Pigs

BP is living the life right now. Choke supply, raise demand. Then increase supply and hold the price steady. Don't invest anything in infrastructure during those windfall profits years. Got to make those shareholders happy you know. And when your infrastructure crumbles, use it to raise prices again. Pass those costs on. Love means never having to say you're sorry.

Soon BP will be looking for welfare. Oh sorry, I mean reinvestment or something. Or maybe they'll do it the old fashioned way. The criminal who begs for money and when you shuffle past doing your best to look busy, next time asks again with the gun to your temple.

I know, I know corporations are made up of people like you and me. I believe that for the employees but not the shareholders. Shareholders are shadows of people. The way the system is set up its hard for a shareholder to be very concerned about anything other than pure profit. I don't think mixed fund managers exactly take an interest in the election of the latest board, or the newest changes in the by-laws. And being a shareholder you have a certain amount of anonymity. Even more so if you merely own a share of a fund.

Now maybe I'm a bad person but if I look at my 401K I'm hoping to make money. If I owned shares of a company, I'd be even more motivated to make money, I suspect. In the best case scenario I probably wouldn't read the mandatory disclosure from the corporation that they were about to undertake a lucrative business operation in human trafficking. In the worst case scenario, I'd vote for the operation and pray with the extra money I could buy a nicer security system to protect my wife and daughter.

Corporations run efficiently, but to what end? To me the flaw at the center of corporations is the flaw at the center of humanity. We might never do anything bad on our own, but when we're in a comfortable group we force ourselves not to pay attention, or worse - rationalize, when they are building the ovens at the work camps.