by Peter A. Belmont / 2011-06-19
© 2011 Peter Belmont

RSS Recent Essays (All Topics)   •(12/23) How did we get to October 7th? •(11/23) Our Political Habits Are Ending The Human Race •(10/23) Sketch of Israel-Palestine History •(10/23) Whoever controls the discourse controls emotional reactions to reality •(08/23) Russia On Trial •(01/23) The Purpose of "Conservatism" •(10/22) The project of returning the earth to the cockroaches couldn't be in better hands! •(05/22) Abortion, The Constitution, And The Supreme Court •(03/22) The Problem of Climate Change Framing or Discourse or Understanding •(06/21) Israel-Palestine: If not apartheid, then what? Some believe—as Lincoln suggested—that the government of the USA is “of the people, by the people, and for the people” but, increasingly, government is seen as “for the big corporations” without much regard to the desires or needs of “the people”. The response to the banking crisis is often cited as a proof of this. You may sense that corporate-centric governance is “wrong”, but have you thought about why? One reason is that we have built a political system that, in being almost solely responsive to the expressed desires of big corporations, which have very short planning time-lines, is nearly completely impervious to the need or possibility of long-term national planning. Responding to Global Warming, (“GW”, also called human induced climate change) can only be done by governments and only by mechanisms that respond well to long-term problems. This, the USA lacks.

People are unlike corporations in many ways. What’s good for a particular corporation may not be at all good for the people who ultimately own the shares of that corporation. When government responds to lobbying (and campaign contributions, bribes, or what not) from corporations and passes legislation (or makes administrative regulations and decisions, or even judicial decisions) in favor of corporations, the government may in fact be acting directly against many interests of the public (world public, national public, local public) in general, and even against the interests of most shareholders of the same corporation.

Corporations are essentially one-dimensional. They exist to make a profit and to distribute that profit to their shareholders either through dividends (this is the old style measure of corporate value) or through growth of share price on stock exchanges. Their measure is money, and money alone. And their time-line is 1-year, 5-years, maybe 10-years (although the modern mechanisms for rewarding CEOs with enormous salaries and bonuses stress very short term stock-price improvement above all other values).

People, by contrast, are concerned with money, but also with availability and quality and cost of food, water, air, energy, medical assistance, housing, transportation, information, and—after these basics—many other things. they are also concerned with the health and happiness of their own children, perhaps also of the next one or several generations more generally.

People may be, and some are, concerned for the good of others, including future generations, even world-wide.

Thus corporations have very narrow concerns, both in subject-matter and as to time-lines, whereas people have whole ranges of concerns and, in many cases, much longer time-lines.

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