10 Per Cent: The Trojan Horse Opens

Barely over a year ago, we called for a creative alternative to the corporate troll’s 10 Per Cent Solution. It did not arrive, and today we have the 10 Per Cent Consequence.

It’s not that there are no good, creative minds offering solutions that would take us out of the fecal ditch of the corporate troll — Krugman has been at it a while, and he adds today that key advisors to the President have also been urging a stronger policy response.

The problem, of course, is not that government is too slow to act — that shoe is most frequently on the other foot. Government usually acts too quickly, and therefore too weakly and too blindly.

So it isn’t that government fails to act; it is that it fails first to perceive. As with the individual, so with the organization or state: action is effective only to the extent that clarity precedes and informs it. What seems to Krugman and many others like weakness in will or policy was really the result of a murky discernment.

Krugman’s Anzio metaphor could benefit from some revision: I would suggest a slightly older war, the one fought in Troy. The Bush administration welcomed that great wooden horse within the gates of the nation’s economy and saw it for what it claimed to be, a gift. Come to think of it, that horse loaded with suffering and death for those who received it may have been the first instance of corporate marketing in the history of western civilization. Consumers and governments have been repeatedly and disastrously fooled by the big, gleaming Trojan Horse of corporate pretension ever since.