A young Stevie summons Prince Rebus by eating the forbidden fruit...
A missile in every silo trumps a chicken in every pot
"Make America Great Again." We hear the phrase ad nauseum, see it plastered on t-shirts and bumper stickers. But what seems to escape the dialogue and analysis is an important distinction: "America,", not "Americans." It was Americans who cried out for help in the election, so why haven't they been the real focus?
The recent White House budget proposal, if implemented, arguably does more damage to the lives of ordinary Americans than all terrorist acts of the last 45 years, and then some. People will die of starvation, freeze to death, stop life-saving medical treatment, and likely be pushed to suicide as they have lost everything. To what end? To fund weapons to kill more people? To pay for golfing at Mar-A-Lago? The Chief Rhetorician apparently has no interest in the people that make up the country unless they are serving a convenient purpose, in which case they are otherwise expendable. (Soylent Green anyone?)
This detachment from the reality that most of us experience should come as no surprise, really. The President has lived in the corporate world his entire life. He has never known hunger, worried about a place to live, or been laid off from a job. Never had to pay for insurance out of his pocket as a substantial chunk of income. He has never had to serve people, either as a waiter or as a civil servant. So it's unreasonable to expect him (and the other elite surrounding him) to have any concept of what survival and subsistence mean to the average American. That number on a ledger actually translates to a life saved or lost. What's a human life worth?
America used to be comprised of self-sustaining individuals, small merchants or farmers, workers, and companies. A company has an identity and a responsibility to its community, to its workers, to its reputation. It's something that reciprocates loyalty, that has a reputation to protect, that's why it often has the owner's name embedded in its identity. That company had a vested interest in being a good steward, providing a good job, and protecting its good name, in order to continue. It was a symbiotic relationship, the business only thrives if the people thrive, and vice-versa.
But a corporation is not a company, it lives in a different world. A corporation as a non-personal entity has a legal responsibility to provide the greatest return to its shareholders, even if done without morals, ethics, or legality, as long as the fines paid for such breaches end up with an increased bottom line. All without any of the personal liability or responsibility. (Sound familiar?) In that world, people are a means to an end, but only if needed. The end is profits. Profits are clean, people are messy. Hence the preponderance of investment corps and an increasing trajectory towards full automation. If those profits can be delivered, on the extreme, without people, all the better.
What is lost in this equation, and apparently to the White House, is that people are still integral, if not central. Someone has to buy the product. Some person has to engage the service, and the transaction of funds to consummate that exchange involves a flow from wages earned, not from a trust fund, capital gain, or interest income for the most part. And they have to be alive. If their grandparents are alive and providing joy, surviving on Meals on Wheels if need be, they spend and contribute more.
Those are the gears and engines that make up America, the people, and you can't make America great without allowing Americans to be great, any more than an engine will run without oiling the parts. Maybe the government, for the people and of the people, should be run as a non-profit, with aim of making its people great, or at least better off than when they came into the world.
But that is precisely why Trump is OK with killing Americans through denial of healthcare and heating in the winter. Not because he’s a sociopath who doesn’t have empathy; not because he’s pandering to his external brains and puppetmasters who told him it’s part of the devil’s bargains he made to get there; it’s because it’s more profitable. And when you’ve always been part of a corporation, that, in the end, is all that really matters.
“Mr. President, let's make AMERICANS great, shall we? Run America like a company, not a corporation. Maybe even as a 501(c)(3). You'll still get the write-off as a charitable contribution to society, and maybe even to history.” --The transcript you’ll never hear from any secret tapes of the current Oval Office
