Western societies are rapidly losing their moral center. The employment of reason in the majority of society now seems divorced from the basic capacity for empathy. Government war criminals walk free, while whistleblowers reporting their crimes are punished. Bankers who commit massive fraud are bailed out while taxpayers have their futures foreclosed. When a culture rewards selfish deeds and immunizes the criminal acts of its leaders, it skews the norm toward depravity. How has this happened? How is it that Western civilization has devolved into something like a global rouge state?The author provides some profound perspectives on the appearance of global corporate power that is shaping human beings and their culture in pathological ways, ways that transform the best in human nature to the worst. In my view, what her analysis lacks is a class and system analysis to uncover the source of this phenomenon which she characterizes as a "culture of pathology"; and by doing so, she focuses on the effect rather than the cause. By identifying "corporate personhood" as the cause which, in her view, happened almost accidentally, does not get at the root of the problem.
If you are familiar with my point of view, you know that the root is the system known as capitalism, the private ownership of an economy, which was established by the old mercantile and banking classes some 400 years ago. The legal fiction of corporate person-hood represented another stage of the growing dominance of this class over the rest of society.
