Acceptable.

How can a book about Augusto Pinochet, a book more about not his crimes, but his immunity against consequences for murder, rape, pederasty, kidnapping, torture, embezzlement and more, lead me to think about both the current state of the advertising industry and the modern world?

That parallelism came, for me, into sharp focus this week. Cindy Rose, OBE, the new CEO of the advertising holding company WPP called the performance of her company "unacceptable."

The trade press, here Adweek, did their usual crappy job explaining all this in a "2 minute read." Though through the numbers they chose to throw at the reader (in their truncated coverage--it's as if one of the biggest stories of our time deserves but two-minutes) they missed the big numbers. 

They missed badly.

This is big news covered by Adweek, the journalistic equivalent of Bazooka Joe comix.

The big numbers--the real ones--are these: 

In 2017, WPP claimed they had 200,000 employees. Today, they have fewer than 90,000.

In 2020, WPP had a market-capitalization of $32,000,000,000. Today it's around $5,000,000,000. If they had $5.20 at the start of the decade, by the end of the first half of the decade, they're left with just $1.

This chart might help if you have a hard time with numbers.

It makes sense here, I think, to introduce the German concept Persilschein into the conversation. When the trump era finally burns down amerika, if amerika rebounds, I have a feeling a lot of trump's willing executioners will buy for themselves the amerikan equivalent of Persilschein. We don't have wonderful linguistic cognates like the Germans. But let me propose one for this inevitability, Cheetobleach.

Certainly Pinochet, above, Persilscheined his way to a immunity and impunity. Like Sammy 'the Bull' Gravano, he got away with murder. The Ratline Nazis, like Walter Rauff, who built Pinochet's state torture, disappearing and murder infrastructure got off scot-free. Earlier, Rauff invented the Nazi's 'killing vans' and was responsible for the deaths of 125,000 Jews. He Ratlined to a new life (after causing so many deaths) in Chile.

The basis for my comparison is attached to Cindy Rose, OBE's, use of the word "unacceptable," above. WPP's performance is unacceptable.

What she didn't call out as unacceptable is the corporate mob's perfectly acceptable pillaging of the corporations they run and their manipulation of their corporate "Compensation Committees."

There are hundreds of mostly-men from WPP and countless other corporate entities who "presided" over their plummet. They were running those places into oblivion. 

They leave with nine-figure compensation packages and in-perpetuity pensions. (They put the ptui- in in-perpetuity.)

Some of these pillagers like Mark Read, came to the company, stripped all its wealth, drove it into the ground, and now live in 33-room mansions in Mustique, Cannes, Geneva and in 107-story sun-blocking buildings on "Billionaires' Row" in Manhattan.

Their's is an un-punished villainy.

OK. Maybe this is too harsh.

They didn't murder anything.

But an industry.

Perfectly acceptable.