Demonizing Capitalism and Success: A Saturday Morning Communist Manefesto

From TV to movies to kiddy cartoons... there is only one true villain to Hollywood and those on the left and that villain is the so-called evil capitalist corporate CEO.

Our children are being spoon fed hatred for success in business, anti capitalism and communism everywhere they turn for entertainment.

Who is the villain in the new 3d movie "G-Force"? The CEO of course.
Who was the villain in the Santa Clause movies? The CEO of course. Movie after movie and TV show after TV show the theme is the same... terrorists aren't evil but success is.

From a USA Today article back in 2004-

"CEOs didn't even escape this summer's sci-fi releases: Halle Berry becomes Catwoman due to skin cream made addictive; Dr. Otto Octavius turns villain in Spider-Man 2 in a gone-haywire attempt to make a profit; and I, Robot exposes the ultimate warranty hassle when products made by U.S. Robotics start killing humans because sleazy executives in 2035 try to cut a few corners.

Documentaries are enjoying unprecedented success, and they can thank CEO bashing: The Corporation and Super Size Me are built on the premise that companies have moved beyond evil to psychopathic, or at least deceitful enough to plot our plumpness.

There aren't many bad guys left. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid warmed us to train robbers in 1969. The Godfather nearly did the same for mobsters in 1972. When the remake of the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate arrived this summer, even communism was off the table. It had been replaced as villain by shadowy corporate execs out to privatize the White House.

Lawyers, the butt of so many jokes, are portrayed as heroic when they're up against a corporation, says Paul Argenti, a professor of corporate communications at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, who tracks how the media treat CEOs.

About the only villains left are terrorists and CEOs — and terrorists will probably be portrayed as sympathetic long before CEOs, says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.

On the screen, CEOs are swimming like never before at the bottom of the low-life barrel.

It's a law, like gravity, going back to silent movies such as Metropolis (1927), The Crowd (1928), and Modern Times (1936), which depict CEOs as villains and socialism as a better alternative. Before that, it was literature. Remember Scrooge, the executive who wouldn't give his devoted worker with a sick child time off on Christmas Eve?"

Harmless or hurtful?

It's only getting worse. But do they deserve it? "It's a bum rap," says Robert Crandall, former CEO of American Airlines.

A more important question may be whether disparaging CEOs is harmless entertainment or does it have a lasting impact on a system that has made the USA the world's economic engine?

"Most CEOs are honest and hardworking. Creating the idea that all CEOs are bad is adverse for society," says Crandall, who, while widely respected, was not universally loved by his troops.

Lionel Barrymore in It's a Wonderful Life.

Get used to it. CEOs have long awaited the promised production of the movie Atlas Shrugged from the 1957 Ayn Rand novel that portrays business leaders as heroic and society's saviors. The screenplay is supposedly being written, but that's been reported before.

Experts struggle to come up with examples of CEOs portrayed as good. Nell Minow, who has a rare combination of expertise as a movie critic and a corporate watchdog, says the 1954 movie Sabrina is an atypical case where a stodgy executive played by Humphrey Bogart falls in love and grows a heart.

We forget that Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey is a good-guy CEO in It's a Wonderful Life (1946) because nemesis Mr. Potter is CEO of a larger company trying to force him out of business, Minow says.

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So.. why would our children want to go to college and become a big success in life if that very success makes them the evil villain?

-red