NOT ANYWAY TO RUN A COUNTRY!

 NOT ANYWAY TO RUN A COUNTRY!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 23, 2011

ANNOUNCEMENT

Snopes, the watchdog for truth telling in news releases, has given a bold blue “true” to the story that General Electric is planning to move its 115-year-old x-ray division from Waukesha, Wisconsin to Beijing, China.  GE plans to invest $2 billion in this enterprise and train more than 65 engineers and create six research centers in China.  GE made a $5.1 billion profit in 2010, but paid no taxes, and employs more people overseas than it does in the United States.

To add irony to this development, President Barak Obama’s “job creation czar” is none other than Jeff Immelt, CEO and Chairman of the Board of General Electric.

THE RATIONALE AND DANCE

This is not a huge GE operation.  The Wisconsin x-ray division employs 120 people.  The justification for the move is to respond to China’s accelerating healthcare market.  GE released the statement, “As the company grows more global, it’s increasingly important for us to become close to our customers.”  This is a 50-50 joint venture based in China.

In the present dearth of jobs climate, the inclination is to knock President Obama.  Truth be told he has little control over the situation.  Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, or any other candidate currently looking to be president in the 2012 presidential election is prisoner to the global climate.  It has taken one hundred years of commission and omission to get the United States into this mess with our leaders all stick figures to the times.

President Obama says, “American workers are the greatest workers in the world.”  Perry and Romney and other presidential candidates have said the same thing.  Words!

Republicans look back with nostalgia to President Ronald Reagan, who had the good fortune to be president during a massive Department of Defense (DoD) build up, and the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, just prior to globalization on the current scale.

My own penultimate career paralleled the Reagan years but before the Internet frenzy.  I mention Reagan because much as he has been celebrated by his legions of admirers he was in the right place at the right time.  The private sector ratcheted ups its greed in those subsequent years.  I know.  I was one of the benefactors. 

Giants of the private sector, and GE among them have operated as if they were independent states.  They have had legions of lobbyists in Washington, DC who manipulated Congress and the Oval Office as extensions of their own mission plans. 

When I was director of human resources planning and development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd. in the 1980's, I worked for Honeywell’s European president, Mike Bonsignore.  Mike went on to become CEO of Honeywell International, Inc., forming a sweetheart deal with Lawrence Bossidy, CEO of AlliedSignal Corp. in 1999, adopting the Honeywell company name. 

GE then came into play.  It planned a $42 billion acquisition of Honeywell International Inc. to dominate the European marketplace.  It was blocked by The European Union in 2001. 

The corporate speak of the EU was predictable.  "A more diversified, and thus more competitive GE could somehow disadvantage other market participants.”  Truth be told, GE had a reputation of playing quick and dirty with Europe after World War Two, and that economic affront had not been forgotten.

The shooting star of Mike Bonsignore into the firmament fell quickly to earth not unlike the waxwings of Daedalus in the Greek myth.  He retired and Honeywell has been limping along ever since.

WHERE IS ANDREW JACKSON WHEN YOU NEED HIM?

Those that read me know that I have a special place in my heart for President Andrew Jackson, not because he was a perfect man, but because he was an American president that had a center, spine and didn’t do the dance fantastic with the banks or industry, Congress or special interests, but looked out for the people’s business better than any president before or since. 

Jackson, according to historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is responsible for the imperial presidency, which was not meant to be about pomp and circumstance, but to keep special interests at bay in order to promote the common good.

His legacy has been eroded during the last hundred years with grandiose ideas from President Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, down through FDR and to the Oval Office’s present occupant, finding it better to promote their celebrity and legacy than stay connected with the people. 

More harm than good has been done with social and corporate welfarism over the last century.  So much is made of entrepreneurism, but so little is made of worker pride, which was once endemic to America and American workers.  It is now all but gone.  Greed is the game at both poles.    

Jackson had his “spoils system” of nepotism and cronies but they came out of the bowels of the country’s common people.  Thomas Jefferson thought Jackson was a buffoon because he wasn't a polished gentleman, but he was far from a buffoon.  Truth be told Jefferson didn’t have the spine of Jackson nor his impact on history. 

Jefferson falls into the hagiocracy of presidents.  This includes Wilson, Roosevelt’s, Kennedy and Reagan.  The halo never fit well on Jackson’s head.  The exception to this trend was Harry S. Truman, who had a little of the Jackson spark.

Jackson never cared what people thought but believed passionately in his role, responsibility and in the American people, which admittedly translated into neo-Europeans.   Indians still will not handle a twenty-dollar bill because his picture is on it. 

Say what you will, but he was a leader, not a poll reader, not a politician in the sense we have of politicians today, but a man who had his own mind, was his own authority, and was energized rather than disrupted by naysayers.  I smile to myself thinking of how he would have frustrated today's media.  It was rumored he never read a book.  I would imagine that could be extended to newspapers as well.  He was too busy doing.

But, alas, the Presidency, the power of Congress, and the voice of the people is only a whisper as the tens of thousands of lobbyists, and hundreds of talking heads gossip the day away in white noise. 

GE, Exxon, BP and scores of other international companies have their own international ambassadors, hundreds of lobbyists, and secret services with no other function than to look out for their own special interests.  Occasionally, these interests are congruent with the national interests of the United States.  Machiavelli is alive and well in the corporation.

We have gravitated to this day by erosion, apathy, dissembling, self-denial and fatigue.  Blame President Obama for the mess, or Congress, Wall Street, or the rise and dominance of corpocracy, but it changes nothing.  These are simply the current faces in our midst.  They didn't create the history.  They are only players currently on stage.  We have made this bed.  Now, we have to sleep in it. 

CORPORATE SIN 

We have no leaders because we are not interested in leadership.  We are interested in people that will support our special interests, the country be damned! 

We have no trust because we don’t trust ourselves.  In “Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leaderships and Dissonant Workers” (2000), eight long years before the real estate and financial meltdown, it was pointed out that the stock market became the arbiter of corporate destiny, and that this was myopic, short-termed, intolerable and destined to fail (p. 137). 

Workers, the book noted, had gravitated to “learned helplessness” and had become suspended in terminal adolescence.  It was shown how corporate ethics had corroded the bond of trust by a business ethic of entitlement (corporate welfarism).  You didn’t read this book?  Surprise!

Still, I can’t improve on Shakespeare.  He dealt with the same dilemma in his day.  He writes in King Lear: “That sir which serves and seeks for gain, and follows but for form, will pack when it begins to rain, and leave thee in the storm.”

The buck doesn’t stop anywhere because like the can, it is kicked constantly down the road.

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