Damek.

I frickin’ love Jimi Tenor. No one else whips up sexy jazzy loungy funky tunes like he does, mixing orchestras & forgotten Finnish jazz musicians into a soup of unlimited love. You think it’s cheese, but it’s not – this is sincere. And, as Alex pointed out, he’s Finnish, which makes it OK. Go run out and get his latest album, Beyond the Stars, if you can. You’ll love yourself all the more for doing so.

I noticed this interesting interview with Marjorie Kelly, author of The Divine Right of Capital and founder of Business Ethics magazine, over at GNN, a site I haven’t been to in ages. I was looking at the website for Helios, an artist whose new album on my favorite Merck Records is giving me some shivers lately, and he had a link to the site… And anyway, the point is, it was fortuitous, because, as I said, it’s an interesting interview…

When you go back to the founding of his country, the vote was restricted in three ways: In order to vote you had to be male, white and you had to have wealth, you had to own property. We have since done away with all three restrictions when it comes to the vote, but we’ve only recognized two of the other forms of discrimination — we call them racism and sexism. We haven’t yet recognized wealthism — the idea that special privileges in law are reserved for those who process wealth.

[...] corporations were [originally] chartered only to serve the public good. You could only get a corporation charter if you had public purpose, like building a road or a canal, but in the era of the robber barons after the Civil War, they changed the corporation. It used to be that corporations had a limited life. They lasted 20 or 30 years, you made as much money as you could, then they went out of business. The robber barons said, no, corporations have eternal life, exist not to serve the public good but to make their shareholders money, and they have limited liability. If we step on people on the way, we have no responsibility for that. That whole model which we still have today came from the robber barons. It’s no accident they were called barons — that’s a term from the aristocracy. They wanted to make themselves rich and they created a form that would do that effectively. We still have that form, but we’ve outgrown it. We now have income detached from productivity.

It was fortuitous that I found this article “by accident” today, because I was just beginning to feel that I didn’t care whether or not I went to see the Corporation documentary. This has renewed my interest. I’m not much of a “revolutionary” type, but I think it’s very important for us to review the place of corporations in society. I think there are a lot of valid, insightful criticisms coming out that need to be addressed; problems that need to be rectified. Even Ms. Kelly says, though we “need a revolution… – it’s not going to happen in the streets. We are not going to shed any blood. It’s going to happen in the courts, in the media, in the debate of ideas about what it is we need to do.” Amen.