Romney’s own campaign managers did not try to obscure the episode at the state fair, to say he had been misunderstood or to secret it away. Instead they promoted it, as an advertisement of principle, and made the confrontation the centerpiece of a solicitation to supporters. A few days later, Romney’s communication director, Gail Gitcho, told the press that the exchange had raised $25,000 within 24 hours.
The incident, in retrospect, did less to peg Romney as a creature of privilege than it did to reveal something deeper. For Romney, the corporation has long been an object of a certain idealism. It is something he has spent much of his adult life—first as a management-strategy consultant, then as CEO of the private-equity firm Bain Capital—working to perfect, to strip of its inefficiencies until it might function as a perfectly frictionless economic unit.
Of course, everyone missed the point. It seems like the entire US press has overlooked something that any second-year law student could tell you. That is, corporations are people.
Don’t believe me? Here’s something Lord MacNaughten said in Salomon v Salomon [1897] AC 22:
The company is at law a different person altogether from the subscribers to the memorandum; and, though it may be that after incorporation the business is precisely the same as it was before, and the same persons are managers, and the same hands receive the profits, the company is not in law the agent of the subscribers or trustee for them.
This goes right back to basic principles of what a corporation is – an entity designed to be separate from the people running it. It has its own interests and it is responsible for its own actions. Remember that a “person” is not the same as a “human”.
It is perfectly understandable that a retired priest wouldn’t have a strong grasp of this legal technicality, but the entire US media? For shame.
The death of goatse? No more tubgirl? Why we are no longer seeing shock sites
Posted by MK in Culture, Technology on February 9, 2011
The AWL’s Choire Sicha made a good observation about the internet:
Why Did Web Gross-Out Culture Die? | The Awl.
2 Girls 1 Cup took the web by storm—back in summer of 2007. Goatse—the infamous picture that first gaped at us in 1999!—has been popular and not popular in waves over the years since, but the last few years? Not so much. Whatever happened to Tubgirl and Eel Girl? (If you have never seen these things, worry not!) There was also, a few years back, some website that was supposed to be the future of the Internet, devoted to tabloid play of death and destruction video. Now I can’t even remember what it’s called and can’t even Google it up….
What happened? The Internet was great at being a foul cesspool of shock, but it looks like that’s over now.
Her answer is that since everything’s become more professional and most of the “hub” sites are owned by “grown-up” organisations like AOL and the Huffington Post, everything is self-censored and material like tubgirl just doesn’t spread like it used to.
The enjoyable and more mainstream websites that propagate meme-related stuff on the web, like Urlesque (currently most-popular: Cab Driver Does Spot-on Michael Jackson Impression) and Buzzfeed (most popular:Top 10 Crazy Texts From Parents), are actually grown-up entities and can’t and won’t handle actual shock material, as seems quite correct. (One is owned by AOL; the other is the team behind the Huffington Post.) And so there’s really no one left to identify the next famous Brazilian lesbian scat porn trailer and force it upon its non-intended audience.
I think there’s a point here, but I also think a big factor is the migration of social interaction from messageboards and chatrooms to sites like Twitter and Facebook, as well as the takeover of…life by Apple. You see, forums didn’t really moderate for material like this and it was very easy/funny for someone to post a picture to a whole bunch of random people who they didn’t know and then sit-back and laugh at the reactions. These new social media giants can restrict certain links and the whole process is made much more difficult by the fact that you are no longer an anonymous screen name, you need a whole extensive profile that takes a lot of time and effort to build and can be traced back to your real identity.
Add to that the fact that Steve Jobs’ own morality prevents any inappropriate material on iPhones and iPads and seeing shock sites is becoming harder and harder.
I do agree with Sicha though, while it’s obviously pleasant to not be watching a video of a jar breaking…inside some guy, there is a certain charm that the young internet had that all this growing up has caused it to lose. Sad…
RSS This
