Corporate Vigilantism: Failing, but still Dangerous

[babylonsister]

http://firedoglake.com/2009/08/09/corporate-vigilantism-failing-but-still-dangerous/

Corporate Vigilantism: Failing, but still Dangerous
By: Glenn W. Smith Sunday August 9, 2009 9:30 am

I say plainly that every American who takes part in the action of a mob or gives it any sort of countenance is no true son of this great Democracy, but its betrayer, and does more to discredit her by that single disloyalty to her standards of law and of right than the words of her statesman or the sacrifices of her heroic boys in the trenches can do to make suffering peoples believe her to be their savior.

-- Woodrow Wilson, "A Statement to the American People," July 26, 1918

When elite institutions - a cable television network or a medical corporation, for instance - intentionally incite extra-legal or illegal mob action and even violence, what should we call it? And what should be done about it?

This is, without question, what FOX News is doing, mobilizing some sad and ill-informed viewers to attend and disrupt the summer health care forums of Democrats. The disgraced health care fraudster Rick Scott, a guy protecting his storefront quack clinics behind a fake grassroots group, "Conservatives for Patients' Rights," is doing the same thing. And Scott's bragging about it. The national Republican Party is helping.

This is Corporate Vigilantism. It's different than corporations' long established practice of hiring private corporate armies and police (Pinkerton; Blackwater) to murder union members or rape those bothersome to a company's bottom line. And, while some of the steam seems to be going out of this fake movement, it sets a terrible and dangerous precedent. The vigilante sponsors must be called to account.

snip//

Despite their ineffectiveness, the vigilantes' corporate backers need to be called out for what is extraordinarily anti-democratic and unpatriotic behavior. As Woodrow Wilson said of his era's vigilantes, they are betrayers of Democracy.

It is no small thing to encourage violence - by direct recommendation or implication - in our shared political sphere. For corporations to engage in such behavior simply to make another buck takes national betrayal to a whole other level. It can't get any more un-American than that.

[Turborama]

1. K&R "Corporate Vigilates": This is how these assholes need to be framed

It's worth reading the whole piece and the comments at the link.

Thanks for posting, BabylonSister.

:kick: & R