Corporate Psychopaths...

I have no head for business. I care too much for things like honor and integrity to be successful in a corporate atmosphere. I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, either. Maybe that's why I don't understand this.

"NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Dell, the No. 2 PC maker, reported sales and profits Thursday that handily beat Wall Street forecasts and announced it would cut its staff by 10 percent over the next 12 months."

I'm not a big fan of corporations. A while back, when my dad was alive, he worked for the same company for over twenty years. ConAgra bought that company, and wanted to clean house. Dad was pushing fifty, making six figures a year, and running the show. ConAgra gave him the option of leaving the company, or moving to Georgia to do twice the work for the same pay. They were trying to run him off, because a twenty-something kid just out of college would do the same job for a fraction of the pay. Dad wasn't much of a quitter, so he made the move, and died in Georgia. I've always blamed ConAgra, and I always will. (Fuck you, ConAgra.)

Now, I don't exactly have my MBA (though I've had two MBAs working for me, at NRS and Papa John's - "I'm so smart, I went to school for seven extra years, got my MBA, and now I work for a high-school drop-out!"), but I've worked for a handful of corporations. Telling my employees that the pay-cut they just took would be good for them in the long run used to be part of my job. I used to say things like:

"'While reductions in headcount are always difficult for a company, we know these actions are critical to our ability to deliver unprecedented value to our customers now and in the future,' Michael Dell said in a statement."

If you were wondering, that's what bullshit smells like. I prefer the acrid smell of truth:

"The Board of Directors, as representatives of the stockholders, is committed to the achievement of business success and the enhancement of long-term stockholder value with the highest standards of integrity and ethics. In that regard, the Board has adopted these principles to provide an effective corporate governance framework for Dell, intending to reflect a set of core values that provide the foundation for Dell's governance and management systems and its interactions with others."

A little further digging, and I found this, which equates a corporation, which is a juristic person and has all the legal rights and protections of an individual, but none of the responsibility, actually qualifies as a psychopathic personality, and is bound by law to do whatever evil, underhanded, backstabbing shit possible to squeeze out a few extra pennies for the stockholders.

Wait... bound by law? How did that happen? Ah, corporate lobbyists. Special interests throwing money and catamites (look it up) at Congressmen and Senators. So that means Schoolhouse Rock lied to me. Now I'm really mad.