R U a Happy Meal?

I’ve heard a lot about 2012 being the end of the Mayan calendar and it heralding the start of a new phase in humanity, mostly from people dealing with it on an introspective level. But I’m also aware of people out there working for this change. Just this morning a report from a Catholic conference about business: a strange mix, Catholics, business and Mayan culture, but I guess that’s how progress swirls. Their question, does business serve those it touches? Take McDonalds for example. It doesn’t serve its employees by paying them poorly or its customers by feeding them poorly. It provides millions with poverty and obesity in equal measure. How can that company be so profitable when one that pays reasonably and provides good food struggles to survive? The knee-jerk answer is supposedly efficiency; the efficiency of scale provides good value, but how can something that serves everyone so poorly be considered good value? Can it really be considered ‘good business’? In Nazi Germany Gerbils, sorry Goebbels (thank you internet, pics of little fury animals saved me from a terrible mistake there) used propaganda to great effect in wartime and Edward Bernaise, nephew of Sigmund Freud, realised its peacetime uses but called it Public (read proletariat) Relations, and with the help of his uncle’s theories made good use of it. By almost single-handedly setting up the corporate/proletariat divided he put capitalism on a war footing, and with the help of our own unconscious taught us to love our enemy. We now see profitability and growth as inviolable even though it serves a mere one percent and impoverishes the other ninety-nine. So go for it Mr Bishop, good on yer. And then there’s Russel Brand bewitching Jeremy Paxman with a similar message. And finally a Youtube video of a polar bear playing with dogs has had 12 million views. We are instinctively yearning to be able to play together, even with a predator. Well when it’s not hungry. But when it’s insatiable every living thing will give it a wide berth and it will die. Unfortunately in our case PR has over-written this natural sense. Anyone for a Happy Meal?