Pixel Scroll 10/13/17 Pixel the Thirteenth, Part Scroll

(1) PKD DAUGHTER ACCUSES AMAZON STUDIOS HEAD OF HARASSMENT. The Hollywood Reporter says Isa Hackett, executive producer of two TV series based on the work of her father, Philip K. Dick series, has told the media she was harassed by the head of Amazon Studios — “Amazon TV Producer Goes Public With Harassment Claim Against Top Exec Roy Price”.

In the wake of revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged years-long sexual harassment and assault, a producer of one of Amazon Studios’ highest-profile TV shows is ready to talk about her “shocking and surreal” experience with Amazon’s programming chief Roy Price.

Isa Hackett is the daughter of author Philip K. Dick, whose work is the basis for Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, as well as the upcoming anthology series, Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. Hackett, 50, is an executive producer on both series. Price, 51, is head of Amazon Studios and has presided over its growth into a major streaming service with such series as Transparent and movies such as Manchester by the Sea. His family has deep connections in the entertainment world: His father, Frank, ran Columbia Pictures and Universal Studios. (The existence of the alleged incident detailed below and the subsequent Amazon investigation were previously reported by the website The Information.)

On the evening of July 10, 2015, after a long day of promoting Man in the High Castle at Comic-Con in San Diego, Hackett attended a dinner with the show’s cast and Amazon staff at the U.S. Grant Hotel. There she says she met Price for the first time. He asked her to attend an Amazon staff party later that night at the W Hotel (now the Renaissance) and she ended up in a taxi with Price and Michael Paull, then another top Amazon executive and now CEO of the digital media company BAMTech.   Once in the cab, Hackett says Price repeatedly and insistently propositioned her. “You will love my dick,” he said, according to Hackett, who relayed her account to multiple individuals in the hours after the alleged episode. (The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed Hackett told at least two people about the alleged incident in the immediate aftermath.) Hackett says she made clear to Price she was not interested and told him that she is a lesbian with a wife and children.

The New York Times reports Price was put on a leave of absence

In a statement, an Amazon spokesman said, “Roy Price is on a leave of absence effective immediately.” Albert Cheng, currently the chief operating officer of Amazon Studios, will assume Mr. Price’s duties on an interim basis, an Amazon spokesman said.

Ms. Hackett is a daughter of the late science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. “The Man in the High Castle” series, which was renewed for a third season in May, is based on one of his 44 published novels. Although Amazon does not release viewership numbers, the company said in 2015 that “The Man in the High Castle” was its most-streamed show.

Ms. Hackett is also a producer of “Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams,” an anthology series that premiered in Britain last month and will be streamed by Amazon Video next year.

Allegations that Mr. Price had made unwanted sexual remarks to Ms. Hackett surfaced in August in an article by Ms. Masters that was published on the tech news website The Information.

That article included few specifics about Ms. Hackett’s claims, with Ms. Hackett providing a statement that she did not “wish to discuss the details of this troubling incident with Roy except to say Amazon investigated immediately and with an outside investigator.”

(2) OFF THE BOOKS. Last year California state Assemblywoman Ling Ling Chang, responding to complaints by celebrities like Mark Hamill, got a law passed requiring autographed memorabilia come with a certificate of authenticity. (For a refresher, see the LA Times article “The high cost of an autograph”.)

That put a crimp in the state’s collectibles business (one collectibles dealer stopped shipping to California), so the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America sponsored a bill, AB 228, now signed into law and in effect, granting broad exceptions to the original law. The ABAA has informed members —

More comprehensive Guidelines will be forthcoming. In the meantime, the three main takeaways for members are:

  • Allbooks, manuscripts, and correspondence, as well as any ephemera not related to sports or entertainment media, are now categorically excluded from the regulation of “Autographed collectibles” under California’s autograph law.
  • Those few of us who do deal in the kind of autographed collectibles in the state of California that still fall under the law may now provide an “Express Warranty” guaranteeing the item as authentic, rather than a Certificate of Authenticity.  That warranty may be incorporated into an invoice rather than being a separate document.  And the requirement to disclose in the warranty from whom the autographed collectible was purchased has been eliminated.
  • Civil penalties incurred by those subject to the law who fail to comply have been lowered.

(3) HANGING AROUND. David D. Levine tells readers of Unbound Worlds “A Lot Harder Than It Looks: David D. Levine Experiences Zero Gravity”.

As a child of the Space Age, born in the same year as Gagarin and Shepard’s historic flights, I have always fantasized about floating in zero gravity. In college, I studied orbital mechanics and rolled my eyes at stories and films that got zero-g wrong. And as a science fiction writer, I have often used zero gravity settings (notably in my debut novel Arabella of Mars) and took pride in getting the physics right. So when I got the opportunity to experience zero gravity myself, thanks to a very generous birthday gift from my father, I was thrilled, and also confident that I would know how to conduct myself in free fall.

Let me tell you this: the thrill was real, but the confidence… well, maneuvering in zero gravity is a lot harder than it looks….

(4) GEEKWIRE. The third episode of Frank Catalano’s GeekWire podcast on science fiction, pop culture and the arts has posted. Says Catalano, “I invited Museum of Pop Culture (formerly EMP Museum) Curator Brooks Peck and Collections Manager Melinda Simms to come on the podcast and talk about the MoPOP collection, how they source/conserve/display objects, and the role of fans in helping find needed pop culture and science fiction items.”

There are also two accompanying articles, the first on the collection and what happens at MoPOP behind the scenes.

You might sum up the motto of their dual mission as to preserve and protect … as well as present. There’s a lot of stuff — artifacts or objects, depending on your preferred term — involved.

“I am responsible for the daily care and feeding of the collection, and make sure everything is housed appropriately to archival standards,” Simms explained. She estimated MoPOP has close to 100,000 objects cataloged, and “if you expand that out to the pieces in the vault that we are still working on getting cataloged in the collection, probably close to 150.”

The second on the important role of fans in preserve pop culture artifacts.

It’s not like one art museum simply calling up another to borrow a Monet. “With pop culture artifacts, it’s different from art collectors. Because art has a tendency to be high-value commodity, and you know museums have art, and you sort of know the lenders around the world who have the art,” Simms explained. “But with with pop culture things it could be anybody.”

Fortunately, pop culture fans tend to know each other. And they tend to focus.

For example, for the current Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds exhibition, “I was looking for a few Ferengi related items,” Peck explained. “And I’m asking around the main Star Trek people I know. No one’s got anything.” Ultimately, one fan collector in this loose network said he should contact “the Ferengi guy … So I talked to him and he’s absolutely going to loan what I need. So there’s this constant leapfrogging of networking and the things that people specialize in,” Peck said.

The podcast audio is embedded (and downloadable from) each article.

(5) CLAIMED BY FLAMES. An Associated Press story called “Wildfire Burns Home of Peanuts Creator Charles Schulz” says that Schulz’s Santa Rosa home was destroyed in the wildfires but that his widow, Jean Schulz, escaped the fires before the house burned.

The Schulzes built the California split-level home in the 1970s and the cartoonist lived there until his death in 2000.

…Charles Schulz usually worked at an outside studio and most of his original artwork and memorabilia are at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, which escaped the flames.

But the loss of the house itself is painful, [stepson] Monte Schulz said.

(6) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • October 13, 1957 — Movie audiences in America are treated to the science-fiction thriller, The Amazing Colossal Man.
  • October 13, 1995 — James Cameron’s sf thriller Strange Days premiered in theaters

(7) COMICS SECTION.

John King Tarpinian sees technology ruining another holiday tradition in today’s Close To Home.

(8) HAVE DICE, WILL TRAVEL. UrsulaV’s Paladin Rant — Or “Why Kevin’s D&D campaign has an Order of the Silver Weasel” — has been Storified.

(9) DID YOU MISS IT? Sheesh, wasn’t 2001 already long enough? Now some supposedly lost footage has been found.

17 minutes of lost footage from Stanley Kubrick‘s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey was uncovered in a salt-mine vault in Kansas. Warner Bros. has now released a statement regarding the “found” footage.

Here is Warner Bros statement:

“The additional footage from 2001: A Space Odyssey has always existed in the Warner vaults. When [director Stanley] Kubrick trimmed the 17 minutes from 2001 after the NY premiere, he made it clear the shortened version was his final edit. The film is as he wanted it to be presented and preserved and Warner Home Video has no plans to expand or revise Mr. Kubrick’s vision.”

(10) NEWITZ REVIEWED. In an English-language review at Spekulatív Zóna, Bence Pintér concludes, “The Magpie Wants Too Much – Annalee Newitz: Autonomous.

I had high hopes for this one, because the premise was really interesting, set in a postnational world ruled by patent-protecting international organisations and multinational drug companies. The main character is Judith Chen, aka Jack, a middle-aged drug pirate and onetime patent-rebel who runs a reverse-engineering, drug-smuggling business while driving a badass submarine. Shit hits the fan when consumers of her reverse-engineered performance-enhancing drug (stolen from a big pharma company) starts to show the signs of dangerous addiction. Jack is determined to make up for her mistake and to help bring down the company which had patented the dangerous drug. In the meantime, a young military robot, Paladin, and his human partner, Eliasz are commissioned to hunt down Jack and his loose gang of pirates.

Sounds good? Yeah. Still… I think my hopes were too high. It’s true that Newitz’s vision of the somewhat dystopian state of the world in 2144 is kind of intriguing and on every page there is some fascinating gadget, invention, etc. I also liked Jack and her backstory about the failed patent-revolution thirty years ago. But I felt that this novel has too much on its plate and Newitz cannot really find the focus….

(11) DRILLING FOR INSPIRATION. In the Washington Post, Chris Richards compares Kanye West’s current spate of spells and visions to those of Philip K. Dick and wonders if West experienced something comparable to Dick’s experience of “2-3-74” — “Philip K. Dick was a sci-fi prophet. Did he predict the unraveling of Kanye West?”

Kanye West saw his beams during a visit to the dentist.

“I’ve heard that there are colors that are too bright for our eyes to see,” the rap auteur said during a concert in Washington last summer, explaining how a few puffs of nitrous oxide had recently enabled him to catch a direct glimpse into heaven. The prismatic rays he described sounded as astonishing as your imagination would allow — and then you had an opportunity to feel them on your ears during “Ultralight Beam,” a song that captured all of the beauty and bewilderment of West’s epiphany in the dental chair. “This is a God dream,” the lyrics went. “This is everything.”

Philip K. Dick saw his beams a few days after seeing the dentist. But once they started, they didn’t let up for weeks….

(12) GAME OF THRONES CAKE UPSMANSHIP. A lot of people run photos on Reddit bragging about their Game of Thrones themed cakes. Click through and judge for yourself whose is the mightiest.

(13) TOAST OF TRANSYLVANIA. Dracula said, “I never drink…wine,” but maybe you do? Vampire Cabernet Sauvignon in a bottle with a cape – is that cute, or what?

Full-bodied with Blackberry and Dark Cherry aromas, with just the right amount of Oak flavors leading to a lingering finish. Classic, small-lot fermentations, followed by aging with Oak, gives full expression to the rich varietal flavors in this wine.

(14) MORE THINGS. Stranger Things Season 2 final trailer. IanP asks, “Is it just me or does Eleven look very Frodo’ish?”

[Thanks to Gary Farber, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, JJ, IanP, and Bence Pinter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day OGH!]

58 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 10/13/17 Pixel the Thirteenth, Part Scroll

  1. First!

    And no geographic location on the wine other than California is pretty suspect…though the average California can contains enough wood to stake a vampire anyway.

  2. 6) I really liked Strange Days, however it was directed by Kathryn Bigelow from Cameron’s screenplay.

  3. (1) Kudos to Amazon here; they obviously took the issue seriously when first reported. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hackett’s own status helped them in taking it seriously, but that’s sadly endemic in the entire social system.

    I’m more than a little concerned about the double-punishment of the harasser here, possibly one after the first investigation, and now one after it becoming public. But given that sexual and other harassment is so wide-spread, and so many structures perpetuating and protecting it, I can’t think of any better alternatives than the mallet.

    (4) Heh. I often view fandom as a sort of alternative academic and curating infrastructure for genre literature, that the established mainstream genres gets for free via universities, academies, and museums. This is one good example of that, and good for Peck to making that point.

    (8) That’s some lovely Vernonish imagery and phrasing! Though the idea that every garden-variety god needs its own little army or militia doesn’t really strike true to me. Polytheistic pantheons seemed to be much more into aspects and situations than in bureaucracies or One Primary God. When you needed to go fight the invaders, you went to the war god, when you needed to clear out the weed you went to the garden god.

  4. Karl-Johan Norén: I’m more than a little concerned about the double-punishment of the harasser here, possibly one after the first investigation, and now one after it becoming public.

    What you call “double punishment”, I call “Amazon finally doing what should have been done in the first place, now that it’s become public knowledge”.

    For a long time, perpetrators have been getting let off with a smack on the back of the hand and maybe a secret payout to the victim while everything is kept hush-hush. Finally having to face real consequences doesn’t really qualify as a double punishment.

  5. 7) I really enjoyed Ursula’s speculations about a Paladin of a God of gardening. Very Ursula-esque.

  6. (6) Strange Days is another one of those movies that’s still crying out for a proper home video release, at least in the US.

    (9) I’m glad they’re not going to try to reinsert the found 2001 footage, but I hope it’s made available for viewing somehow or other — maybe as an extra on a future release or something.

    (7) Yes, that was a great thread.

  7. @Joe Agreed. I am curious as to what got trimmed and from what part of the movie it comes from.

  8. Making dick references at Philip K. Dick’s daughter. Right. She’s heard them all before in sixth grade and they weren’t funny coming from a twelve year old. Coming from an adult male studio head makes one really wonder – was he in the same frat as Bezos or something?

  9. As far as I remember, Kubrick cut 15 minutes of Poole jogging around Discovery after the first showing…

  10. I was going to say maybe another 15 minutes of the Pan Am shuttle very, very slowly approaching the rotating station to the sound of the Blue Danube waltz.

  11. (10) I’ve taken to calling this a “cardboard dystopia”: the one where companies run the world and use patent and other IP law to oppress the public. No one who ever held a position of responsibility in a large corporation could possibly take it seriously (governments are so much more powerful than companies that there is no real contest there), but for some reason it’s real, real popular. It usually comes along with a rejection of the Law of Comparative Advantage and an embrace of the Lump-of-Labor Fallacy. That is, most people have to do without because there are no jobs they can do at any wage, and there are no jobs because everything has been automated.

    I’ve chatted in person with a couple of authors who use this setting a lot (I won’t name names) and the depressing thing is that they actually believe it’s something that’s likely to happen. There are a lot of ways we might end up in a dystopia, but this really isn’t one of them, and it’s a real failure of imagination that we see so much of it.

    ETA: I’m at my 40th High school reunion in Chattanooga, Tennessee, so in the event this inspires discussion, don’t be surprised if my responses are a little slow today.

  12. Greg Hullender: No one who ever held a position of responsibility in a large corporation could possibly take it seriously (governments are so much more powerful than companies that there is no real contest there)

    Big Business has been running the U.S. Government for decades now. The idea of taking that just one small step further is not at all ludicrous.

  13. @JJ “Cutting out the middleman” as it were.

    Power abhors a vacuum. If a central government fails to exercise it, other entities would. It could be local entities, formal and informal, or other large scale entities, foreign and domestic.

  14. (1) @JJ: The issue with the court of public opinion is that it is by nature uncontrolled. Sometimes it’s necessary, but it often causes lots of extra damage to the already involved parties. As I understand from Hackett, Amazon had already taken some action as well against Price. There are also very good reasons for why judicial systems frown on double jeopardy.

    I’m not saying Hackett is wrong to go public, but I also can’t say that she is right to do so in this specific case.

  15. Karl-Johan Norén: The issue with the court of public opinion is that it is by nature uncontrolled. Sometimes it’s necessary, but it often causes lots of extra damage to the already involved parties.

    I would argue that the “extra damage” is a necessary step in rooting out this behavior from our culture. As long as men are allowed to engage in this behavior and buy silence and their way out of consequences with power and money (and many men have been doing exactly that, for many decades), things will not change.

  16. @JJ

    Big Business has been running the U.S. Government for decades now.

    I know a lot of people believe this, but a look at the sort of laws Congress actually passes and the regulations that come out of Washington makes it clear that this just isn’t the case. Yeah, sometimes business gets things it shouldn’t, but other times business gets screwed over. Big business definitely has influence, but it’s very far from having control.

  17. Greg Hullender: Big business definitely has influence, but it’s very far from having control.

    Companies which pollute routinely escape consequences and prosecution from the now-toothless EPA.

    Banks engage in predatory lending practices without any real restraint.

    The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act provides no protection to individual consumers whatsoever.

    The U.S., which should have gone to single-payer Nationalized healthcare decades ago, still has a massively broken healthcare system because Big Pharma and insurance companies have prevented it.

    The tort system, which should have been fixed decades ago, is massively broken because legal corporations profit from it not being fixed.

    Corporations are allowed to become such monopolies that their failure would take down the economy. So the government bails them out, and there are no real consequences for anyone but the individual.

    Individual employees have basically no protection from arbitrary corporate acts because the labor unions and employee rights regulations have been gutted through the influence of big corporations.

    The entities which have endless amounts of money to spend on legal action are the ones which triumph in the courts — and those entities are Big Business.

    I could go on all day with examples, and I’m sure that other people would be able to offer plenty of others.

    Once in a rare while in the U.S., Big Business doesn’t get what it wants. The vast majority of the time, it does.

  18. The U.S., which should have gone to single-payer Nationalized healthcare decades ago, still has a massively broken healthcare system because Big Pharma and insurance companies have prevented it.

    What I understand as the big problem is, how do we get out of the employer-provided health-insurance system which many people have? It’s a legacy of WW2, and it’s possibly the second-least-efficient way to provide healthcare coverage. (Least efficient is making everyone buy it on the open market.)

  19. P J Evans on October 14, 2017 at 8:28 am said:
    The U.S., which should have gone to single-payer Nationalized healthcare decades ago, still has a massively broken healthcare system because Big Pharma and insurance companies have prevented it.

    What I understand as the big problem is, how do we get out of the employer-provided health-insurance system which many people have? It’s a legacy of WW2, and it’s possibly the second-least-efficient way to provide healthcare coverage. (Least efficient is making everyone buy it on the open market.)

    Sadly, the way the GOP and their goon in the Oval Office are proceeding, their attempts to destroy what the Black Guy did may very well have the side effect of destroying the entire health care market in a way that will result in only the very rich having access to health care.

    Like so many other idiot right wing ideas (tinkle-down economics comes to mind) they don’t seem to care. Since the GOP is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Billionaire Plutocrats at this point, the paymasters are content.

  20. @JJ: The entities which have endless amounts of money to spend on legal action are the ones which triumph in the courts — and those entities are Big Business.

    In a broad chunk of the corporate sector that the average person has direct dealings with – any and all credit cards you hold, probably your insurance provider, whatever bank owns your mortgage if you have one – you are not even allowed to take legal action**: written into the contract that you signed is a clause that requires you to go to arbitration in the event of a dispute, with the arbitrator chosen and paid by the corporation. Guess who the arbitrators side with nearly all the time?

    **Not that the majority of Americans can afford to take legal action in any case.

  21. Greg Hullender on October 14, 2017 at 7:33 am said:
    (10) I’ve taken to calling this a “cardboard dystopia”: the one where companies run the world and use patent and other IP law to oppress the public. No one who ever held a position of responsibility in a large corporation could possibly take it seriously (governments are so much more powerful than companies that there is no real contest there), but for some reason it’s real, real popular. It usually comes along with a rejection of the Law of Comparative Advantage and an embrace of the Lump-of-Labor Fallacy. That is, most people have to do without because there are no jobs they can do at any wage, and there are no jobs because everything has been automated.

    I’ve chatted in person with a couple of authors who use this setting a lot (I won’t name names) and the depressing thing is that they actually believe it’s something that’s likely to happen. There are a lot of ways we might end up in a dystopia, but this really isn’t one of them, and it’s a real failure of imagination that we see so much of it.

    Greg, realizing that you won’t be around much today to answer, I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make with your comment about ‘anyone who has held a position of responsibility in a large corporation.’ I’ve held such a position, and I think corporate fascism is far more dangerous than you make it out to be.

    True, no corporation has nuclear weapons, but except for that, why do you describe a government as ‘far more powerful’? JJ laid out a long list of things corporations do with no consequence now a days.

    If the government is neutered, nonexistent, or under the thrall of Ayn Randian acolytes, frankly, only government laws and regulations stop a corporation from basically doing anything they want. To you, me, or the environment.

    So, I have to say I’m a believer in ‘cardboard dystopias’. “Gladiator at Law” doesn’t seem all that different from what we are living through right now, except we don’t yet have televised blood sports. (USA here, so YMMV)

  22. Making dick references at Philip K. Dick’s daughter. Right. She’s heard them all before in sixth grade and they weren’t funny coming from a twelve year old.

    According to what I’ve read (primarily the Sutin biography of PKD), his wife (#4) Nancy Hackett moved out in 1970, taking Isa (Isolde) with her; Isa, who would have been 2 or 3 at the time, only rarely saw her father afterward. It’s possible she grew up with the surname Hackett, which she uses today, not Dick.

  23. @Techgrrl1972 Well, to start with, corporations don’t have their own armies or police forces. (Except in stories.) Companies are at great pains to avoid litigation and will often make “nuisance payments” to avoid it. Small companies are far more likely to disregard the law than big ones, if only because big ones fear the “disgruntled ex-employee” who rats them out.

    Nor is it true that CEOs are never prosecuted for crimes. Here’s a list of CEOs sentenced to prison. Should more of them be prosecuted? Probably, but if they really controlled the government, it would never happen.

    Nor is it true that companies win arbitration because they chose and paid the arbitrator; conflict of interest is one of the few ways to get an arbitration decision overturned. Abuse of arbitration is a problem because it’s used to make class-action suits impossible, and that’s a problem that more and more people know needs fixing. I haven’t found anything that compares how well individuals do in arbitration vs. court.

    When I was a kid, it was far easier for companies to sell dangerous products and escape any sort of accountability. Government has forced car companies to make far safer, far more efficient cars, power plants to emit far less pollution, etc. The phone company charged outrageous fees for calls, and airlines overcharged hugely for seats.

    In just about every meaningful way, big business has less influence on the government today than it did fifty years ago, and the way the Internet has empowered ordinary people to keep tabs on them keeps diluting their power further.

    Sure, there are still problems, and JJ has enumerated a few of them–with, I’d claim, a certain amount of exaggeration. For example, the “toothless” EPA has far more power than anything that existed in the 1960s. But it is a long way from saying that businesses have some unfair advantages to saying that they control the government.

  24. @Joe H

    I’ve had a DVD copy of Strange Days long enough that I couldn’t tell you how long, or where I got it. So it’s certainly been available in the U.K. Not sure about BluRay.

    Off to see Blade Runner 2049 in Imax tomorrow, so far completely unspoiled.

  25. Greg:

    Well, to start with, corporations don’t have their own armies or police forces.

    Yes, but instead they have lawyers and all-but-bribed politicians to protect themselves against the police being used against them.

    Also, private security guards are at thing – I’d say I see uniformed security guards more often than I see police officers. I don’t see it as inconceivable with a development where security guards gets more rights, and more areas where their privileges apply, gradually edging out the police even more.

    Private military companies also exists – like the one formerly know as Blackwater, currently Academi or something. They can’t fight the armies of large nations, but as with security guards the seed is there and can grow.

    Should more [CEOs] be prosecuted? Probably, but if they really controlled the government, it would never happen.

    Yes, it would. I’d even say we should expect to see more CEOs to be prosecuted if large corporations where in full control of governments – because all companies cannot control the government simultaneously, and we should expect the ones who do to use that power as a weapon against their competition.

  26. I’m kind of surprised that a country that has started wars against other countries doe the whole purpose of helpibg american companies (see Guatemala) will talk as if corporate fascism is not a problem.

  27. Corporate fascism has existed for centuries. See the British East India Company for a private company that governed. That said, I agree with Greg Hullender that fears are overstated. I personally think that a good old-fashioned oligarchy is taking over the U.S.

  28. @World Weary

    I personally think that a good old-fashioned oligarchy is taking over the U.S.

    Exactly!

    @Hampus Eckerman

    I’m kind of surprised that a country that has started wars against other countries doe the whole purpose of helpibg american companies (see Guatemala) will talk as if corporate fascism is not a problem.

    Ah but the question is what direction is the country moving. You’re absolutely right that those are things the country used to do, but the Guatemala coup was in 1954. As I said above, the trend is away from corporate influence, and has been for a long time.

    @Johan P

    I’d even say we should expect to see more CEOs to be prosecuted if large corporations where in full control of governments – because all companies cannot control the government simultaneously, and we should expect the ones who do to use that power as a weapon against their competition.

    We definitely don’t see anything like that. So which companies do you imagine are controlling the US today?

  29. No company controls the US. Lots of companies control parts of it. And the only real reason they do not have it all locked down is that they work at cross purposes to each other.

  30. No one who ever held a position of responsibility in a large corporation could possibly take it seriously (governments are so much more powerful than companies that there is no real contest there), but for some reason it’s real, real popular.

    This is utter nonsense. I worked for a government-owned utility and we had legal and other documentation that should have let us handily win a contract dispute against a private corporation, and would have saved the taxpayers over $70 million… but we weren’t allowed to use it by our superiors. The reason? We may have to work with them again someday, and we needed their goodwill, because they were too effective at co-opting our top-tier officials. Our own superiors would go to bat for the private company regardless of their breach of contract or other malfeasance rather than support their own staff and the taxpayers we were trying to protect. My stepfather, who made his career building public infrastructure for over 40 years, informed me that in large-scale, government-run infrastructure projects (like mine) this was standard procedure, and has been since he was just starting out. The government can’t afford to fall afoul of the private sector, so they let them get away with murder. I’ve worked in the public sector in various capacities half my life and we are constantly being bullied and outspent by for-profit companies who flout the law because they know they can.

  31. @August, okay, but tell me how you get from that to corporate police forces that arrest citizens in their homes and put them in corporate jails. Even in the case you describe, do you seriously believe the private companies could kidnap or murder people and get away with it? A government-owned utility is not the government.

    The cardboard dystopia isn’t about corporations getting the government to look the other way while they rake in the profits. That certainly does happen, and it’s certainly a problem. It’s about corporations replacing the government and essentially enslaving the population. In the real world, corporations have almost no ability to use force. In the cardboard dystopia, they use it all the time. I have never seen a story make any attempt to explain that transition.

  32. Greg Hullender: are you genuinely unaware of for profit prisons in the US and how they keep prisoners? Yes, the prisoners were charged, and found guilty, by the government, but a: this means the prisoners are effectively turned over to a corporation for actual punishment, and B: the for-profit model encourages guilty verdicts, parole and probation denial, and even charges laid where otherwise they might not be, which is a demonstrable influence on government by a corporation.

  33. That one’s better (although I’d want to see some evidence that any verdicts were ever influenced for that reason before I’d believe it) but, again, I’m not arguing that corporations have no influence on the government. Obviously they do. I’m arguing that the idea of corporations running the government is absurd. They seek to make more money and to get out of regulations they don’t like, but they don’t try to run an army or a police force. (Those things would be money losers.)

    ETA: Interesting link, Kathodus. Thanks. It definitely proves that the government was, in the end, more powerful than the corporation though.

  34. Greg: there was a case in Pennsylvania, within the last couple of years, where a judge was convicted of ?taking bribes? to sentence people to a private prison.

  35. @Chip Hitchcock: Oh, much worse. It was two judges who sent hundreds of kids to private prisons for things that weren’t even vaguely illegal.

    Twenty-eight years, that one judge got, for something maybe worse than murder.

  36. @Heather Rose Jones

    I’d say that a lot of the legal and “police” actions around the North Dakota Access Pipeline protests came fairly close to the scenario being discussed.

    I suppose it depends on what you think really happened there. My own view is that it was 100% about opposing anything that adds to our carbon footprint and that all the other issues were fabricated. The protesters were able to delay it but not stop it, since the only real issue (the CO2) was the only one that’s not yet illegal.

    When you get a large, unruly protest, you always tangle with the police. I’ve never been part of one that lasted days rather than hours, so I can only imagine what it was like, but I do know that the main point of any protest is to get public attention and swing public opinion. Their decision to stick it out to the bitter end (until the police removed them by force) guaranteed some bad things would happen. (I’ve been in a protest that was dispersed with water cannons–it’s not fun.)

    However, I think they got what they really wanted. Any company wanting to run a new pipeline is going to hesitate. Projects that require new pipelines will always get internal objections. “We don’t want to go through all of that–let’s do something different.” Time will tell, I suppose, but there’s a reason I’m optimistic on this one.

    Back in the early 90s, gay groups around the country protested a film called “Basic Instinct,” which was yet-another film with a “Lesbian-Psycho Killer.” (The only kind of lesbian allowed in movies up until then.) We did just about everything we could think of to disrupt their filming in San Francisco, but, of course, although we could make it unpleasant for them, we couldn’t stop them. I’ll add that it was the only time in my life I was physically assaulted by the police–and all I was doing was talking to the press.

    Worst of all, our protesting brought national attention to the film and unquestionably swelled their take at the box office.

    But there has never been another major film like “Basic Instinct.” Big-name Actors and actresses would refuse to participate in such a thing just as they’d avoid a film that glorified the KKK. That was our goal from the very first planning meeting I attended more than a year before they were filming, and so I’ve always considered it a big win for us. I have a feeling the pipeline protesters achieved a similar victory.

  37. Greg Hullender: I suppose it depends on what you think really happened there. My own view is that it was 100% about opposing anything that adds to our carbon footprint and that all the other issues were fabricated.

    The pipeline (and such pipelines leak and break all the time) was adjacent to their water supply. WTF.

    Not to mention that it was on sovereign land, land to which the government does not have the right to grant access to private corporations.

    WTF. I don’t have words for this. 🙁

  38. If those things were true, you’d have a point, but they’re not. The pipeline is too deep the threaten the water supply (else the protesters could have got an injunction), and governments in the US can and do routinely use eminent domain to seize private property to enable projects as mundane as shopping centers.

    As a practical matter, it’s usually a pretty good deal for the property owner. A gas company ran a pipeline across my grandmother’s property about 20 years ago, but, because eminent domain cases take a long time, the gas company was eager to do a deal with her. She told me she’d been holding out for a higher price (although they were close) up to the point where the representative from the gas company said, “Mrs. Jones, this is the best we can do. If you keep pushing I’m going to have to bring up the fact that we’re paying you for loss of the timber on the land when I know for a fact you sold it all two years ago.” She laughed and took the deal.

    In fact, it’s a big problem that electric utilities for some reason cannot use eminent domain to get right-of-ways for power lines. This is making it really hard to upgrade the US power grid.

  39. I don’t think the government is supposed to be able to use eminent domain against the sovereign lands of the various Indigenous peoples. They are actually considered literally another domain — making it rather like the US deciding it was okay to dig on the Canadian side of the border.

    The real issue was, what was considered sovereign territory was part of the dispute. The piece of land the pipeline went through was never ceded officially to the US, but it also wasn’t explicitly covered by treaty. The people had considered it theirs because it contained burial sites and other traditional grounds, and nobody else wanted it until this pipeline.

  40. As to whether the pipeline was “deep enough”, there have been problems and leaks with numerous pipelines, and if it was my water, I wouldn’t trust that claim.

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