While Asian markets closed up considerably for the week, Europe and the ‘Western Hemisphere’ bled from the eye sockets today…although none of that bleeding is real or consequential.
Despite their best efforts it appears we have survived yet another week…but the fateful year of 2012 isn’t over yet…there’s 50 more weeks to go!
Then there’s the questionable wisdom of tempting fate on Friday the 13th
Although (fish that I can sometimes be) I rose to the bait and jumped into a curious fray:
But there’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not , in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery.
Why isn’t a national economy like a corporation? For one thing, there’s no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company. [which is still no excuse for its gross mismanagement!]
Most relevant for our current situation, however, is the point that even giant corporations sell the great bulk of what they produce to other people, not to their own employees — whereas even small countries sell most of what they produce to themselves, and big countries like America are overwhelmingly their own main customers.
Mr. Krugman is correct, the US is NOT a corporation so success in business (as relative as that can be) does not a successful president make.
We can take the (over) venerated (and recently departed) Mr. Jobs as an example.
In a move that many of his admirers call ‘genius’, he used a ‘contract manufacturer’ to actually produce Apple’s technological wonders…
By, er, ‘massive coincidence’ this very same contractor has been plagued with an abnormally high suicide rate.
Only ‘Jobs apologists’ deny a connection.
And, truly, it is ‘unfair’ to point at that single blemish and tar him as a ‘poor leader’, after all, he did make a handful of people fabulously wealthy! (And that alone has proven enough to win him a permanent spot among the ranks of ‘the saints of capitalism’!)
This points to a yawning, er, ‘character flaw’ in the American mythos, that ‘successful individualism’ is not only ‘enough’, but that it is enough for all!
The ‘failures’ of the countless millions (capitalist point of view) have resulted in the grinding poverty that is destroying our civilization today.
Do we really need men like Steve Jobs (or Mitt Romney, for that matter) running things when they both owe their ‘success’ (such as it is) to the disaster they have created?
Yes good citizen, that’s right, this mess is THEIR fault.
Although they would both be quick to point a finger at their ‘investors’ (who both would claim they did it all for!)
Nor is there any irony in the fact that both Mitt and Steve easily qualify as ‘one percenters’…but I don’t think either makes it into the more exclusive ‘one TENTH of one percent club’.
That’s where the ‘lions share’ of everything disappears into and it is from there that the tragic decisions are made that have destroyed the global economy.
Which presents the very frightening thought that this whack job is fucking with us just to prove he/she can!
Isn’t that how it goes good citizen, money talks and bullshit walks?
Then why is it so ‘inconceivable’ that the ‘money masters’ have a master that they all take orders from?
Even mobsters bow to a ‘pecking order’ (even if they dispute their own rank within the, er, ‘organization’.)
And how ironic is it that it is usually wealth that determines this pecking order rather than, er, ‘muscle’? (But that has more to do with cleverness being more ‘advantageous’ than strength…in most cases.)
Still, the question folds back upon itself, if not an ‘executive president’ then who(m)?
Well, we’re all partial to our own solutions and I’ll be the first to admit that I DID NOT make this one up…I merely ‘lifted’ it from the most long-lived society our species has ever known…the Native Americans.
we begin with the question: "What did it take to become the chief?"
Two prime requisites were strength AND wisdom. The tribe would not follow a weakling any more than it would (willingly) follow a moron.
But there was a second step…anyone up for the job had to ‘prove’ they were up to the task by accomplishing a variety of ‘tests’ designed to reveal their ‘character’.
Which is to point out there are a million ways to solve a problem but it is how you go about it that tells us ‘who you are’.
Um, it is the only ‘tele-play’ (pilot for a t.v. series) I’ve ever written and it finished in the top ten of the (only) writing competition I entered it in. (I haven’t bothered circulating it more widely due to the sensitive political nature of the material…which is to admit it would NEVER get a ‘green light’ under our decidedly corrupt socio-economic system. Contrary to popular belief, there is a considerable effort expended to maintain the fiction that what we have is ‘as good as it gets, which is really quite pathetic!)
Which is to say given the importance of this process to the nation, it is extremely likely that the event(s) would be televised…sort of ‘redefining’ reality TV.
It sort of goes without saying that if you fold like a cardboard box under a spotlight, it is, er, ‘unlikely’ you would make a satisfactory leader, considering every thing you do is public!
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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