Tuesday, October 11, 2011

See, here’s a big part of the problem

Jeffrey Immelt, the former head of General Electric, is America's "Jobs Czar." What's the problem with that? Well, first off, corporate executives don't necessarily know anything about creating jobs for regular American citizens. Their whole expertise, from Mitt Romney (Republican presidential candidate) to Rick Scott (Governor of Florida) to Meg Whitman (Spent $160 million to become Governor of California and lost), consists of doing what benefits them and them alone. Perhaps a few cronies can share in the spoils, but their whole ideology revolves around "What's good for General Motors (Or whatever corporation they run) is good for the USA!"

Because the ideology of business holds that whatever is good for them personally is also good for America as a whole, they simply can't see where what's good for them personally ends and when the good the country should take a higher priority. There never was any indication that corporate executives make good politicians. There are of course exceptions, there's nothing about being a corporate executive that automatically makes one unqualified to be a politician or a political appointee, but when Immelt fired one-fifth of GE and made hundreds of times what the average worker at GE made, there's nothing that should give us any confidence that Immelt has the vaguest clue as to what he's doing.

Please let's get off the idea that corporate executives automatically make good politicians. G.W. Bush was the first President to have earned an MBA and look where that got us!

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