( – promoted by lowkell)
Today’s Washington Post lead editorial was about a smart phone app that will allow consumers to determine how corporations producing products they’re thinking about buying make political donations.
The Washington Post suggests that this will “increase partisanship” in America and that somehow the sky will be falling.
In what alternate universe, exactly, does the WaPo editorial board live?
This small time business investor and consumer member of the REAL “we the people” thinks this is a wonderful idea.
The business of business ought to be BUSINESS, not politics. Our investment dollars ought to be plowed into developing new products and services and improving current products and services. Corporations are failing to deal with the services issue because they see labor as an expense, not an asset. Some of that money ought to go to hiring, training and retaining good employees with living wages and benefits; and paying our fair share or the tax load for the public services our corporations consume. The “bottom line” appears to be healthy, but it is done by refusing to pay the costs of the business, not by producing and selling a better product.
There is a huge difference between those two strategies, and the long-term results of the choice many have made has been to poison America, which is choking from the toxic waste, falling off collapsing bridges, and dying from lack of real investment, seeing the former middle class evaporate by sliding into poverty, all imposed by corporations that are more interested in the bottom line – achieved on the cheap by any means possible – than by earning a dollar by working for it.
About the only investments we see for most big businesses are the buying and selling of politicians, for the purpose of buying and selling policy, for the purposes of enrichment of management. Even the stockholders aren’t profiting.
All the money is made, in the absence of real innovation, by cheating investors, consumers, employees, and government. It goes to line the pockets of management, and rigging the system so they can profit not, by and large, by selling a better product or service, but by avoiding the legitimate costs associated with doing business.
I see this app as the beginning of a three-part trifecta under which it just might be possible for taxpaying Americans and the small investors to seize control of the country back from the business.
The “good”: In the short run, the knowledge from this app will raise a stink–in the form of lost revenues–which even the most rabid corporate boards will be unable to dismiss. Think about how Home Depot and others cozied up to the gun nuts, until the shoppers stayed away, in droves.
The “better”: Medium term, it will suck some of the dark money, which is not only tarnishes our politics but diminishes our republic, right out of politics. We’ve been un able to accomplish this with laws. What walls we did have, the Republican bought and paid for Supreme Court has undone.
The “best”: And finally, it will but a nail into the coffin–though not likely the last one–into the ludicrous and dangerous notion that “businesses are people”‘ and that businesses have a right to impose there religious beliefs on the rest of us.
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