Destroying ExxonMobil, as an Example. Recent news stories have called attention to the preposterously excessive pay packages received by some corporate executives. One in particular, the compensation given to ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, drew national attention, especially because its recipient wasn't the slitest embarrassed about it:

Raymond denied having any role in formulating his $52 million 2005 pay package, the $98.4 million lump sum retirement payment he received when he left ExxonMobil ... on Dec. 31, or any other compensation he received over his 43-year career with Exxon. * * *

Raymond defended the large payout, saying that it was Exxon's policy that employees' pay and incentive payments were supposed to reflect the performance of the company.

"When the company does well, the shareholders and employees should do well, and when the company does poorly, then the shareholders and employees should do poorly. The facts are that when prices of oil collapsed, the incentive program went down, substantially," Raymond said.

So Raymond is pretending that every single one of ExxonMobil's ordinary "employees" was richly rewarded during the company's good years? No one on Earth believes that. Nor do we believe that executives' "incentive program went down, substantially" unless by "substantially" he means from obscenely excessive to merely astronomically excessive.
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This Raymond character is a really, really bad man, so bad that he should be flogged at least 500 lashes.
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Society really is not helpless against corporate criminals, and they are all such worthless physical cowards that a little violence would go very, very far toward curbing corporate criminality across the 'board'.
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Alas, they aren't afraid of us because we're paper tigers. They, and Their fawning servants in government, should think of the people as an extremely dangerous mob-in-the-making that can storm every corporate Bastille and throw every corporate wrongdoer under a literal guillotine. They should be scared to death of Us.
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They insist that it is "unrealistic" to think We can severely punish the Few who abuse the Many. No, the reality is there are 300 million of Us and only a few thousand of Them. They, the few thousand people who control the major corporations' corporate suites and boardrooms, the 535 members of both houses of Congress, the few dozen people at the top of the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, and the 9 individuals of the Supreme Court exercise power only because we believe they have power. The physical reality, however, is they have no more actual power than they can muster in personal physical force and the weaponry they can personally, as individuals, employ against attackers. That means, for all practical purposes, small arms.
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The reality is that we are living a delusional existence in which the Few have all the power and the Many have none, whereas the exact opposite is true.
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The Many have all the power, and the Few have none except what we are persuaded to permit Them. It is mere inaction in the face of tyranny that has empowered tyrants to be tyrants for the past several centuries. Never, at least since the development of easily operated guns, have the Few had real power over the Many. In the bad old days when skill with a sword or physical strength and reach enuf to swing a broadsword or battle-ax farthest and fastest determined who controlled whom, there was a real reason why tyrants could tyrannize. But after the development of the bow and arrow or crossbow, when people of only moderate strength could attack from far out of range of a sword or mace (a symbol of power today because it and other weapons of hand-to-hand combat once bestowed real power), the Many have always had the power to destroy the Few. And it doesn't matter which "few" it is, minorities or tyrants.
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To believe other than that the Many have the power to destroy the Few, is delusion.
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We can do anything we want to Them, and They can do nothing but what We permit them to do. They cannot so much as draw breath if we want them dead. Any time We want, We can mount mass violence, from burning to the ground the many headquarters built by corporate greed — hundreds of Towering Infernos — while the executives are trapped inside, to torching Their mansions while they sleep, to shooting Them from rooftops. There are only so many people willing to risk death to protect slimeballs. As often as not, indeed, bodyguards turn against tyrants, as Indira Gandhi found out. It's not just the age of Caligula in which bodyguards can kill the beasts they are tasked to defend.
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ExxonMobil is a bunch of thieves who have co-conspired with other oil companies to gouge the little guy and make life hard as hell for tens of millions of people. The little guy may have to make very loud noises of violent retribution, not just threaten "windfall-profits" taxes, to alter the contemptuous abusiveness of the great corporations toward the public and even government. But windfall-profits taxes are a start, as are confiscatory income-tax rates on unjustifiably astronomical "compensation packages".
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When the typical person makes $25,000 a year, or $35,000 in midlife, We do not have to stand idly by while corporations pay Their executives tens of millions of dollars in cash and hundreds of millions in stock options and other non-cash compensation. We can monetize it all and seize 99% of everything over $5 million gross income per year. Raymond — or his widow or other heirs, if he is flogged to death — can live extremely well on several million dollars a year after taxes.
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But as for what the little guy can do right now, without any reform to any tax law, without government seizing and flogging oil executives, a proposal has been bouncing around the Internet in recent days that even conservative Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly agrees with:

BILL O'REILLY, HOST: In "Back of the Book" segment tonight, the former chairman and CEO Of Exxon Mobil, Lee Raymond, who retired in December, received $140 million in compensation last year, and his entire retirement deal is worth nearly $400 million, according to public reports. * * *

Here's what I'm going to do. I'm not going to buy ever again a drop of gasoline from Exxon Mobil. I'll tell you why. ...

... I, as you know, think the oil companies are gouging the American public, because every time the futures people bid the price of oil up, as they did today over $70 a gallon, because they're worried about Iran, they're worried about Nigeria, they're worried about "American Idol" being canceled, it doesn't matter, they just bid them up, the oil companies say now we have another excuse to raise prices. They don't have to raise them. They do.

And then they turn around and they pay one human being $400 million. That comes out of their bottom line. You know that. It comes out of their bottom line. So they have to charge more money to make the record profits.

I, as an American citizen, am going to exercise my right never to buy one drop of oil from Exxon Mobil again, because I think they're greedy. I don't think they're looking out for the folks.

It's really good to be able to agree with a conservative every now and then. Let's make it unanimous, folks: let Us all agree not to buy anything from ExxonMobil, ever again. Avoid all Exxon stations and Mobil stations for the rest of your life. If ExxonMobil starts to lose money, They will drop Their prices to try to win you back. Don't go back. Let other companies lower their prices to compete, and stay away from ExxonMobil forever.
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I have never been a fan of Exxon or Mobil, and am especially not a fan of ExxonMobil combined. Their prices are always higher than almost everybody else's, and I have had startlingly good results from Shell, among the higher-priced brands. I think Shell has some kind of detergent additives in its gas that clean out my engine to give markedly superior milage, so I buy a tank of Shell every second or third refill. But I will never again in my life buy from Exxon or Mobil unless there is absolutely no alternative because I'm in a desert or arctic waste somewhere and there are no other stations to be found.
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If ExxonMobil tries to buy up other companies — with their $36 billion in profits last year alone — that people have switched to, sic the Feds on them and compel antitrust regulators to bar such acquisitions.
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Let's hire Claes Oldenburg or some other major artist to erect a 50-foot or 100-foot statue of a guillotine on the Mall in Washington, DC, as a reminder every day to the rich and 'powerful' that the people are not powerless to kill them any time We want, for any reason we want, whenever they get too far out of line. Maybe France, which used the guillotine to such good effect in its Revolution, would make this statue another gift to the people of the Nation they helped create, as they did with the Statue of Liberty. We could call the guillotine on the Mall "The Statue of Natural Liberty", to remind the Few that, always and ever, the Many have the power of life and death over Them. All else is illusion.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is .)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:24 PM