Look, I know you've been busy. You've got a White House to win, and all those other down ticket races you're trying to shape your way. But seriously? It's time to tell you something. Your friends - and yes you do have them still - are worried about you.
Frankly, you've become an insufferable asshole and if you keep doing what you've been doing, it's not going to end well.
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
Okay, in America you've done some amazing stuff. We've got a standard of living - if you measure it by material goods - that's the envy of the world. We have stores full of all kinds of shiny gadgets, plenty of food, all kinds of entertainment, and so on. The old "bread and circuses" scam. Thanks, really. But you know what? It's not all about you.
Business, and I realize you may find this hard to grasp, you are NOT the beginning and end of all things in America. Believe it or not, there are people who are perfectly happy NOT centering their whole lives around the world of commerce. This doesn't mean they don't like or need money - but it doesn't drive everything they do. Because Business, and I mean this in a helpful way, you are obsessed with making money to the point of self-destruction.
Everything begins and ends with it for you. You're always looking for ways to control costs, increase profit margins, increase shareholder value, capture more of the market... Yeah, I get that if you don't make some kind of profit, that's it for you. Business exists to make money, pure and simple. But could I suggest that maybe you're getting a little megalomaniacal about it?
I think at some level you realize this. Whenever anyone points out how much inequality there is in this country - and it's now at levels never seen before - you start screaming about class warfare. You get upset when someone asks what you do that entitles you to such obscene amounts of money, especially when there are so many things all of us need (including you) that never seem to get funded the way they need to be. You seem to be getting more and more paranoid that people are out to get you. Hello? Could it be that at some level you realize there may be a price to pay for your actions?
See, it's not just that you're behaving badly - you're defensive about it. You boast the invisible hand of the free market can regulate the economy far better than any nanny state government. Well, the last 30 years have been all about unshackling you so you can demonstrate what the market can do. And you know what? You blew it big time. You inflated bubble after bubble, you crafted Ponzi schemes and called it financial innovation, and you just plain pigged out every chance you got. When it all came tumbling down, the rest of us had to bail you out. Repeatedly. And you know what?
You laughed in our faces. You sneered at us. You regretted nothing and apologized for nothing. You were annoyed that we even dared to suggest that maybe you needed to be reined in, grounded a little. You can't wait to do it all over again. You've learned absolutely nothing. And no, we're not good with that.
You have this problem with time. It's always about instant gratification with you. You can't think past the results for this quarter, let alone the next. Deep Time for you is thinking about what might happen next year. The rest of us would like to be able to think about careers, raising families, retirement, and what kind of world our kids will have after we're gone. And it's not just the future - as pointed out above, you have a problem with the past too. You keep making the same mistakes, doing things that have never worked out well in the past. You keep telling us this time it will be different. There's a difference between optimism and damn fool recklessness, and you keep crossing that line.
Then there's your constant bullying. Take jobs. We're getting sick and tired of seeing jobs held hostage by you. You call yourselves job creators and that has to be one of the biggest loads of bullshit ever foisted on us. No one goes into Business to create jobs - just profits. Employees are considered an expense, NOT an asset. You are always looking for ways to cut the payroll. You're always telling us we need to do more with less. What that really means is that you want us to do more FOR less - and you pocket the difference. Let any of your employees complain about that, even hint at thinking about organizing and you freak out.
You don't create jobs unless you have to - you are always looking for ways to destroy them. And if you can't do that, you'll yank 'em away and ship 'em to wherever you can skim off more profit. You LIKE a certain level of unemployment - because that gives you the upper hand in managing your workers. You LIKE cuts to wages and benefits - because that means more money for you. It also validates your self-worth, because having more money than God proves (in your limited world view) that you are a superior being entitled to everything you can get - and more. Paying your employees shit wages is your way of telling them they ARE shit - and you're not.
You like to talk about "growing the pie" by promising that all the government deregulation and employee givebacks will make the economy grow so much, there will be more for everybody. It's the Magic of the Market! Funny how that works. You're the one slicing up that pie, and for the last 30 plus years the pie HAS grown - but for 99% of us the slices have gotten smaller and you've taken the rest.
You complain the rich pay too much in taxes and the poor don't pay enough? There's an easy fix. 1) Start paying people more and raise the minimum wage. You complain the government is running up debts, but you expect consumers to keep buying your stuff on credit indefinitely? You want us to pay more in taxes, start paying us more in wages. Duh! 2) You want to pay less in taxes? Stop voting yourself huge salaries, stock options, etc. Again duh! Here's a thing you seem to have forgotten. A healthy, growing middle class with real mobility into it and on up makes for an economy that's a hell of a lot more resilient and productive. You want to make people less dependent on government? Give them more money in their paychecks. Triple duh!
You keep claiming competition is the magic elixir that makes everything better and cheaper - but you keep working on ways to eliminate it at every turn - mega mergers, too big to fail banks, conglomerates of unrelated companies mashed together for 'synergy', market rigging, patent wars where litigation replaces real innovation, trade subsidies, special tax loopholes... You claim to love competition, but you're addicted to cheating and rigging the game.
You talk about innovation. I don't think that word means what you think it means. Crafting computerized trading systems that buy and sell thousands of shares of stock in nanoseconds (may the best program win!) is not the same thing as inventing a better mousetrap. Making a pill purple, the better to market a brand, is not the same as investing in research that actually cures disease. Creating intricate debt-leveraging schemes to profit from repackaging toxic assets is not the same as making loans to people purely on the merits of the deal for a small but reasonable profit. Buying up companies, extracting all possible value from them and then selling off the remains is not the same as building a company through providing needed goods and services at affordable prices. (Calling it vulture capitalism is an insult to vultures - they don't go actively looking for victims to kill.)
Frankly, you've gotten so good at marketing yourself as the Be-All and End-All of everything that is bright and beautiful, the wellspring of democracy and and the source of freedom, that you've lost sight of the painful truth. Truth be known, you make Ebenezer Scrooge before the visits of the Ghosts of Christmas look like Mother Theresa when compared to you. It's all about you, 24/7 365 days a year - and screw everyone else. Not your problem.
The rest of us might be willing to let you live in your Galtian fantasy world if you didn't insist on wrecking the reality based world we actually have to live in. See, there's this thing called the public sector that ALL of us belong to, even as we belong the private sector too. There's a thing called the common good. There's an increasingly crowded planet with decreasing tolerance for abuse. And you, with your tremendous ego, don't like to admit that there might be something bigger than you, that your desires aren't the sole axis on which the universe spins.
See, every time you externalize profits by dumping toxic waste into the air and water, the rest of us get the costs while you get the profit. Every time you cut yourself a tax break by buying politicians, the rest of us have to take up the slack to keep bridges from falling down under your stretch limo. Even as you demand a highly skilled work force, you want to turn schools into profit centers and make the rest of us pay for it. You make nice profits off the wars you make the rest of us fight for your interests, but you won't pay for them. And so on.
See, as much as you demonize government as bad, you love having it suck up to you at our expense. (Corporate socialism is the term for it, I believe.) You love having military and police power guarding your stuff, enforcing the laws you pay for. You've turned our government into a subcontractor for your benefit, and outsourced the bills to us. There are things that need doing that only government can do well, things that can't be done purely for profit. Government is neither good nor bad of itself - it's a tool we can use well or badly, for the public good - or private gain.
I watch the attack ads flooding the television with a week to go before you hope to install one of your own in the White House and take both houses of Congress. It's all about who raised taxes, who will cut taxes, who wants to kill Social Security, who will protect it, who voted to give millions of Americans health care, who wants them to just die quietly, and who will really create jobs? All of it seems to be either aimed at you seeking your favor or aimed BY you at the rest of us. Both sides want to be your friend so bad.
You've succeeded in making politicians fear being labeled "business unfriendly" to the point where they'll do almost anything to suck up to you. There's nothing in the Constitution about "maximizing shareholder value" or "increasing the bottom line" although you act as though the whole purpose of government is to keep you happy. You've gotten a supreme court that considers corporations to be people, and money equivalent to speech. Your obsession with money has you targeting Social Security as the last big pension fund left to raid. Can you stop and take a good look at how your endless pursuit of the almighty dollar is finally about to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?
The east coast has been ravaged by nature. Can we finally start talking about who is making a profit by changing the weather and what we have to do about it? Can we talk about rebuilding for the future in a way that will make life better for everyone and do so responsibly, or should we expect full blown balls to the wall disaster capitalism? The differences are real; the track record is clear. You got Occupy Wall Street removed from your citadel of Capitalism - so do you think NYPD is going to be able to roust the next Hurricane Sandy to come along? People are starting to realize there are other ways to organize an economy. And believe or not, literally decades and thousands of man hours of research have documented that inequality is bad for you in so many ways. Yeah, you the Master of the Universe.
What it all comes down to Business is this: it's not all about you. There's a thing called blowback and you are headed for an extreme case. We're worried about you - and we're also worried about becoming collateral damage. Again.