MBA Follies - About the ‘Common Good’: A Battle between the Citizen and Corporate Ownership-for-profit

This post was motivated by Noam Chomsky’s recent op-ed in ’Nation of Change’ webzine, ('What Is The Common Good?’),that focuses on a seemingly increasing and critical lessening of importance, and increasing fuzziness, of being a human citizen in America. This blogger maintains this is a crisis time because it appears the requirements of traditionally defined citizens (i.e., human) are competing somewhat unsuccessfully with corporate wishes, influence and priorities that are often in conflict with, are ignorant of, or just plain unconcerned and callous about the quality of life of normal citizens. The results are persistent erosion of our natural environments, depletion of natural resources even those that are replenishable but require husbanding and planned harvesting (our fisheries) and a general rush to perdition in the interests of corporate quarterly profit reports.

Professor Chomsky summarizes this problem of citizen vs state as not new but a continued debate from even the era of Aristotle 2400 years ago. Chomsky brings the debate into ‘current’ focus at the moment of the formation of America and summarizes the thoughts of Thomas Jefferson who was the principal writer of the Declaration of Independence and served as the third president of the United States:

Thomas Jefferson, the man who drafted the United States’ Declaration of Independence, captured the essential nature of the conflict, which has far from ended. Jefferson had serious concerns about the quality and fate of the democratic experiment. He distinguished between “aristocrats and democrats.”

The aristocrats are “those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.”

The democrats, in contrast, “identify with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depository of the public interest.”

Today the successors to Jefferson’s “aristocrats” might argue about who should play the guiding role: technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals, or bankers and corporate executives.

Pericles21 has for several years posed this same broad question, 'what has happened to the notion of the citizen?' Has America lost it’s sense, along with its senses, about what is the purpose of a nation and whom does a nation exist to serve - human citizens or corporate enterprise? Where along the path so far in this nation’s history have we detoured to value ‘signs’ of wealth (not health) such as material possessions, wealth in itself beyond even expanded wants, and acted-out greed, above social needs and individual happiness, physical health, education, child nurturing and spiritual well being?

From Pericles21’s commentary added at the end of Professor Chomsky’s article:

American culture appears to be facing the ‘depletion’ of room for its human citizens (note, now, the break-out of 'citizenry' into subcategories) to co-exist with their corporate co-citizens whose sole responsibility is the quarterly financial report; and whose regard for human citizenry is focused on their usefulness as a labor pool, a flexible (disposable) pool at that. In this respect, the labor pool is respected only as long as employed by the corporation who assumes nothing about the welfare of laborers outside the corporation’s physical and fiscal boundaries, the plant or office walls and the employee list.

Question, ‘is the human citizen to accept this status? Or, more accurately, ‘can’ the human citizen accept its new status - a status defined as co-equal to a sister population that does not eat, breathe, drink, care for its children, etc., and consequently does not need healthy, safe food and water, does not need to nurture a child, support an education system, nurture a spiritual life and carelessly and without conscience tosses aside surplus labor whenever they are not needed. Note: a great many, increasingly too many, American workers are not owed more than 24 hours notice of layoff. All of these human ‘requirements’ not met by corporations seem to be leading to a ‘Crisis of Choice’ for human citizens in America - accept second-class status according to a new democracy (for humans citizens) regardless of race, creed, etc. - or, what? As yet, no optional theories for coexistence are being formulated? While the corporate ‘American’ citizen is free to roam the globe seeking the lowest-cost labor, and is often freed (by special interest lobbying) from any tax loyalties to America, yet, the human citizen labor pool, unneeded and cast aside must (?) remain in place within America, ...unless we become the next global pool of low-paid migrant labor available (forced) to work in foreign industrial zones.

Question - what is the process whereby elected, human, Americans willingly fall into place and support the corporate citizenry in this madness? WHAT QUEER, ILLOGICAL, UN-COMMONSENSICAL LOGIC MOTIVATES SCOTUS TO INTERPRET THAT CORPORATIONS MERIT EQUAL CONSIDERATION OF ‘RIGHTS’ AND PRIVILEGES (E.G., CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTING) AS HUMAN CITIZENS???

These thoughts are repeated more and more often now even by concerned (and thinking) Conservatives. and, it appears the critical point has yet to be reached. What will be the nature of that critical point - a fundamental collapse of our natural environment or resources? A serious calling of ‘time out’ by the grass roots (human)? Or, will we stand and watch with wringing of hands as it all goes down the drain?