The whole point of incorporating is to make the fictive person of the corporation the “Lex-Luthor like figure” while any actual bad actors or investors in the corporation are shielded from liabilities for anyone’s actions within the corporate framework.
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The “Lex Luthor figure” I mentioned above is not a figurehead for a single corporation, but rather the fictive mastermind who would have to coordinate a smear campaign conducted by multiple corporations, according to the libel fantasy Retchdog constructed.
And just because individual liabilities are shielded, that doesn’t mean the corporations themselves are immune from punishment. Corporations escaping punishment is a hallmark of cronyism, which has nothing to do with Citizens United.
You said it yourself, the nonliving legal fiction of the corporation gets punished in place of the people who perpetrate the bad actions themselves. In other words, corporations are ethereal scapegoats for the actions of individuals. Which sticks in my craw from an ethical standpoint.
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Which can have bad outcomes, I agree with you, but there are good outcomes as well: In the 1970s, Nixon sued The New York Times over the Pentagon Papers, rather than the reporter who wrote the story.
What it amounts to is a process of abstraction. When you represent real-world things and relationships symbolically, you can manipulate the symbols nearly any way that you like. Then we might have some consensus agreement that this symbolic activity in turn informs the real world. Nearly all economic activity over the past several hundred years exists to make indirect control of people possible, because the church and royalty fell out of favor. If there is no real reason why some people are better than others and allowed to rule, then you make up symbolic ones which are now subtle enough to withstand post-enlightenment rational scrutiny.
So incorporation, and even punishing corporations, both serve to re-enforce the strength of capital over citizenship. It involves the necessity of translating all wealth, goals, and damages as being essentially financial. So if a corporation ruins real lives, they merely have to pay their way out of it with money. Because it allows them to have a primarily financial rather than ethical responsibility. This abstraction also allows for selective enforcement, to keep undesirables out of the corporate game, or to punish only selected actors while leaving the system untouched.
And for the most part those corporation’s punishments are in the form of fines, and guess what corporations have plenty of?
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If your problem is with the system itself, what’s the solution?
For better or worse, I think a constitutional republic that engages in free-market capitalism is pretty much the best option we’ve got.
It can always improve, of course, but the bloody history of the twentieth century makes me wary of anyone who advocates for a complete overhaul of the system. Those tend to produce body counts.
This is the problem right here. Not “the system”, A SYSTEM. It is a system which I think is problematic. The solution is to recognize that systems are inter-related, and it that would be foolish to demand one, all-encompassing one.
Well, if you are willing to alienate or kill anybody who thinks differently, then it has to be by default, doesn’t it?
Sure, because it’s based upon the idea of having One System For Everybody, which means choosing your most palatable delusion. It’s like fundie religion, if everybody needs to live the same way, there’s a fight. The problem with traditional liberal democracy has been that it relies upon an illusion of consensus, the pretense that we can have a society of free people by just happening to all agree to live the same way, rather than having it imposed by some authority. And when this way of living is entirely based upon “market forces” as an obfuscation of human power games, then it is based upon lies and delusion, which makes it a bogus, ineffectual way of life, with arguably no future to it. Not for ideological reasons, just because it assumes to much and isn’t very practical.
Instead of overhauling The System, or tearing it down to replace it with a different The System, implement some systems of your own, and encourage others to do the same. Playing the same old game when there’s a stacked deck, even as opposition, only makes your opponent stronger. Best to opt out and diversify.
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Wow. It makes me wonder if there is correlation with things like street painted addresses, curtains, amount of vehicles, or grass/weed proportions.
But (at least where I live) it is either 51/49 or 60/40. There is no consensus, really, ever. I don’t think liberal democracy has ever advocated consensus.
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Render unto Caesar…
You’re not being very clear. If you’re talking about multiple, overlapping systems, what would that look like in practice? A town that’s laissez-faire next to a town that’s communal agrarian society next to a compound run by a Pastafarian cult? Or even more granular? A house that engages in industrial capitalism next to a lean-to that houses a hardcore anarchist?
For someone who railed against abstractions, you’re awfully short on specifics. 
When you dominate the media coverage you control the narrative. Simple as that.
If you can run hundreds of different ads directing a wide range of accusations against your opponent and he can only afford a small handful of ads to counter them then he’s probably going to spend what little resources he has in a vain attempt at defending himself.
Voters make their decisions based on the information they have (or the information they think they have). What information voters are exposed to is largely a function of who controls the biggest chunk of the media.
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The way I used to put it was that people know they’re being lied to, but that doesn’t mean they know what the truth is.
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Well put. In this age it’s hard to keep the truth from getting out there, but you can certainly bury it under a mountain of baloney.
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I definitely don’t mean consensus on any particular issue, but rather consensus about subordinating ourselves to a framework of representation and capital as a way of organizing society. Basically, the Enlightenment-era concept of the “social contract”. It’s easy-ish to pull off in older conditions of less decisions, less pervasiveness, and slower communications. The idea that even if we might disagree upon particular issues, that our values and goals can be assumed to be similar enough that such a system can be considered, more or less, fair enough for everybody.
In a broadcast media structure, this is understandable. Perhaps I too much take it for granted that media content is more distributed now. Why would anybody in 2015 rely upon newspaper or television to keep informed of current events? That we have instantaneous, practically cost-free media now seems obvious to me, so it seems hard to install an effective “propaganda machine” when people have a practically infinite number of channels. Apparently many don’t see it this way.
Ah, in US the highest voter turnout is generally older, and they generally watch broadcast TV. I suspect, as you are intuiting, that tides will change. But as of 2016 they haven’t.
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QFT.
(though i do enjoy the NY Times food section)
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[quote=“goodpasture, post:52, topic:50759”]
You’re not being very clear. If you’re talking about multiple, overlapping systems, what would that look like in practice? A town that’s laissez-faire next to a town that’s communal agrarian society next to a compound run by a Pastafarian cult?[/quote]
Yes!
Better yet!
What I meant by abstraction was more specific, the act of taking something concrete, and translating or reducing it into something conceptual. Not the quality of being vague or indistinct.
There is something of a paradox about putting forth a particular system, when I am thinking of a meta-system. Like telling somebody to “Think for yourself!”, or selling rebellion, or telling somebody what to “DIY”. But yes, what I am thinking of could be considered very granular. Many more, much smaller, networked groups. Social networking as the politics of meatspace. If you will, not unlike the rhizomatic interconnectivity of Mille Plateaux. A shattering of the monolith into a political and economic diaspora of uncontrollable micro-societies which find their equilibrium through the optimizations of ecology.
