|
It’s not so much that he stole.
It’s that he did it with unbridled arrogance, unapologetic zeal, and
lavish ostentation. Now that Conrad Black, a.k.a. Baron Black of
Crossharbour, former CEO of Hollinger International, is a convicted felon
four times over, facing up to 35 years in an American jail, the
capitalist media chooses to dwell on... his hubris.
After all, theft is endemic to the capitalist
system. So, why belabor it? Why even ponder how Black, born
into a millionaire clan, became a billionaire by swindling two corporate
widows of the Argus Corporation in 1978, and by pilfering the Dominion
Stores’ pension fund in 1984 (until an Ontario court ruled in the
supermarket workers’ favour, ordering Black to return $37.9
million). By then he had already denuded and dumbed-down an array
of community newspapers, bought the Daily Telegraph in London, and was well
on his way to controlling 50 per cent of Canada’s print media, plus the Jerusalem
Post, the Chicago
Sun-Times and notable others. After all, isn’t this
the cannibalistic way of the business world. To say nothing of the
‘ordinary’ practice of squeezing workers to the max, whose labour is the
basic source of profit.
But Conrad went too far, you say? Well indeed,
when it comes to capitalist greed, he did the full monty. He
chucked the fig leaf, elbowed his way into the clubs of the super-rich,
and routinely sued his detractors. As he crudely rewarded himself
with huge ‘non-compete payments’ when selling off newspapers in a given
market, he said ‘let the shareholders howl’. For a man who was so
instrumental in shifting the elite political agenda to the right (via his
vanity press “The National Post” and other means), Black showed an
amazing inability to grasp that his way was no way to rule a
sophisticated late capitalist society where liberal democratic rights,
albeit under attack, still remain largely in force.
For such indiscretions, for the sheer lack of upper
crust ‘nobility’ he so strove to attain and to exude, Black may go to
jail, or go into exile, or more likely engage in years of further
litigation at the cost of his purloined assets and a legion of
opportunistic ‘friends’.
And the system that made it all possible, having once
again rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic, just keeps sailing
along.
|