Badtux the Snarky Penguin

In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.

Religious fundamentalists are motivated by the sneaking suspicion that someone, somewhere, is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.

Friday, June 08, 2007

"Corporate America" is like "Bush Competence"

So a nice little headline on an editorial in the Murky News says, "Corporate America needs to answer the education bell."

Morons. Stupid fucking morons. There is no "Corporate America" anymore. Thanks to globalization, corporations today are multinational entities that owe no allegiance to any nation. To talk of "Corporate America" is to talk of a by-gone era when there was such a thing as an American corporation. Today's corporations owe allegiance only to one entity: The Almighty Dollar. And they're perfectly willing to clear-cut entire nations, stripping them of all their assets then moving on, in pursuit of their object of worship, the long green. Including stripping entire nations of the assets needed to run a decent educational system. After all, once they finish reducing one nation to a hoard of illiterates incapable of contributing to the world economy as anything other than consumers, there's always other nations out there whose educational system has not yet been plundered where they can cherry-pick that nation's smart educated people to run their international conglomerates.

In today's American economy, there are two kinds of businesses -- small individually-owned businesses that barely manage to eke out a living for their owners, and giant multinational corporations that make obscene profits by monopolizing major areas of the world economy via organized oligopolies and structural barriers to entry. The effects upon local charities that formerly depended upon corporate donations has been devastating. There are not, for example, local banks anymore. They're all owned by some big corporation based in New Jersey or South Carolina or someplace like that. So a charity goes in and asks a bank manager, "could you donate money for a new roof for our town's elementary school?", and the bank manager can only shake his head and say "I can put in a request to corporate in Charlotte, but I don't have authority to do that myself." And anonymous bank managers in some far away city... what do they care about your local town's elementary school? They don't. It just isn't relevant to them.

Any notion that "corporate America" will have anything to do with educational reform is just proof that some people are congenitally stupid. You might as well ask Santa Claus to reform education. Santa Claus is no less fictional.

-- Badtux the Multinational Penguin

Labels: economy, education

Posted by: BadTux / 6/08/2007 12:47:00 PM

Comments:

I agree with everything you said, except for one point. It's not necessarily the "almighty Dollar". It's becoming more the "almighty Euro". Or, maybe the "almighty Yaun". :-(

Dave
# posted by Anonymous : 8/6/07 1:14 PM

What anonymous said. In a few years, the dollar won't be the world's reserve currency any more, since it will be worthless. Yet another thing we can thank BushCo for, since their primary strategy for dealing with the national debt is to appoint a Fed chairman who will simply print money hand over first to pay it off.

But your larger point it spot on. And really, what difference will it make whether or not one national currency is worth more than another, when the extranational corporate monsters we've created can bankrupt entire nations and then simply move on?
# posted by Gerald Fnord : 8/6/07 3:35 PM

Whoops, that first paragraph should've read "print money hand over FIST."

It's Friday afternoon. A beer needs me.
# posted by Gerald Fnord : 8/6/07 3:37 PM

The name of the global currency for the next 20-30 years is spelled O I L. Right now, O I L happens to be traded using dollars. Which is why the Yuan is worthless at the moment, and the Euro is more a curiousity than something that most multinationals are interested in pursuing. If O I L happens to be traded in some other form of money in the future, that's what the corporations will want.

Consider that Iraq was going to start trading oil in Euros, and Iran is talking of doing the same. Consider Vice President Halliburton's animosity toward both those countries. Connect the dots. Q.E.D.

- Badtux the Oily Penguin
# posted by BadTux : 8/6/07 4:22 PM

Damn fine rant, and spot-on about the O I L bit, too.

While I'm here - terribly presumptuous of me I know, but I was tinkering around in my sidebar and added you to my blogroll of compatriots, cohorts and partners in thought-crime. Better late than never - gives you an authority point anyway, traffic? probably not somuch.:)
# posted by --Blue Girl : 8/6/07 6:28 PM

http://www.globalpolicy.org/nations/sovereign/dollar/2003/0624euro.htm
# posted by nunya : 10/6/07 1:15 AM

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"Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce." -- Molly Ivins, 1944-2007

"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."

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