The End of An Empire?

Do any of you recall the remarkable scene in the movie Network where an industrialist named Jensen, played by Ned Beatty, rails against the crazy network anchor, Howard Beale, played by the incomparable Peter Finch? http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechnetwork4.html

The two of them are alone in a corporate board room and Jensen schools Beale in the "real world," and anoints him as his evangelist. Near the end he becomes quiet and says"

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

I thought of this arrogant speech two days ago when the chairperson of General Motors humbly announced that the corporation was entering into bankruptcy protection in the U.S. and accepting that the governments of the United States and Canada would take a controlling interest in their North American operations. How the mighty have fallen.

We have been talking alot about "empire" in the Christian church of late, aware that political empires rise and fall, seem all-powerful for a time and then are exposed in their frailty. Jensen told Beale that corporations are now the true empires of the world, and of course we realize they too can crumble. Sadly, every empire must have subjects, and they often suffer when hubris leads to destruction.

What do you think of the decline of the empire called GM?