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Another Corporate Psychopath
Chuck Richardson

Let’s take a trip down truth lane in the spirit of Steve Miller, bankrupt Delphi Corp.’s new boss, who recently said, “Philosophers can speculate about fairness…[but] I have to deal with reality.”

Corporations are psychopaths. These commercial entities are legal persons in the U.S. and get equal protection under the law, meaning they have the right to free speech, personal privacy, to bear arms, assemble, serve a god, etc. This was pointed out in The Corporation, a Canadian documentary film released last year.

In 1886, the U.S. Supreme Court allegedly recognized corporations as legal persons in Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. Nearly 120 years later these creatures have generated vast wealth for their financial operators and, combined with their inhuman life spans, have emerged as our nation’s most politically powerful, though unfaithful “citizens.”

Being “human,” corporations are psychopaths because they disregard others’ feelings, are unable to maintain or foster trusting relationships, discount poor peoples’ well-being, repeatedly lie and con others for fun and profit, exhibit a perverse bottom line ethics, and fail to conform to universal concepts of human decency.

Real humans risk becoming psychopaths by participating in corporate culture. Miller is a prime example. While attending a Stanford University Alumni Weekend lecture two years ago, he made quite an impression. The lecturer was playing a rhetorical game—“Name That [Corporate] Governance Scandal!”—as Miller sat in the front row. When the disgraceful litany was finished, Miller blurted out “I guess I missed the boat!” The Stanford Business School of Management story about this lecture does not say whether Miller’s joke was laughed at or not.

Nothing has changed, but Miller’s corporation, since then. On October 12, he said: "The only way we're going to restore the [employee] pension plan is to have profits in the restructured company. If the labor costs stay too high, there won't be profits and therefore the pension will get terminated."

Miller loves the career he’s made for himself, swooping in for nourishment off sick and dying corporations. He’s a proud leech, sucking his patient back to health.

Corporations commit crimes in the name of what their operators deem is good. Delphi Corporation has been allegedly cooking the books ever since it gained its independence from General Motors Corp. in 1999. The Securities and Exchange Commission and U.S. Justice Department is investigating the corporation for overstating its cash flow throughout its short existence, and other possible accounting irregularities.

Many former GM workers who became Delphi employees six years ago, and who now face uncertain futures and economic despair, feel those responsible for ripping them off should be incarcerated. Wrongly, what these corporate operators are doing is legal as church. Fairness has nothing to do with legality. In the corporate world, managerial operatives avoid harsh punishment for lying to investors about huge lines of foreign credit ($300 million from Europe, in Delphi’s case). Dishonesty is a de facto necessity of global corporate culture. It bends the law—moral philosophy—to the facts it perceives.

In light of this, Miller and gang seem to be renouncing the moral codes the vast majority of us live by, opting for one that unleashes their talent for accumulating personal assets instead.

Corporate globalization means a race to the bottom for all workers. Corporate executives know Earth’s depleted resources won’t abide its current human population level and allow its chosen people their Manifest Destiny. Something has to give. A Malthusian war for survival between the rich and poor is on the horizon. The elite know this and are waging a pre-emptive strike against the largely unconscious masses. There’s just not enough stuff to go around.

Miller brags about telling “basic truths” about globalization, how it means an apocalypse for the American worker’s way of life, and that he’s one of its four horsemen: “People don’t want to hear it, but I’m going to do what it takes to lead a restructuring of this company and perhaps this industry, or I wouldn't have bothered to show up."

He believes growing Delphi’s exploitation of the low cost labor, high-tech medical equipment market; linking executive pay to stock value and expanding foreign operations is the wave of his future. Miller is participating in much more than the restructuring of the American auto parts industry. His perestroika is global.

The globalization of free market “democracy” is the human world’s governing dogma. Like all other ideologies seeking world dominion, it is born of hubris and greed.

Miller, who received $3 million when he signed on with Delphi last July for $1.5 million a year, made it his first priority to sweeten his executive team’s severance packages after telling hourly employees they’d likely be unemployed soon and that their parachute—in the form of a job bank—would be purged.

Claiming Delphi Corporation is “out of money,” Miller said, “globalization has swept over” hourly workers and he understands that "They are extremely angry and have to lash out at someone. I forgive them."

Hourly workers, he added, don’t see the differences between “mowing the lawn” and “managing a big business.”

“It may not be fair, but it is reality,” he said, claiming critics of his plan do “not fully understand” the corporate world, which imposes liberal pay to keep managers from jumping ship for more lucrative waters. Delphi is vying with other global corporations in the “market for human capital,” said Miller, which prevents paying “too much for a particular class of employee.”

Traditional opponents to corporate power—primarily labor unions and the Democratic Party—are cowardly and impotent. We’re in a situation where psychopaths are abusing “Big Labor” and “Democrats,” and they have to take it.

These bastions of people power have been losing the war since the Reagan years, and now find themselves too weakened to fight back when the boss man says: "Nobody may like it…but in the end [you] will do it, and [you] will do it the right way."

The UAW and Democrats are also accepting Miller’s proposal that his American plants—like the one in Lockport—are hemorrhaging money from wounds inflicted on it by an expensive work force. Terming the situation a “scandal,” Miller is pressuring Democrats to help revise laws that impede the new world order’s emergence.

He voiced his indignity at government regulation by saying: “[I] can’t just terminate a [benefit or retirement] plan because [I] feel like it.”

The always intelligent, perceptive UAW, for its part, also blames the Democrats for not coming up with a national health care system, and believes Delphi and GM should be lobbying much harder than they are for needed reforms. But, being corporations, these entities know how scandalous things become when government shoves its bureaucratic tentacles into their porridge.

Democrats and the UAW also ignore the fact that someone must profit from disease to make cures possible, whether here or elsewhere, in the new global reality. The ruling ideology of the day—global corporate libertarianism, or fascism—sees this as a sacred commandment, one which allows “God’s invisible hand” to lead them to glory.

As low-level corporate persons or lackeys, the UAW and Democrats are tics and fleas gnawing the corporate underbelly. Their existence depends on the antihuman life of the corporation, which would love to terminate them.