prospect.org: When Shareholder Capitalism Came to Town

The publicly traded corporation has two products and two customers: its stock and the goods or services that makes. It sells the one product on the stock exchange to investors, most of which are other corporations. It sells its goods and services in the ‘marketplace’. Which customer comes first? Is that a reasonable question?

My aims are fairly limited: I expect to hug my kid, and tell him I love him. I expect to hug my wife, and tell her I will always support her. I expect to make my Momma proud (“Be a good race-man,” she used to say.) And I expect to honor my Dad. I expect to drink some good rum. And I expect to know more tomorrow than I know today. And I expect to talk to the youth about taking control of their own education. And I expect to be a good writer.

And that really is it. It’s all I can ask. It’s all I can control.

That was written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and posted on his blog at The Atlantic a few days ago. It is singularly sane and hopeful. A mark of in-sanity, particularly the ordinary everyday insanity of mood disorders (to use a bland pop-generic term), is the desire for the wrong things. Wrong in the sense of impossible, unattainable, delusory. To expect sane things ― to love my husband, to do right by my kids, to be a friend to my friends, to do my job ― is to desire these things. It is also to expect that I will have the ability to do these things: to hope that I possess, or can acquire, the capabilities and skills required to achieve them. Further: it is to expect that my circumstances will not prevent me from acquiring those capabilities and employing then to achieve my heart’s desire. Some of those circumstances are of my own making ― or undoing. Some conditions are created by others: employers, clients, family, friends, strangers. But many of the conditions that can defeat or justify hope are institutional ― including the legacy, both good and evil, of the past.

I fear that my visits to Temendia are, however much they seem to be mere visits, the first stages of my own relocation, by own habitation, my own removal to the status of a resident.

In Temendia I seem to move through a world composed of remnants. Not in the way I thought during my first visits. Past and ‘present’ are mingled. But the immediate past, what occurred 20 or 10 minutes ago is just as likely to be jumbled as things happening 10 or 20 years ago. More likely, in my experience. What is impaired is my ability to construct a narrative that plausibly connects present experience with the past.