After the harrowing ordeal of the government shutdown, I began to reflect on what all this means, what everything is really about. Imagine if the company you work for was actually the country in which you lived. Think about that. You have no say in who your boss is or what direction the company is going. If you do not like it, then you can leave with no health care, no way to feed your family, no way to pay for their shelter... or you can go to another corporate country and follow their laws and find out you have no say there as well. In these corporate countries, you have no freedom of speech, no privacy, no rights at all really. They can even require you give them passwords to your social media, make you piss in a cup so they can see what you do when you are not at work, require you not to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol in your own home, check your credit history to see if you pay your bills, require you to take lie detector tests and background checks and on and on and on... More and more often, they can banish you for any or no reason whatsoever. There is almost zero accountability to the corporate country for any violation of any supposed rules they are supposed to obey. You are required to give them between 25% and 50% of your time (33-66% of your waking hours) and you are required to use what meager resources they provide to sustain yourself and your family on your own time. Your only value is how much money you can make for them and they want that value at the least possible cost. Welcome to corporate America!
It seems almost unchallenged by either party that the government needs to privatixe more and more and more. Government has all these rules they have to follow like prevailing wages, fair treatment of employees, accountability, etc... And worst of all, the money goes directly to the people and not through a CEO making 100 times what the people are making. How are corporations supposed to compete with that?
Corporations are ran like sociopathic dictatorships that have one and only one purpose... to make money. They do not care about anything that does not help them make more money. Your kids got cancer? Too bad, it caused our insurance rates to go up and therefor our profits to go down so your outta here. It doesn't matter that we had record profits last year, we could have had more. Jamie Diamon broke the law laundering money for drug dealers and terrorists and cheated municipalities out of billions of dollars? So what, he made us a killing! There is nothing that matters beyond making more and more money.
As an lean manufacturing engineer (six sigma/ Lean/CI, etc...), someone who has implemented and trained people over the last 20 years in numerous companies (before the term "lean manufacturing" actually became common place) I have watched how companies operate. I have told the same lie so many times to people (because I wanted it to be true) that we are only trying to reduce costs to be competitive and we are not planning on letting anyone go, we are just trying to free up resources to be used in other areas. Then I would go back into meetings were managers would scream that unless bodies hit the door, we haven't saved any money. These "Bodies" were my friends, co-workers, veterans who risked their lives fighting for the country they believed in, neighbors, parents of children my kids went to school with. They were let go, not becuase the company wasn't making money but so the company could make more money. And eventually, when times got tough and they thought I had squeezed as hours and as many dollars out of the people as I could, they saved a little more and let me go. I usually welcomed it.
This is the government the Koch brothers and the Waltons and the Republicans and the neoliberals all want. They not only want the country to be ran LIKE a corporation, they want it to be ran BY corporations. Outsorce, privatize, right size, collaborative partnerships with the government where the government provides the money and the company provides the management and on and on and on. Citizen's united was a major step forward in realizing the ultimate goal.
Maybe this shutdown was a test run, a dress rehearsal to find out were the bugs are, where do people shout the most about what can they get away with, who knows. If we take it at face value, it was incredibly stupid but I have learned over time that politicians don't mind being considered stupid. That is better than being considered a criminal so if they are doing things behind the scenes, they want to look stupid so as to conceal the criminal activity they don't want you to see. Ever notice how everyone called George W. Bush stupid but he always seemed to be stupid in just the right ways to get exactly what he and the neoconservatives wanted? DUh, I'm George Bush and I was soooo stupid and believed bad information and sent our country to war without probable cause. Oops. That's a hell of a lot better than saying that he knew the reports were wrong or fake and purposefully used them to manipulate an angered country that had just been really attacked for the first time in almost two hundred years into a 3 trillion dollar war against a country that did nothing to us. I'd pick stupid over war criminal everytime.
If a politician seems stupid, there is only two explanations: It is some combination of he is smart and putting on an act or he is very loyal to someone who is not stupid and he is just a very loyal puppet. It is the only two ways they can get elected.
Corporations love to play the "our hands are tied" meme over and over again. "I hate to have to do this but to stay competitive in the market, we have to lay a few of you off." I know it is bullshit, you know it is bullshit, they know it is bullshit. I am not saying that tough times do not cause layoffs, they do but the secret is, if they could have figured a way to do it, they would have laid you off in good times as well. The executive management of every company I have worked for in the last twenty years believe that they could train monkeys to do everything workers on the floor do and the workers are over paid and lazy. They are constantly looking for ways to reduce hours, reduce compensation and increase the productivity. As an industrial engineer, I always hated seeing some management level person walk onto the floor with a stop watch. They would inevitably walk out n the floor, time a couple cycles and then go back to their desk and extrapolate some rate based on an extremely small sampling. It would be like timing Usain Bolt run the 100 meters in 9.45 seconds and then expecting him to run the Boston Marathon in one hour and seven minutes. But it doesn't matter. They will create unacheivable standards and then whip you until you acheive them and as soon as you do meet them, it becomes the expectation. That is why productivity keeps rising in this country but it is only the wealthy that make more money. They do not value the person making the money for them, they value the guy with the whip making the monkeys work and quit being lazy which is their nature to be.
Corporate America. Such a fine shining city on the hill. A country where corporations have the freedom to do whatever the hell they want to do and the workers have the freedom to like it or starve.