The older I get the more disenchanted I feel about the American political system. Especially since in recent years the political donation rules get more and more lax, allowing more and more corporate and other lobbyist money to go into candidates war chests. As long as a particular interest or corporate entity donates enough money and hedges its bets with enough viable candidates, they can secure at least partially, action that helps or at least protects whatever interest ($ source of some kind)they have no matter who gets voted into office.
I am already off track while hardly starting to write about my subject, mainly because in my mind there is just so much of a mess with things wrong with America that it's hard to know where to begin. Anyways, I think the notion of the President's office being a sort of CEO of America started in the three party election that included long infomercials from Ross Perot and all his charts (that may itself have started a new presentation revolution with Micro$oft's help). His notion of the presidency was that America was a big business and should be operated to be profitable. I'm seeing this notion reappear in the '08 election in some of the talk from candidates Romney and to a lesser extent Guliani ('these other guys haven't ever run anything'). In general, it is kind of a Republican idea associated with fiscal responsibility and an idea that concludes that the more government agencies you can cut, and in general, the more government spending you can cut or reduce, the better you are managing America as our country's spending is inherently wasteful and the bureaucracy begets more bureaucracy and therefore government waste.
My first question which I'll make not attempt to answer in regards to this notion is profitable for whom? I'm certainly not getting some return from the profitable operation of the American corporate unit.
My first reaction and argument against this notion of the president as CEO is that America is not a business. America and its people are not a means to the end of annually increasing profits. America is about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Last time I checked the fortunes of the government's bottom line didn't coincide with my life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness.
That said, government should be run responsibly as any household should (but usually doesn't) by staying within their means, consuming only as much as they can reasonably afford to pay in a reasonable amount of time (not a $100 credit card payment into infinity). Right now the government as a household is the stereotypical family where the couple both works, they make 120-180k a year together, but have borrowed against all the equity in their house, have $25,000 or more in unsecured debt and are just barely making the minimum payments, drive a leased car, and have ridiculous cell phone bills/plans. The commercial showing the guy with the 'American Dream'--a McMansion type house with a picket fence, a few dogs, and a luxury car who states at the end that he affords all of what he has because he is up to his eyeballs in debt. That is America right now, but add to that some kind of uncovered health care crisis right now because of the war. Why is our government so greedy to rack up all this debt at the expense of the lifestyles of future American generations?
The answer is because America is already being run like a corporation. Corporations only focus on profit. Capitalism focuses primarily on profit, and that pursuing profit solves everything in a marketplace. The problem is that sometimes profits mean injury or death to some citizens. For instance if the medicine that cures a certain disease is so expensive to make that there is no profit in making it because too few people have that disease, people will die essentially to save money. The government shouldn't be about more money at the expense of human health and life, should it?
America does have controls on capitalism and for the example above, the government does have a program in which it subsidizes the costs to drug companies to produce very costly to make drugs that would otherwise not be made to get them in the marketplace. However, this line of thinking of the President as CEO and running America as a big corporation leads its proponents to want to shave away or eliminate government programs that protect citizens as unnecessary because 'the market will figure it out'. Capitalism as the holy grail of economic systems is very misguided to me and will lead to humanities self-destruction, all because we're greedy.
America currently has one of the highest standards of living and has been up there for some time. The dark side of this is that we have one of the highest rich to poor ratios of developed nations. This is the bad side of capitalism at work...corruption. We are the new Rome. Our wealth is very unevenly distributed and it's getting worse. Why should our government run in such a way that seems to result in growing wealth inequality? Who would want to perpetuate this kind of deal? Why would the rules be tailored to continue to enrich a very small percentage of individuals that control a very large percentage of the nation's wealth while most other people are scraping by? It is because of the true unspoken values of America. This is the America that pays entertainers large sums of money while paying the teachers of our children hardly enough to get by. This doesn't seem to jive with how America represents itself as the country where anyone can attain the American dream and be and/or do whatever one wishes if you educate yourself and work hard. How talented and smart you are or how important you are to society has little correlation to how much your paycheck is. America right now is more like a big sweepstakes, many will enter, few will win. You might think you will eventually win because you are a good person and work really hard, but that isn't the way America really works. You think that because you've been programed that that's the way things work through t.v. and political rhetoric and school. You've also been inundated with commercials programming you to aspire to a certain lifestyle, certain goods and luxuries, certain personal services. This is where America has gone all wrong. We've gone from admiring hard, honest work to admiring things and wealth, no matter how much of your future income you've whored off to acquire it or how much suffering was used to subsidize your being able to acquire it. Those are the people that have fallen into the trap with confusing wealth with displays of wealth.
We have all these things we purchase with our paychecks that are abnormally inexpensive due to the virtual enslavement of third world laborers. By buying these products and paying so little to these people who have no rights, no workplace safety, and no freedom in the case of China we virtually become their slavemasters. We have such a high standard of living because another government is willing to let their people remain at such a low standard of living to make their products cheap. In turn, we stupid capitalists cannot flock to these seemingly great deals fast enough, shooting ourselves in the foot by letting the means of production run over there to this seemingly great deal--22 cent an hour labor. But there's no free lunch and eventually the Chinese will be ready to let their currency rise, call back their loans, and raise the standard of living of their people on our backs, demand more for their goods that we are now reliant upon since we no longer make anything here, and all hell will break loose in the United States economically. The Chinese might have beat us at our own game. Our game being the greed that exemplifies the capitalist economic system. Eventually there will be some equilibrium and industries that are gone here will come back when things become economically feasible because Chinese stuff is now so expensive, but it will suck for a few years while that adjustment is made. Adjustment mostly meaning the average family not being able to afford much of anything at all because of massive inflation and the value of the dollar gets beat into the ground. The Chinese will then virtually own the average American for a little while. This is why unchecked capitalism and running the country like a corporation is bad, it does not look out for the long term interests of itself or the people. Without people, what's the purpose of wealth. That isn't in a corporation's equation.
However, the government is spending its money on something to offset this possibility. Despite the whole big government is bad idea and cutting government spending is good, the government still spends a lot of money on weapons that hang around, get old and get replaced with new weapons. Somehow spending insane amounts of money on weapons and guns presumably to protect America and Americans can be seen as a good idea. I don't know how the 'big government is bad' people see no conflict in being proponents of high military spending reconcile that. If you think government and government spending is bad, it shouldn't matter what form that bueracracy or spending takes be it a missile or some bureaucrat that is in charge of making sure the missile was made correctly.
It really does seem that we have taken a trip back in time when Reagan seemed to go to welcome instability in little countries just to sell more weapons to them (most ironically, Iraq). Who's selling weapons again to Iraq? Who makes money making and selling weapons? Why do we sell weapons at all to other nations if the purpose of spending money to make weapons is to keep American citizens safe? I don't know but I'm glad I'm not that much responsible in profiting off war and human suffering. I profit enough off death and the suffering of others just by being an American and living the average American lifestyle.
America's people are citizens with rights and duties spelled out in the Constitution. The government was created to help people in their pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The government is supposed to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic. Why is it then that the government has cut every program that was set up to ensure citizen/consumer safety through product testing yet arming other countries that may turn against us like Iraq? Why does my country go to war with my tax dollars with a country that couldn't have hit us even if they had nuclear weapons to fire off at us (they could barely hit Israel with their best conventional missiles and in the second war turned out they didn't have nukes)? I don't want that kind of government. I want a government that is my advocate and not my antagonist. For and By the people, remember? Why is it that the CPSC is viewed and often portrayed as an example of unnecessary big government or the other rhetorical, badly connoted word, bureaucracy? Maybe we didn't need it so much when more things were made by Americans, but with globalization there are no guarantees anymore and nobodies checking what we're getting anymore. I feel pretty beat down and discouraged about government. The American government is now no more than a tool to externalize as much cost as possible to American citizens through eliminating regulations to create more profit for corporate interests.
If there is another questionable election result and the '08 President Elect keeps ignoring reality and tells us to just be good little consumers I think I will seriously look into leaving the United States for good. Any good president (one who's not bought) would address:
- Wealth inequality in this country. It's already ridiculous and getting worse.
- Public financing reform of federal and state elections need to be instituted so our government representatives aren't corrupt cheats unduly influenced by corporate interests.
- Fixing "Globalization". Rules on corporations going abroad only having to abide by the rules of that country instead of the USA demanding that if they are incorporated in the U.S. they must abide by some human rights floors as far as working conditions and a minimum wage of at least $X no matter what country they're operating in so that U.S. corporations are no longer de facto slaveowners. Yes, this is what globalization really amounts to. This one is really important to me because why should we not care about people everywhere else who work, yet do not have a decent standard of living or are going hungry while we sit in America wasting resources. I think it's morally evil to leech off other human beings labor without regard for their health and human rights. We have so much collectively as Americans, we could subsidize a minimum living standard for the entire world in cooperation with other nations if we cared about each other. Maybe in the future we'll care a little more for people far away. Helping them helps us spiritually and helps humanity. How many potential geniuses or innovators that happened to be born into poverty in the third world did the world let starve to death? Who knows what return humanity could have been gotten by a little rice in someone's belly?
- Fixing the tax code so that people and businesses are taxed relative to their ability to pay and that invested income is taxed at a higher rate than that of labor. Make it fair. Make it simple. Make it unavoidable. Stop giving tax incentives out to companies that don't need it.
- Re-adding government safeguards for consumers (which need to be reasonable funding) rather than telling us to be good little consumers. Capitalism with too few rules leads to the problems we see with the safety of the products we consume. Garbage rules, garbage out.
- Serious action and consideration on possible solutions to pollution and its effects on the environment and alternative energy. I don't expect that there necessarily be an answer, but I expect the government spend a reasonable amount of money to research solutions to the problems. There should also be funded research on the effects of all the new chemicals that humans have been exposed to and the cumulative effects of this exposure on the health of young human beings, women, adults, and the elderly.
- Stop war. Stop aggression. Stop exploitation. Start true Cooperation.
- Update 2-19-08 Dang I have to add another one. Start spending money on infrastructure. We're off fighting people with billions of dollars and we don't want to spend money on roads and stuff. It's like the fall of Rome for crying out loud. This would put people to work and benefit people. Unfortunately it won't get done unless it's a highway that leads to a new Wal-Mart or something.
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