Here we are, 4 years after the Katrina Disaster, and the first hurricanes to pose any serious threat to gulf coast communities have finally arrived. This was, of course, inevitable, and the networks seem to have been prepared for the day when such media frenzy could be justified again. As Hanna, Fay, and Gustav blew into town relatively uneventfully, I began to think the press might get over themselves. That their dripping wet lust for disaster would subside after the first few near misses. But now, with Ike ready to make landfall upon the gulf shores of Texas, I can see that I was wrong.

I’m out and about in Brooklyn today, and every commercial establishment I’ve entered has had a different network tuned to their flatscreen, and every one has featured wall-to-wall coverage of the hurricane. Could it be that the mass media truly cares about the fate of these communities? That would be easier to believe if they’d spent the last 4 years devoting a small measure of coverage to the changes (or lack thereof) in FEMA’s operating procedures, or the emergency preparations of at-risk communities. So, one is obliged to deduce that this year’s hurricane season is just another of what is (so vulgarly and appropriately) referred to in New York as an ad fuck.

But, is it the networks’ fault that disaster is so lucrative? We consumers don’t have to pay attention to this. But, we do, and so I think about the way in which we collectively affect the quality of content in the mass media… and the way it affects us. This insidious, clockwork orange in which we all thrive like parasites, souring the fruit that has so much potential. This society.

There are those, of course, who would blame the universally evil “corporation” for this. But those people are part of the problem. They shut their eyes to the fact that all corporations are run by living, breathing people. The establishments which are the instruments of their mass-marketed theater are just that– instruments. It always goes back to people. To human beings and what we’re capable of. To offer up any kind of scapegoat to replace recognition of that fundamental truth is, to my mind, just as insidious. In fact, maybe more.

Here’s a despicable example of the efficacy of public health systems. Brooklyn’s Kings County Hospital (a public hospital run by the city) left a woman waiting for treatment for nearly 24 hours before she keeled over on the floor and died. Multiple guards came and looked at her as she writhed on the floor, and they did nothing. The incident was all caught on camera. What’s worse, the hospital staff falsified logs of the patient’s activities, reporting that she got up and got herself a drink of water when the security camera in the waiting room proved she was lying on the floor in distress at the time.

As if that wasn’t enough, the hospital only released the tape because they were compelled to by law in the course of exchanging evidence in a civil suit that has been brought against them by the New York Civil Liberties Union. They have now agreed to try to reduce the waiting time at these public hospitals to 10 - 13 hours over the next several months. You read that right; 10 - 13 hours is their new goal for treating patients. Talk about chinning off the curb.

I’ve just been checking out this book, and it seems to offer some interesting insight into how social conscience relates to capitalism and the market. Corporations that don’t exercise social responsibility end up failing, the thesis goes, which would seem to be valuable support for the notion that capitalism works– that agents of corporate fraud can’t, ultimately, survive in a free market. I’ll let you know how the book turns out, but here is an interesting excerpt from the first chapter:

As evidenced by the number of ethical missteps in the news, today we pay the piper as we tally the sorry record of organizational wrongdoings, infractions, and white-collar crimes, all of which can be traced to a diminishing interest in standards, controls, integrity, and that nineteenth-century commodity known as good reputation. Yet as a society, we define ourselves by the values we choose to emphasize. Beginning in the 1980s, a frenzied quest for efficiency led to the endorsement of individualism over community. The resulting emphasis on short-term returns encouraged a speculative frenzy in the stock markets and merger mania on Wall Street, variously described as “the casino society” [2] and a “circus of ambition,” [3] attacked in the Oliver Stone film Wall Street, and satirized in Tom Wolfe’s popular book The Bonfire of the Vanities. [4] The reputation of the business community as a whole fell to an all-time low. On into the 1990s and today, companies like E. F. Hutton, Drexel Burnham Lambert, and Salomon Brothers committed very public ethical wrongdoings, while others saw their reputations become severely tarnished. Once-giant organizations took a fall, never to recover to their previous grandeur. As suggested by Fombrun, [5] the corporate world has squandered much of its reputational capital and its ability to survive and thrive in the years to come.

I’ve been reading a book I picked up at a used bookstore called Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems. It may take me a while to get through it all, as it’s not really on my reading list, and I just grabbed it as it appeals to my interest in social structures. But in the introductory argument for Organizational Theory as a field of study, there is an interesting passage that touches on one of my earlier posts about ownership.

We will fail to perceive the importance of organizations for our lives if we view them only as contexts– as arrangements influencing the activities of individual actors. Organizations must also be viewed as actors in their own right, as corporate persons, to use Coleman’s phrase (1974). They can take actions, utilize resources, enter into contracts, and own property. Coleman describes how these rights have gradually developed since the Middle Ages to the point where now it is accurate to speak of two kinds of persons– natural persons (such as you and me) and corporate or juristic persons (such as the Red Cross or General Motors). The social structure of the modern society can no longer be described accurately as consisting only of relations among natural persons; our understanding must be stretched to include as well those relations between natural and corporate persons, and between corporate and corporate persons.1 In short, we must come to “the recognition that the society has changed over the past few centuries in the verv structural elements of which it is composed” (Coleman, 1974: 13).