“It is great to have a business man as president”. “Maybe now things will get done in a corporate way.” etc. etc.
Do you really want the United States of America to be a Corporate entity – like USA Corp.? Or the General Motors of America? Or even Google – scratch that – Alphabet, inc.?
What does it mean to have a business person as president? Wasn’t that the real issue in this last campaign? Hillary Clinton – who has been in public life her entire life as opposed to Donald Trump who has been in business his entire life?
So what’s the difference?
I should say in the beginning that I am biased. Having worked for major corporations, I would not want these United States to be run like a corporation by a businessman or woman. What is the difference? All of our talk about changing the United States governmental structure into a fascist dictatorship is roughly equivalent to saying change the United States into a government which makes shoes led by a business person within the structure of Corporate America.
Corporations are not democratic institutions. They are dictatorships. The person at the top dictates just about everything. When a new person takes over at the top even the personality and character of the people under him or her changes. The corporate hiring and promotion begins to be of people like the corporate leader.
Corporations don’t take decisions from the bottom up and only on matters that don’t count would a vote be taken in anything. And when corporations do vote at their annual meetings where voting occurs – the results are fixed. Not by someone who goes about ‘manipulating’ the results for a certain outcome, but because shares in most corporations are held by a few large people or corporations with the results known before the papers about voting even go out. The few times someone has tried to change that they were pushed out unceremoniously and life went on at though they had never existed.
Democracies are far less efficient, but far more humane and concerned about making sure those who are among the ‘have nots’ are taken care of – not totally, but some basics are fought over to make sure the ‘have nots’ have a chance. The defense of those who are a part of the democracy is important and monies spent to make sure we are all ‘safe’.
In the United States, we are currently fighting over universal health care. Other countries already have such, but we have some kind of horror that we might be giving away health care to those who don’t deserve it. That is a very corporate mentality – since in most corporations – those that have get and those that don’t have stay at the bottom until they are fired for others who don’t have and who can be paid to do the same job for less money.
Corporations define the elements that go into reporting a ‘profit’. Very seldom does the profit of corporations actually equal out to what is used to add, subtract, divide to get to the bottom line. For example – corporations use much in this world for which they don’t pay. The democracy or other governmental entity in which they live pays for a lot that corporations use which does not get subtracted from their gross to get to their bottom line profit.
They contribute to pollution, but don’t pay to clean up their mess. They contribute to climate change, but don’t pay to reverse the negatives they create. No one disputes that and no one – well very few people – would fight to get that changed. Occasionally corporate profits are disputed and something is added which was not there before and that then makes up the corporate bottom line. What happened to cause that change? Normally government stepped in to demand the corporation make amends; change its policies; be more responsive; and that government entity will demand the corporate product or service be surveyed and kept ‘honest’.
In democracies, the people who make up that democracy determine what is done, how, when, by who and much concern and money is put into defense, social services, education, and more. There is a responsibility which each person in a democracy has in its continuance, growth and upkeep. There is a limit to the responsibility each person has in a corporate setting and your level of responsibility depends upon your job description, salary, etc.
Where a corporation can cause a problem which affects everybody – it is the governmental entity which generally has to address, change and make better whatever happened. The corporation can and some do, walk away from that kind of responsibility and the world will not stop spinning. The governmental entity cannot – especially the democratic governmental entity. It must step up to the plate and make a change.
In corporations, the CEO, CFO, Executive Committee are generally the people who set policy, and run the corporation. The underlings carry out the dictates of the upperlings. That is not true in a democracy.
I think you get my drift.
It is time for us to clearly outline and understand the difference between a corporation structure and what life is like under such an entity and a democracy knowing what life is like under that entity also.
The United States is a democracy/republic and those of us who are citizens of that democracy are also responsible for its good or ill. Voting is a heavy responsibility – we pay taxes to provide the services we have determined should go to others – we pay taxes to provide for the defense of all of us from negative outside forces – we pay taxes for…………..oh god, do we pay taxes!
In a corporation we do not have that responsibility and we do not pay taxes. We earn an income for doing what our job description says we were hired to do and we can be fired by the corporation, sometimes for no reason. We do not have the level of responsibility in a corporation that we have in a democracy.
A war between the corporate structure and the democratic/republic structure has been predicted for quite a long time – and it has now, with Clinton/Trump, arrived on our door step demanding attention.
The Trump/Clinton presidential campaigns reflected that difference more than most in the past few years. Their mind sets – what they are about are all very different and instead of outlining that difference and calling it what it is, we see evil and good – me included – because clearly a corporate structure for these United States would defeat everything we have worked for over a few hundred years. Our constitution is not a corporate document, but one that brought a democratic/republic into being. We have a Supreme Court and all the other trappings to try to keep us on that democratic path. What is going on in this country today is a strong move to drop the democracy and take on the corporate structure.
Most of the people pushing for such have no idea what they are asking. They are simply repeating what they’ve heard and someplace inside they seem to think this would be great – we all have those moments of running home to Mama to be taken care of, but adulthood is much more fulfilling, productive and humane. They talk about how more efficient that corporate structure would be, etc. etc. when efficiency is not the issue in a government. That would be a disaster and would result in our aligning ourselves with Russia and all the other dictatorships of the world where the individual counts for nothing and survives out of the largesse of the oligarchs and dictator – giving up everything in return including equality, freedom, justice, etc..
Maybe if we bring up in our minds these two opposing structures, which were developed for very different reasons we might be able to come to some accommodation. The United States of America was not founded to make shoes, after all. It was founded to bring about things like equality, justice etc. etc. etc. for all of us.
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