Corporarion vs Government

The goal and purpose of a corporation is to make a profit and increase shareholder value. To do so they need employees.
The purpse of a goverenment is to protect and serve the best interests of its citizens.

A corporation has employees and a government has  citizens. While it is true most employees are citizens not every citizen work for a company. Therein lies an enormous differecen bewtween the two organizations. If a company fears it might lose profit it tends to shed employees. If a merger takes place within an industry the objective is to reduce duplicaiton in tasks which means shedding more employees. When the discharged employee has left and his separation time frame and beneifts are finished the coproariton has no longer any respnichulity nor interst in that particualr employee.

A gobernment can not get rid of

In both instances I could say, based on how well they are run, how organized they are and how completely they respond to me, as a customer, why not call them in the event of an emergency?

I could go on with dozens of examples of stores and companies we visit or buy from that are all so well run they are literal models of efficiency, quality and service. Apple is a great company. Maybe I should call them the next time my house is broken into. Or Google, for example is probably the single most data driven company on earth. They know more about me than even I do. So should I call them in the event I need someone to teach my children or stay with an ailing parent?

What I am getting at is seemingly obvious but there is a point here. Why do so may people believe, even people with an advanced education, that having a business person running the United States is such a good idea? It is something I always hear around election time. So and so is a better potential candidate because they started a business or they have been successful in a business or they have become immorally wealthy because they know how to buy and sell businesses.

In the minds of most Americans there has always been a confluence of business and government as though they are interchangeable, indistinguishable from one another.  If they are indistunguishable then a successful person in one is certain to use the same skills and be successful in the other.

I beg to differ and, as always,  I like to start at the beginning. What is the point, the purpose, of a corporation and what is the point,  the purpose, of a government?

According to the Preamble to the Constitution the purpose of the federal government is to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

According to the Milton Friedman doctrine, for a corporation there is one and only one social responsibility, to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase profits.
Said differently, they are seen essentially as a vehicle for maximizing the wealth of their shareholders, to maintain the good will with their stakeholders and most most of all, to maximize profits.

Now do those two purposes seem to align? No. To begin with a government has citizens and a corporations  has employees. In all cases citizens and employees are the same. Most corporate employees are citizens but not all citizens work for coporations.  If a corporation, in pursuit of its primary purpose, needs to reduce expenses they look to what is usually their largest expense, employees,  and to increase their profits they do so by reducing their number of employees. Governments, on the other hand,  have citizens and cannot get rid of them. All American, as long as they are alive, are citizens and cannot be removed by any means. In a corporation when a citizen applies for a job, he/she must demonstrate qualifications to become an employee. Credentials, schooling, background all count in decisions made for employment. In government there are no entrance exams to be a citizen save for the process immigrants need to go through to be granted citizenship. If you are born here you do no cognitive testing. You are not required to do or to know anything.
Not all citizens begin at the same starting line either. Most have diverse backgrounds some of which are fortunate, others, not so. Stagger the start of any race, give an advantage to one over the other and the outcome is almost set in stone. So too as a citizen. We did not all begin with equal opportunity and have a different road to travel to achieve a level of success.

Look at the org chart of a company. They have production, distribution, marketing, finances, governance and legal. They all adhere to  a single mission statement and follow the same guidelines to manifest the corporate mandate.   On the other hand a government has 15 different departments, agriculture, energy, interior, state, education, defense, treasury etc. Within each cabinet level department there are many sub departments all with the same goal as defined by the Director. Not all of them are the same because they have different mandates but their overall objective is the security and well being of the citizens of the country. In government research and development, science, education and security are all investments made by most of the departments to plan for the future. Most companies are focused on a 3 month calendar cycle that is required by Wall Street and investing in new products, research, on going education can be expensive and costly when measured against profit goals. They need to be risk adverse.

When a company goes off shore to lower costs they deprive many Americans of those jobs. When they lay off employees by the thousands they leave untold levels of despair in countless families. Yet corporations are referred to as job creators.

When those laid off or terminated and run the course of their severance package they are no longer a problem to the coprpartion. They don't even exist any longer. Corporations don't have to pay attention to the drug use, divorce rate, criminal acts, suicides, homelessness and general malaise that overwhelms the unemployed. But. The goverrnemnt does. The government has to be there at the lowest level of a persons welfare and dignity. The government has to provide resources and incentives to lift people up and get them back into a productive life. When an industry is decimated by new technology such as coal, manufacturing jobs or retail work the government must step in and offer eduction, guidance and hope to those displaced people. The corporations that were most affected by the technical revolution are downsizing as fast as they can. They do not take any responsibility for those who are inducted-ividually left behind. This is where a real government comes into play.  Can you imagine a corporate CEO with decades of experience running a profitable business based on eliminating all un necessary costs having the empathy or sensitivity or even the skills to step up and take care of the people left behind?

We currently have a president who ran a small company. I would imagine not one single Fortune 500 company would ever consider donald trump a candidate to run their business yet he was elected to run a vastly different, overwhelmingly larger and more complex organism than any business enterprise and one can see, based on his first three years in office, he clearly knows nothing about running a country. The various agencies have been hollowed out of career professionals. probably a good move for a CEO but for a country? We have political contriubtuots in most of the positions of authoruugty, with no relevant knowledge other than they contributed money to get someone elected. Is that in our best interest

CORONA VIRUS: March 1, 2020

I have been intrigued all these years about the debate on climate change. Not so much about the efficacy of it but the sheer certainty of those who don't believe in it nor have any background in any science that would support their belief. But that lack of expertise does not slow them down from their dogmatic certianty to their opinion.

We dropped out of the Paris Accord because of our lack of agreement on its mission. But were we right to drop out? How can anyone with no background be sure? They can't.

Next the world has become obsessed with nationalism as a positive and globalism as a negative.
Globalism came about because the corporate world realized their were suppliers and customers in other parts of the world that could have a measurable impact of their revenues and profits. So they bought into the concept, hook line and sinker. Find cheaper sources of supply, good for lowering manufacturing and employment expense and find a far larger source of additional revenue from new overseas customers. Both very good ideas from a corporate point of view.

But most recently we have decided as have many other advanced nations that we must think of us first and the others last. We are not our brother's keeper any longer. Why should we spend our money on the welfare of others, outside our borders. Nationalism has become the new trend. The outcome has to divide the country by ideology, by economics, by philosophy, by inequality, by religious belief, by age and demographic.  We are truly divided as a nation and there does not seem to anyone in office or on the horizon that can bring us together.

I think our basic human nature must take over. We have to devolve back to our original purpose of being alive. In a word. SURVIVE. That is the number one priority of every living organism.  We have lost all contact with the idea and replaced it with an untold number of personal interest, prejudices, opinions and priorities, none of which mean anything when compared with our own survival.

What will bring all of us together? What will make us all realize we are in this together and no one has a free pass? A major catastrophe. Well it looks like we are getting one, whether we want it or not or like it or not.

Corona virus is descending on us. Time will tell how it manifests itself but right now it is the first subject on the global news, in the entire world and it is the most significant thing anyone is thinking or talking about. We will find out if it is powerful enough to replace the preoccupation we have with our own view of the world with a more concerted, communal, worldview, should of our situation. We are in this together. We are no longer nationalists. We have to be all in on this or we will all lose.

Maybe it will influence all of us to realize the survival of our home, the planet earth, is more important to us individually and collectively and  is not defined, like a virus by arbitrary borders.

PORN IMAGES EXPLODING

Interesting facts from the NYT article. 9/28, 2019

Photos and videos posted on line of children being sexually abused or tortured have increased from around 3,000 in 1998 to 45 million in 2018.

Legislation was passed in 2008 to deal with the subject but was underfunded and was not given proper authorization. Its authority is under the justice department but has not been assigned a full-time administrator.  A budget of $60miillion was budgeted but half of it has never been allocated. Homeland security took $6 Billion from the funds for border issues.

Tech companies have not been helpful and reporting of violations are mired in understaffing, old technology and little cooperation.  Reports, if there are any, are late, delayed or non-existent. 

Less than 2% of the on-line infractions are even investigated.  

The technology used by the offenders is state of the art and the technologies used by the defenders, law enforcement, the government, is old and out dated. It is not even close to comparable. The offenders use the many sites to learn how to avoid detection, to find new sources to share and how to stay encrypted.

Facebook Messenger was responsible for 12 of the 18 million images in 2018. 

There are individual sites like Love Zone that deals in this material. They have 30K subscribers.

A site, Tumbler, is one of the biggest offenders, with 450 million subscribers, not all involved in pornographic imagery but a huge number of perpetrators are thought to be on this platform.

The dark web has instructions for how to make the videos, how to photograph and how to encrypt the images for self-protection and sharing the material by the perpetrators. 

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, established in 1984 was launched to locate missing children and has worked in this area of photos and videos. They prioritize their own activities by age of those offended but have little money and virtually no support to continue their efforts. There is an ugliness to this issue that causes people to not even want to deal with it.

Those who are offenders are thought to be people who did not mature past the age where they first found arousal. So, if a boy was first aroused by a ten-year-old girl he would continue throughout his life to be aroused by girls the same age. The ages most preyed on are from 6 years to 17 years. 1 – 4% of men and women participate. There is an expression “people don’t choose what arouses them, they discover it”

Root cause of child abuse is thought to develop in a prenatal stage. It is not genetic. But if abused in childhood the data no longer supports that they will be involved in hands on abuse as adults.  Rather, the abused are more inclined to drug and alcohol abuse, stress and criminality. 

But those who are physical abusers will participate in on line abuse at rates often as high as 60%-80% of the time. 

For the overwhelming number of on-line abusers (the 45 million) there is about a 5% chance they will advance to physical abuse. These abusers are referred to as “virtuous pedophiles” They look at material, share it but do not progress to hands on abuse. They have gone underground due to the heightened level of scrutiny and the opportunity to encrypt their activities. The medical profession has been interested in studying them because they appear to have control of their needs without going to the next step.

Pedophiles will participate in on-line abuse. On line abusers probably will not.

This is a problem that is not going away.