Word: greed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...behavior and self-importance. Think of Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog, Sam Peckinpah, Erich Stroheim, and other filmmakers who at one point or another made films that became more about their personal psychoses than the films’ topics, which were things like greed, marital breakdown, the fallibility of nature, or cinema history. Given this list, perhaps the obsessive behavior is appropriate. Or perhaps they are (or were) a bunch of narcissistic hacks, behaving like Tom Wolfe’s masters of the universe that populate his Manhattan in The Bonfire of the Vanities...
...that great films can’t come out of this tradition. Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Stroheim’s Greed, and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo are good examples. But it’s still problematic to me that, especially in America, our auteurs have increasingly come to be judged by the extent of their excess. We seem to be constantly grasping at straws to rescue excessive mistakes of the past as well, like with Heaven’s Gate...
Meanwhile, American economics study has increasingly become a pseudoscience of mathematical formula manipulation that is devoid of humanity. This economics has conquered America’s business education and become fused with the robber baron culture of greed supremacy. American MBAs are taught to treat ordinary employees as disposable costs and to swallow uncritically the gospel that corporations exist only to reward abstract stockholders. MBAs are taught the pretend-science of manipulating accounting, finance, employees, customers, and stock prices. Financial games and hostile takeovers of competitors are taught to accomplish corporations’ sole objective—to make money...
...government: business collusion and unfair taxes, Wal-Mart’s exploitations of labor and communities, and robber barons’ hubris. Nowhere in his 900-page book, The Wealth of Nations, does Smith even imply that those who knowingly harm others and society in their pursuit of personal greed also benefit their society. He rejects the notion that a corporation exists to make money without ethical constraints...
...confessional element," says the Whitechapel's Anthony Spira. "He's constantly confessing his sins, his deepest urges, desires, fantasies." Says Crumb's wife, "As he's gotten older, he's questioned his spiritual center, his self, more and more." He has castigated his native country for its ugliness and greed, but, she says: "I don't think he has ever hated America. He longs for an America that once was, or never was." Revisiting the past - his own and the wider world's, real or imagined - should ensure his future remains worth watching...