Quel Surprise!

NPR, the bastion of common sense, started sounding like a 2^nd grader who’d just learned about slavery.  “With the announcement of the WorldCom scandal,” they asked breathlessly, “how could we ever trust America’s corporations to be honest again?!”

A more relevant and realistic question might be, “Why did we ever think they were honest to begin with”?  The history of American capitalism has very little to do with honestly and everything to do with stacking the deck.  The driving principle of business, in the old days, was to drive the other guy out of business and take his customers.  While that principle still holds true, it’s eclipsed by the need to make your company look good to the stock market.  In both cases, where money is concerned, the end justifies the means, at least in the short term.

As corporations fall by the wayside, it’s both frightening and screamingly funny to contemplate that capitalism could go the way of communism in our lifetime.  The US has bailed out banks from scandal, bailed out cites from mismanagement and given obscene amounts of money to prop up private businesses that, in the true capitalistic sense, deserved to die.  This has been done to “make capitalism work.”  Pointing out that capitalism, as it was taught to me as a kid, shouldn’t need to be made to work, generally leads its defenders down a slippery slope of rhetoric in which any sense of irony is lost.

The government destroys many forests each year writing legislation to keep corporations honest and/or healthy.  Antitrust laws, tax breaks, anti-discrimination, proper accounting practices – all of these are supposed to insure that our economic infrastructure is healthy, fair and American.  The problem is, though, that laws don’t work if they are not followed.

Legally, Enron should have happened.  Legally, WorldCom shouldn’t have happened.  Legally, Arthur Anderson shouldn’t have happened. But they did.  The government will now embark on a campaign to clean up corporations.  Even more forests will be destroyed in the process of closing gaps that should have been closed in the first place.  (A quick side note – Why do people print emails?  Isn’t the whole point to have less paper and therefore less clutter?)  And, of course, more gaps will be created to make up for the gaps that were closed.  In the process, campaign finance reform will be conveniently forgotten about, even though at the root, getting corporations out of government is really the only sensible solution.

During the recent mini-recession, Americans were told that it was our duty to prop up business.  Without business there would be no economy.  Without an economy we’d all be screwed.  The question that hasn’t been addressed is what happens when the corporations willingly kill themselves?  Does the government, as they do with farmers, starting paying corporations NOT to produce things?

As the corporations begin to fall, the ranks of the unemployed will rise.  And, given the currently thinking on unemployment, it’ll be their fault they’re not working.