(Roughly) Daily

“Corporate personhood” is– justifiably– a hot topic in the U.S. By dint of a questionable precedent and the legal superstructure that’s grown atop it, corporations here now have have the rights enjoyed by individuals (including the “free speech” right to make unlimited political contributions to PACs) even as they are free of many of a “real” person’s responsibilities.

But there corporations in other countries that are, in a very meaningful way, actually a person. The ever-illuminating McKinley Valentine points us to the intrigue surrounding one of South Korea’s leading chaebols (enormous conglomerates controlled by a single owner/family):

… if, like me, you enjoy mystery and conspiracy and watching too many political thrillers until they permanently damage your brain you will find this story fascinating.

A thread by John Yoo. He’s far from the only person talking about it, but he sums it up really well.

Chairman of Samsung is probably dead but we are all pretending he is alive because if he dies, the country will probably go into an economic death-spiral.

Samsung usually accounts for 20% of the exports of the entire country of South Korea. As a single group, it’s a conglomerate with either large or controlling market share in tech, construction, finance & insurance, hospitality, security, travel, food, retail producing 12% of GDP.

Almost $1 in every $5 in the country brought in from abroad is by Samsung.

[McK paraphrase: a whole ecosystem of suppliers and purchases has built up around Samsung, and is completely reliant on it. These would fail within months if Samsung collapsed] [not a whalefall situation, apparently]

Enter Korean tax code. Korea has 50% inheritance tax on assets above $2.5m. When Lee Gunhee dies, his family will owe the government $7b.

It is a fact that Chairman Lee Gunhee suffered a heart attack in 2014 and was hospitalized. Nobody but close family members have reported seeing him. People who claimed he was dead have either disappeared or been arrested.

When his death was reported in 2014, the entire country flipped and the story was deleted because the news site said that the whistleblower disappeared.

It’s been five years and nobody can tell us his condition with certainty. Nobody has seem him…

“The chairman of Samsung is almost certainly dead.” Do read the entire thread. And do consider following McKinley’s newsletter, The Whippet.

For more on the Samsung saga, see here (the source of the photo above); and for an explainer on chaebols, here.

* Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

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As we stew over Succession, we might wish a stony-faced Happy Birthday to “the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies” (quoth Roger Ebert); Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton was born on this date in 1895.

As a young vaudevillian, Keaton met silent star Fatty Arbuckle.  Keaton borrowed Arbuckle’s crew’s camera, took it back to his boarding house, disassembled and reassembled it, then returned to ask for a job.  He was hired as co-star and gag man on “The Butcher Boy”– and soon became Arbuckle’s “second director” and his entire gag department.  Keaton soon earned his own unit, and began churning out two-reelers.  Leo McCarthy (director of Charlie Chase, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, and others) recalled, “All of us tried to steal each other’s gagmen. But we had no luck with Keaton, because he thought up his best gags himself and we couldn’t steal him!”

From 1920 through 1929, Keaton made Our Hospitality, The Navigator, Sherlock Jr., Seven Chances, Steamboat Bill Jr., The Cameraman, and The General— gems all.  Indeed, Henson collaborator Orson Welles considered The General to be, “the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made.”

With the advent of sound, Keaton’s career took a sideways turn.  While he appeared in a number of feature films, guested on many television series, and even served as an advisor to Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy, he was never again the monster star that he had been on the silent screen… which adds to the power– and the poignancy– of his penultimate role: the lead in the only movie written by Samuel Beckett, the (nearly) silent Film.

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