Who Will You Vote For?

 ”If you think I am off base, tell me why Obama ideas are not just old liberal solutions or why McCain isn’t McBush.  I am more than willing to listen.”

We are so conditioned by the public media to put everyone in a neat little box so we can dismiss them as another one of “those” people.  After my last blog about Exxon I received some emails accusing me of being some closet left-winger communist.  Sorry.  It’s just not true.  I am a true blue American looking for leaders who have truly new ideas to lead us to be more than what we have become.

America’s promise has always been that we can determine the quality of our own life. Where we start in life does not determine where we finish.

We strive to be a society that promotes the key conditions to help us optimize our quality of life no matter what our circumstances.  Doing that isn’t easy.  It requires constantly balancing four distinct priorities: freedom and responsibility, opportunity and equality.  If any one of these values are lost or even de-emphasized, our system is thrown out of balance.  People lose confidence and our national mood sours.  Today, lots of us are in a sour mood.

Maybe we’re nauseated because we’ve lost our balance.  When leaders govern from the center, they do it from a balance point that gives all of us the best chance for life, liberty and happiness.  That’s why, most of the time, leaders who advocate policies that respect all four values simultaneously make the most sense to the most of us.

But recently we have been out of whack.  Way out.  Politicians say the right things, but they don’t do them.  More and more, it’s the people on the fringe who determine the debate and push the agenda because they either deliver the cash or the votes.

These days, the loudest voices shout from the lower Right or the lower Left.  On the lower Right, the Right wing of the Republican Party, all we hear are the values of opportunity and freedom.  Our ideals are reduced to the single notion that everyone should press their self-interest and leverage their advantages to the max.  That’s America!

Their mantra insists only on low taxes and few regulations.  Their ideal nation would have no capital gains taxes, would have open borders and would keep us neck-deep in maids, nannies and day laborers.  Their prophetess is economic philosopher, Ayn Rand, who actually wrote a book entitled, The Virtue of Selfishness.  Their high priest is Milton Friedman, who claimed, “The social responsibility of business is to make a profit. (Collins, David.  (2004).  Tylenol Revisited: Friedman and the current CSR debate.  In David Collins (Ed.), Corporate integrity and accountability (p.20).  Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.) In their perfect world, economic and social Darwinism creates the best society.  The strong, the smart, and the clever win.  The lazy and stupid suffer through their own lack of effort.  That’s the natural laws of cosmically ordained economics working.  The market rules.  The market is perfect.  If you aren’t rich, well educated, healthy and well-connected, you are to blame.  Period.  If you want it to be different—get off your butt.

Lower Right thinking is how the wealthy justify their neglect of everyone else.

The lower Right also manipulates the millions of Americans with traditional religious values even as they privately ridicule them as intellectual hillbillies.  These corrupt politicians, many with sordid personal lives and vulgar private opinions, tout their “religiously correct” views to radicalize their followers and pick their pockets with no intention of changing anything.

On the lower Left, we hear the weak voices of recycled liberalism.  This whiny crowd focuses on protecting the weak instead of educating, empowering, and holding them responsible.  It promotes freedom as the excuse to choose continuing irresponsibility as a viable way of life.  Higher taxes, cumbersome regulations and more bureaucracy always seem to result from the ideas of the lower Left.

Lower Left thinking leads to everyone waiting in line, sharing equally in scarcity.

Today, the real American Dream has been hijacked.  Not by terrorists, but by superficial ideals, the small ideas of powerful people, and the incompetence of our institutions. In the past we’ve tried to promote the American Dream by raising taxes and writing checks.  But the “Great Society” wasn’t so great.  More recently we decided to unleash business and challenge people to be on their own.  As a result we’ve bankrupted the country, worn out our military, and strangled our middle class.  Meanwhile, the Democrats have had a majority in congress for two years, and yet all they do is complain and wag their fingers.  So the Democrats seem like sissies and the Republicans act like bullies.

The result is what we have.  It’s not working.  At least not for enough of us.  Our problems aren’t caused by either lack of public welfare or a lack of personal responsibility. We don’t seem to have leaders who have any truly new ideas.  The democrats want to make us cry and republicans want us to be afraid.  We need to stand for something more.

By now I am sure I have offended everyone, but that’s how I see things.

If you think I am off base, tell me why Obama ideas are not just old liberal solutions or why McCain isn’t McBush.  I am more than willing to listen.

21 comments.

Exxon - Exxoff

I guess I am a little ticked off tonight. Here I am watching the Olympics and I am bombarded with Exxon ads featuring high-minded employees touting Exxon’s $750,000 contribution to fight malaria with mosquito nets.

Then I go to my computer and I get a feed on a Corporate Social Responsibility website called Responsible China (!) praising Exxon humanitarian work. Okay. I know Exxon actually does contribute to humanitarian causes in all kinds of oil-rich off-the-beaten-path countries. It is good and at the same time it is pathetic. Honestly, Exxon spends millions more on advertising costs telling us how good they are rather than on being good! More importantly, Corporate Responsibility and clear-eyed ethics do not pursue a core business that is wildly destructive to the environment, is a primary engine of climate change, and exploits consumers in an economy-wrecking policy of manipulated oil markets all the while refusing to adequately compensate for or even clean up their infamous Alaska oil spill. Now they expect us to feel warm and fuzzy because they throw pennies to poor people. Exxon made $40.6 billion in profit in 2007. They are the world’s most profitable company.

If ExxonMobil really understood Corporate Social Responsibility, they would be the biggest investor in clean renewable energy. Instead their CEO disputes the scientific basis of climate change and publicly reminds us that they are an “oil company, not an energy company.” So their investments are going into lobbying for more oil leases to drill for American oil they can sell to the highest Asian bidder. And to find better ways to extract oil that, after all, nature created.

How does that sound to you? To me it sounds like a very weak justification to pursue toxic self-interest. It has a name. It’s called “negative innovation,” which are improvements in products that destroy the planet, exploit people and eat our future. Let’s see…is there a connection? Global warming, world wide inflation, growing extreme wealth of middle eastern tyrants and Russia and the oil industry. And I’m supposed to feel good about Exxon’s Corporate Responsibility? Isn’t it ironic that rising temperatures are actually causing a rise of mosquito-born tropical diseases even as Exxon buys mosquito nets? (It’s like tobacco companies selling breath inhalers.)

This is all a tragedy. A failure of ethical vision. What’s crazy is that there is big money to be made by creating clean renewable energy (Just ask T. Boone Pickens, PickensPlan.com). And for Exxon to only dabble in it while they increase shareholder dividends is strategically stupid. If Exxon wanted me to feel better about taking a day’s work worth of income from my daughter every time she fills her tank, it would come from knowing they are using her money to create a healthy, sustainable, non fossil-fuel energy future. But they don’t care. Not really.

So here’s what I tell business leaders. Any time we justify the suffering of others as necessary or inevitable, we become the cause of that suffering.

Our worldwide oil economy will likely cause immense suffering in forms of wars, poverty, pollution, climate caused natural disaster, and other unanticipated tragedies. For those who are presently prospering from oil not to take the lead in solving the catastrophic problems caused by it is…well you know what it is.

So, Exxon don’t try to make it something different through public relations. Indeed, it is what it is.

Day-pay in a tank.

12 comments.

Our McFuture

The China Olympics are thrilling to watch.  Our whole family gathers nightly around the sacred tube and cheer our brains out.  It’s a lot of fun.  Viewing China in all its new material glory is also interesting even as Russia invades independent democracies in an apparent attempt to bring back Soviet Union 2.0.  What makes this more remarkable to me is how quickly we as a nation have squandered our power and influence, so today we can do little more than contrast our declining real estate values, growing underemployment and exhausted military with the newly muscular Russia and the wildly successful Chinese.  What irritates me is not so much the rise of others as the ridiculously bad leadership we’ve had for decades that have pushed policies that have led us to a time where for the first time in our history, most Americans don’t believe their children will have as high quality of life as they do.  Yuk.

Our decline simply is due to many insanely bad choices, some of which are intentional.  Our trade policies with China allowed them to keep their currency low making their labor and their imports unrealistically cheaper than anyone can compete with.  We also allowed them to pirate, rip-off, and steal decades of technology and research we paid for to automate their factories for free.  Meanwhile we refused to seriously reeducate our manufacturing workforce in the engineering and technical skills they needed to operate 21st century factories.  We could have chosen a different path.  Germany has lost only 2% of its manufacturing jobs in the past 20 years.  They are the largest exporter of advanced technology products in the world.  And they have the world’s best paid manufacturing workforce.  It’s pretty simple.  Businesses can afford to pay employees well if those employees are producing high economic value.  This takes education and a culture committed to excellence.  A few American companies still have that.  When labor is educated and united with high technology it becomes extremely productive.  Nucor Steel comes to mind.

Perhaps our core problem is that our leaders value money more than people.  Ever since the 1960’s when inflation was blamed on high, unproductive labor costs the drive to find the cheapest labor in the world has been relentless.  In fact, real labor rates in the U.S. have not increased in the U.S. since 1979.  Yet nearly all inflation since 1980 has been due to financial manipulations flooding our economy with cheap credit that makes prices rise or our “benefit the big boys” energy policy.

My point is that China’s rocket-like growth and our continuing stagnation was not inevitable.  It was all a choice based on a worldview that there is money to be made from strip mining the core strength of our nation’s future by creating a consumer economy instead of a productive one.

So what now?  First, we have to quit looking at labor as the source of cost and view it as a source of value creation.  Second, we have to create a much more efficient educational infrastructure of life-long learning emphasizing the skills of science, technology, engineering and math.  This doesn’t require full college degrees; it requires hand-on applied skills of these four emerging sources of value creation.  Third, we must stop countries from stealing our secrets.  Fourth, we need leaders who have a vision of re-enthroning a productive economy based on invention, innovation and excellence rather than a future economy based on Wal-Mart and McDonald’s employees selling junk to each other.  None of this will happen on its own.  It’s all a choice.  It’s all a choice we should demand.

To visit American Dream Project’s homepage, click here.

10 comments.