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...quick-marching around trying to keep up with their corporate massuhs while maintaining the correct speed so that, if their corporate god should stop abruptly, their "journalistic" nose only gets a couple of malodorous brown streaks rather than breaking it for the fourth or fifth time.
It's not generally known, but these same corporate gods -- because they believe so firmly in and work so tirelessly to promote justice, honor and dignity for the American worker -- actually force their media mouthpieces to cover human interest stories like the 24-year lockup and the death of the DC Madam (under increasingly suspicious circumstances) because of their intense empathy for the human condition, with all the vice and virtue that accompanies it.
This is why when various unions, along with unaffiliated workers, decided to participate in the ILWU-led shutdown of 29 West Coast ports on May 1 in protest of the continuing US presence in Iraq and in support of workers' rights, the corporate gods decided that the frail sensibilities of the average American TV viewer might be negatively affected if their media tools were permitted to cover such a terrifying thing.
So as lucky as the readers and TV watchers are to be protected from great psychological harm by their friends in corporate media, even luckier are the workers who staff the six gigantic organizations that own nearly all major US mass media outlets.
For example, at philanthropic companies like GE and Time Warner and Disney, bettering the lives and fulfilling the hopes and dreams of their employees is never far from the collective corporate mind. Let's watch as they demonstrate that humanitarian commitment to their workers by:
- laying them off, preferably right before Christmas or the New Year
- making them pee in bottles every now and then, the better to show their trust and support for their employees
- downsizing, rightsizing, "getting rid of the dead wood," "thinning the herd," outsourcing or off-shoring their jobs
- dumping salaries by firing senior employees solely because they're paid more than new hires or two-year veterans
- reducing or eliminating their benefits because health care is a privilege in America, not a right
- stealing their pensions with the connivance of Wall Street's finest money launderers
- investing their 401Ks and IRAs in various risky schemes that eventually fail and -- alas -- no retirement for you
- getting rid of anyone over 45 and replacing them with inexperienced brats just out of college
- mis-treating these rookies by paying them sub-standard wages and withholding their benefits for as long as possible
- screwing them in any other ways, knowing that they're not leaving until they get a little real world experience
And amazingly enough, even though there's intense human interest in any of those scenarios to make a statue cry, mass media rarely, if ever, covers these kinds of stories. And when they do, it's always from the Wall Street perspective, where everything bad for people is good for business and vice versa.
So we don't hear about family tragedies or suicides brought on by the inability to cope with overwhelming debt and no job.
Instead, we hear about how much investors liked the latest round of layoffs because it helps consolidate equity in fewer hands (like theirs), because it demonstrates the company's commitment to running a lean, mean machine and because it sends another signal to organized labor and non-union employees alike that corporations are no longer interested in being Mr. Nice Guy and, instead, they want to see some serious fucking productivity increases or more heads will roll next quarter.
Yeah, nothing but a bunch of raging philanthropists and human rights advocates on mahogany row.
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