A tweet that captures what I thought of this week #p2 #olbermann @KeithOlbermann
From the election on Tuesday to Olbermann's suspension on Friday (note to MSNBC, GE, and Comcast: the surest way to piss off Americans is to mess with their favorite entertainment; Anonymous didn't start going after Scientology because Scientology was evil, they went after the institution because they took a Tom Cruise video off YouTube, eliminating a source of LULZ), here is a tweet of mine that summarized where I fear we're headed to.
Welcome to the cyberpunk future http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowrun#The_corporations #olbermann
And here's the relevant passage, which demonstrates the power of gaming and science fiction on popular culture and thought, especially my thought.
The corporations
The monolithic "enemies" of the Shadowrun world (borrowing heavily from cyberpunk mythos) are the corporations, dubbed "megacorporations", "megacorps", or simply "megas" or "corps" for short. Megacorporations in the twenty-first century are global, with all but the smallest corps owning multiple subsidiaries and divisions around the world. They are the superpowers of the Shadowrun universe, with the largest corporations having far more political, economic, and military power than even the most powerful nation-states.
In Shadowrun, corporations are effectively "ranked" by the amount of assets under their control, including material, personnel, and property, as well as profit. These ranks are A, AA, and AAA; AAA corporations are top tier. Most corporations in the AA and AAA level are immune to domestic law, responsible only to themselves, and regulated only by the Corporate Court, an assembly of the ten AAA-rated corporations. All AAA-rated and most AA-rated corporations exhibit a privilege known as “extraterritoriality”, meaning that any land owned by the corp is sovereign territory only to the corp and immune to any laws of the country within. Corporate territory is not foreign soil but corporate soil, just like its employees are corporate citizens, though dual citizenship in a corporation and a nation is common. The AAA corps, as well as numerous minor corporations, fight each other not only in the boardroom or during high-level business negotiations but also with physical destruction, clandestine operations, hostile extraction or elimination of vital personnel, and other means of sabotage. Because no corporation wants to be held liable for damages, it has to be done by deniable assets, or shadowrunners, invisible to the system where every citizen is tagged with a System Identification Number (SIN).
This is what many people on the Left call Corporatism, although it's not what was originally meant by the term. I'm of the opinion that most people on the Left really don't understand what Mussolini and others called Corporatism, which has more to do with the Corporate State and Corporate Nationalism than rule by corporations, a form of oligarchy and plutocracy which would result from a political philosophy called (ironically in my opinion) Neoliberalism, not Corporatism as it was originally meant. A much better term would be plutarchy or Corporatocracy.
Come to think of it, a lot of people on the Left would probably be in favor of certain varieties of Corporatism, especially Social Corporatism and Liberal Corporatism; they just don't know it yet. The problem would be that both the association of Corporatism with Mussolini and the modern misuse of the term has so polluted the word that another expression for it would have to be coined. Ah, the power of branding!