My second concern is the recent Supreme Court ruling that recognizes corporations as citizens. The whole sad (or scary) business recalled my review, A View From the Plate, of Grace Jones brilliant 2008 video "Corporate Cannibal": What's most impressive about Grace Jones' video is it offers the viewer no access to enjoyment or thrills. The whole work has zero entertainment value; it's unpleasant to watch and hear—a grinding beat, a morphing monster. This is not a spectacle of corporate capital, corporate greed, corporate hunger. A spectacle seduces the thing it exploits or annihilates. With Jones as the corporate beast, there is no seduction, no sugar, no soft suffocation. Grace Jones makes every effort to fully represent the terrifying force of today's global rich.

Go back to 1985 and listen to "Slave to the Rhythm," which with good reason is referenced in "Corporate Cannibal" ("Lost in this cell, in this hell/Slave to the rhythm of the corporate prison"). Produced by Trevor Horn, the older tune has several seductions: the seduction of the then-new go-go beat; the seduction of Grace's appearance (at once elemental and futuristic), and the seduction of her lyrics, which expressed the sublime of world-historical labor.

Axe to wood in ancient times
Man machine
power line
Fires burn
Hearts beat strong
Sing out loud the chain gang song
Never stop the action
Keep it up
keep it up

We have in these lines the same sublime that gave much of the Communist Manifesto its beauty and poetry.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?

We are amazed and seduced by the spectacle of production itself, the awesome power of social labor. With "Corporate Cannibal," however, the moment of Debord is over. We no longer look at capital (or the history of productive forces) from a safe distance ("don't cry, it's only the rhythm") but directly at its dark mouth, as if we were on a white plate, soon to be devoured. Nothing about this situation is pleasing or thrilling. All we want to do is find a way out of this place/plate; but the image of corporate hunger is fluid: it shifts its shape like some sort of digital snake ("...Digital criminal/Corporate cannibal/Eat you like an animal"). Writes Steven Shaviro:

The modulations of "Corporate Cannibal" don't give us the sense that anything can happen, but rather one that no matter what happens, it will be drawn into the same fatality, the same narrowing funnel, the same black hole.

And you can not shake the hand of this snake. You can't even mistrust it, bribe it, distract it with talk about the importance of civility (verses barbarism), of re-investment of the surplus value, or saving for a rainy day. All of those possibilities are long gone. With this form of capital, neoliberal capital, every barrier to its desire, the negation/consumption of all value, has been removed. What's left is for you to await the inevitable on a plate.

Pleased to meet you
Pleased to have you on my plate

You won't hear me laughing
As I terminate your day
You can't trace my footsteps as I walk the other way.

That's Grace Jone's stark conclusion of capital at this point, which roughly marks three decades of neoliberalism and de-unionization. The rich eat the poor with no compunction or preparation. The video is raw.