KDLadage:
In it's own way your rebuttal is as flawed as Monte's original rant.
From the very start you commit a grave error that mortally flaws most of the rest of your points - you ignore the title. Monte did not call it, "The Anti Corporation Well Thought Out, Objective, Researched and Technically and Politically Correct Essay." He called it, "The Anti corporation Rant". A rant is not merely a statement of opinion, which one might expect to be based upon thought and facts. A rant is an expression of emotion. A wild and uncontrolled expression of emotion. Yet, you treat it as if it were intended to be published in a business newspaper, holding it to high standards of technical accuracy.
It is as if you were in biology class, did a dissection, and reported that the creature on your tray was a highly deformed cat when it was, in fact, a frog. In analysis of a thing (be it a frog or an essay) we must keep in mind what the thing actually is.
Now, for a few scattered other points...
Mr. Cook does not, in fact, assume the audience believes as he does. He says it "shouldn't surprise any of you too much". That doesn't imply agreement, merely an understanding of the origins of the rant - the man used to work at WotC, and has watched a whole bunch of his former coworkers (and presumably, many friends) get laid off. For the folks who read his website, the existance of this rant really should be no surprise.
As to the number 500 - hyperbole is a well-accepted tool in prose writing. While it would be inappropriate in a technical piece, it fits into a rant nicely. And, btw, I don't know where to look, but is it possible that the Hasbro bigwigs do in fact earn 500 times what many of their employees earn?
The fact that a company can produce many cars in a year does not prove that it is actually efficient. It merely proves that they are not so inefficient as to kill themselves. Just as a single human workman can be inefficient, but still good eough to earn a day's pay, or a human may survive for a long time with clogged arteries, a corporation can have inefficiencies and still manage. The fact is that corporate structure does have some inherent inefficiencies - like the communications problems Monte explains. Saying that they manage to succeed despite them does not mean that they do no harm, or that we should ignore them.
On the handling of creative properties, again, you completely miss the use of hyperbole that I expect every other reader caught. I severely doubt that readers actually believed that Monte felt that literally every employee of a corporation, down to the mail room and janitorial staff, wanted input on creative processes. We know darned well what he meant, because we take it in context.
And that brings me back to the start of my rebuttal to your rebuttal. Analysis of writing must be done in context. You should not apply nigh-journalistic standards to a clearly labelled rant.
