The Supreme Court's ruling on corporate spending in elections may or may not finish off our already broken political system, but it does confirm one of the central ways in which ours is a moral culture in crisis. The majority's argument was based on the fact that, in American constitutional law, corporations are individuals - a travesty of the 14th amendment which Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan's 2003 documentary "The Corporation" explored and exposed. What's really undermined here is not just democracy but a sense of the nature and value of personality, even humanity. "The Corporation" used the diagnostic manual of the APA to test the "personality" of the corporation, and found it a certifiable sociopath. More than democracy doesn't work when sociopathic behavior is permitted or even encouraged.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Inhuman
The Supreme Court's ruling on corporate spending in elections may or may not finish off our already broken political system, but it does confirm one of the central ways in which ours is a moral culture in crisis. The majority's argument was based on the fact that, in American constitutional law, corporations are individuals - a travesty of the 14th amendment which Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan's 2003 documentary "The Corporation" explored and exposed. What's really undermined here is not just democracy but a sense of the nature and value of personality, even humanity. "The Corporation" used the diagnostic manual of the APA to test the "personality" of the corporation, and found it a certifiable sociopath. More than democracy doesn't work when sociopathic behavior is permitted or even encouraged.
