NP: Modern Rock Mid-'80s (CD)

I don't want to scare you, but Paul Krugman has another fairly scathing indictment of the Bush administration in his column today (registration required). What I find interesting about this is, surprise, the pattern he describes, where it seems that there's a lot of pressure put upon every branch of the government to support the president's agenda, whether that's playing down global warning, supporting a war or defending tax cuts.

We already know that Dubya's main "qualification," and I use that term very loosely, for government office has always been his tenure as a CEO and successful businessman through the 80s and 90s. Of course, you can say the same thing about Ken Lay at Enron. Which is entirely the point. This sort of kowtowing to the "mission statement" is pretty clearly, to me, an artifact of the corporate world, and while Bush's ability to subvert the roles of government agencies to his own ends displays a certain amount of managerial prowess, the end result is more than a little disturbing.

Corporate America, as we've learned the hard way, doesn't have much of an internal system of checks and balances. Whenever possible, successful corporations would like to function as a black box to the outside world. The only responsibility is to the stockholders, who largely don't care what happens inside the box as long as their investment does well.

This is the model Bush has applied to democracy, and it's fraught with peril. First, government has to have checks and balances. The Treasury Department, as Krugman points out, is supposed to keep the White House honest when it comes to fiscal policy. Second, there's an inherent danger in using a "value to stockholders" model at all, namely because you have to define who those "stockholders" are. I'll give you a hint, it's not you or me, unless you're a Fortune 500 executive or millionaire by other means. Quite simply, Bush's responsibility is, just like in the corporate case, to his investors, and that means those who pad the coffers of his campaign and the GOP.

In a sense, Bush has set out to do exactly what he knows how to do. He's become the CEO of the United States, and true to current business trends, his success at such has led to massive layoffs of the American public.