Please Remember Mr. President -- We Are a Nation, Not a Corporation

Pamela Troy

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Wed Jan-26-11 01:08 PM
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Please Remember Mr. President -- We Are a Nation, Not a Corporation

From President Obama’s State of the Union Speech:

We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world. We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business…

I would submit that it’s more important to make America the best place on Earth to live.

Which is not always compatible with America being the best place on Earth to do business. In fact, judging from the behavior of many businesses, the “best places” to do business are countries that don’t bother with unions, minimum wage, worker safety regulations, environmental laws, or restrictions against child labor.

There are good things in this speech. Obama’s succinct call for religious tolerance, his observation that “American Muslims are a part of our American family,” was badly needed in our current climate. Yes, we need technological innovation, yes, we need to improve our educational system. (We can start by improving the working conditions for public school teachers and reducing our stultifying reliance on standardized tests.)

But its general tenor made me uneasy. As Rachel Maddow observed, it came across as a “prayer to the free market system.” The United States seems determined to follow the same path as the late, unlamented Soviet Union. We are staking everything, with starry-eyed religious fervor, on a single, narrowly defined economic system, even though it’s not working for large segments of the American people.

For the Soviets it was Communism. For us, it’s an unfettered capitalist system where human beings without money or the ability to make money are treated as meaningless. Note the increasing drumbeat from the right in which the poor and unemployed are reviled as lazy and immoral. Dehumanizing language describing those who don’t fit into the right-wing libertarian utopia has become increasingly common. They aren’t citizens, but “tax eaters,” and “unproductive consumers” (The more concise and punchy phrase, “useless eaters,” was taken about seven decades ago.)

We are not a business, the president is not the equivalent of a CEO, and citizens are not the equivalent of employees or customers. When Americans become too sick or elderly to work, they are not “laid off” or “retired” from being Americans. When Americans are too poor to pay taxes, they are not cut off from government services, as are consumers who cannot pay a business for its product. When Americans can no longer make enough money to satisfy the bottom line, their welfare is not suddenly beside the point, as the welfare of a fired or laid off employee is beside the point to a business. The plight of the poor remains the nation’s problem – and not merely because the poor are aesthetically unpleasing to the “customers” who have to edge around them on their way to buying something big and shiny.

Blogger Bob Cesca seems to believe that the speech was a calculated, “perfectly orchestrated” trap for the Republicans, a game of chicken in which the Republicans must “vote for the spending freeze they've been demanding, or vote against the spending freeze in order to preserve their earmarks and, thus, saving their asses from being voted out of office.” I hope that’s so, but even if it is, it makes me uneasy.

Given the madness that has seized the Republicans since Obama’s election, betting on their logic, their humanity or even their sense of self-preservation may be a losing proposition.

Crossposted from http://torchwood-us.com/">Thoughtcrimes