According to the documentary film The Corporation, corporations enjoy the same legal status as actual persons, even though they are nothing of the sort. The film went on to ask the pertinent question: If a corporation is a person, what sort of person is it? And the answer it came up with, after diagnosing the typical activities of large, powerful corporations, was that a typical large, powerful corporation is a psychopath.
That answer, of course, came as no surprise to me. If you’ve worked for corporate bosses for any length of time, however short, you’re apt to feel bullied, harassed, picked on…because you are. And because psychopaths like to do those things. It’s because psychopathy is rewarded in our modern capitalist society–it is regarded as “dynamic” and “leadership-oriented”, rather than harmful and injurious to others and a menace to the environment.
I was reminded of that rather forcefully yesterday, when this crossed my screen:
The same day Russell Williams disposed of the frozen body of the second woman he murdered, the former air force colonel attended a top secret meeting in Toronto arranging security for the G20 summit, where he was to help protect the flights of U.S. President Barrack Obama and other world leaders, the National Post has learned.
The Feb. 3, 2010, meeting of senior military leaders, chaired by Brigadier-General Jean Collin, commander of the armed forces in Ontario, shows the trust Williams maintained before he was unmasked as a deadly sex predator.
His never-revealed high-level role also highlights his unparalleled double life: helping arrange the air movement and protection of the world’s most powerful leaders at the same time his violent sexual behaviour spun out of control.
Williams was among those responsible for planning the air component of the summits, including the arriving and departing dignitaries and protecting the area’s airspace in conjunction with North American Aerospace Defence Command.
“I bet there are a few U.S. Secret Service guys perturbed right now over a serial killer helping plan the president’s movements. By that time in February, he would have known the entire procedure for arrivals and air movement for the summits,” said a military source.
You may be wondering what this has to do with The Corporation. Simple: the G20 summit, while ostensibly a gathering of national leaders, was really all about corporatism and how to make the world “safe” for it.
Human rights take a backseat to the interests of corporations all the time, and G20 governments and their militaries have an active role in making it so. That’s why we saw $2 billion spent on “security” (translation: violent repression of dissent) and the revamping of obsolete wartime laws for purposes nothing like their original ones, and plainclothes police rioting in the guise of “Black Bloc” anarchists while their uniformed brethren stood idly by, even considerately leaving decoy cars out for them to torch, and turning arbitrarily on obviously non-violent, genuine activists instead. Such behavior seems bewildering, until you realize that it is perfectly consistent with one thing only, and that is psychopathy. Our governments, and their militaries, have become handmaidens of the biggest psychopaths in the world. Thus, it stands to reason that they would have hired a Russell Williams–himself a psychopath–to oversee “security” (translation: violent repression of dissent) on just such an occasion.
Of course, Williams has been deemed unfit to operate in society any longer, ostensibly because of his “violent sexual behavior”–which, in fact, is NOT a sexual behavior (as I’ve pointed out, more than once, previously), but sexualized violent behavior. All sexual assaults are forms of assault, not sex. But let’s not kid ourselves: he wasn’t locked away merely because he was a perverted killer. Guys like him get away with it all the time, until by some fluke they are caught: Ted Bundy, Robert Pickton, and the Green River Killer being just a few of the more egregious examples. Russell Williams was deemed unfit to roam free because he got caught, not because he stalked, harassed and killed women.
Behaviors like those of Williams, et al, are actually very well tolerated in our authoritarian capitalist society, and always have been; women’s lives are held cheaper than those of men, and working women of any kind are cherished less than “good” housewives. Moreover, a killer of streetwalkers (such as Pickton) is most likely to get away with it because those ladies are widely seen as human garbage, especially if they’re drug-addicted and/or Native, and the police get tired of having to “clean them up”. So anyone who’s willing to do it and save cops the hassle is likely to be left alone for years, and the murder of “just another hooker” is easily tolerated. As is the theft of underwear from the homes of dozens of women and girls.
What’s not tolerated is the embarrassment of having the perpetrator come to light, because it exposes the pervasive rot in the system. We can’t have people see that the police are more obsessed with cracking innocent protesters’ heads than they are interested in putting real criminals behind bars. So of course a Russell Williams will get shuffled out of sight at the earliest possible opportunity.
Now, since corporations are not actual living breathing persons (albeit perverted ones) like Russell Williams, and since they have a lot more ready cash at their disposal than the former colonel was likely to see in his lifetime, of course, they will get away with bullying, raping and even killing actual living, breathing persons. They will even get away with it when they use military and police uniforms as a front.
As long as the omertà of the “military chain of command” and the “thin blue line” holds, so long will uniformed perpetrators escape justice. Remember, Russell Williams was initially ruled out as a suspect in the rash of break-ins and underwear thefts from nearby women’s houses, precisely because he was a commanding officer at CFB Trenton! The police investigating the break-ins even said, “Well, I guess we don’t have to look at him, then”–because everyone knows there’s a certain “type” that does that, and the uniform is supposed to cancel it out. And let’s not kid ourselves that his violent extracurricular activities were interfering with his performance on the job, either–he was as by-the-book a commanding officer as the Air Force has ever seen!
Heaven forfend that we see the uniform not as cancelling, but concealing such things–both in microcosm (Russell Williams, creeper, killer and thief) and macrocosm (Russell Williams, face of the G20 military-industrial complex).
Heaven forfend, in other words, that we see.
Have to disagree on the psychopath thing. They are. however, narcissistic sociopaths. They want what they want when they want it and the don’t care who gets hurt in the process. After doing these awful things to innocent people, the have no remorse at all. The classic symptoms of a narcisstic sociopath.
In either event, they are fake creatures set up by the legislature to function in a certain way and that way does NOT include citizenship rights. The are set up to limit the personal liability of the stockholders and the officers so that they are willing to take risks and advance the state’s interest in a growing economy. Period. End of story.
So Johnny Roberts, Tony Scalia, Tony Scalia the Second, Tony Kennedy and Sammy Alito, apparently you were not paying attention in Corporations 101. You simply decided to create a whole new body of law whole cloth. That is the very definition of an ‘activist court.’
Where is Sarah Palin infamous rants about that?