Corporate America is clambering on the Trump Train. Large Corporations do almost nothing out of conviction, but everything out of making more money. The woke garbage hurts sales; appearing to be part of MAGA, or at least MAGA friendly, helps sales.
Thought For The Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
My company, “Neutrons ‘R Us,” is exactly as you described, Donald. When Biden was President and his worthless Jennifer Granholm Secretary of the Dept of Energy (she had zero nuclear energy experience), senior corporate leadership couldn’t stop talking about climate change and carbon-free nuclear. Now that Trump is President and Chris Wright (a former fossil and nuclear energy executive) is Secretary of the Department of Energy, senior executive leadership can not stop talking about how we’re going to make America energy independent (it almost sounds like MAGA). Those men in senior executive leadership have no principle except for what the company stock does.Oh, don’t get me wrong: with a few Democrat exceptions, I work with great engineers and technicians. And middle level management (again, with a few Democrat exceptions) is respectable and honorable. But that’s as far as it goes. Senior executive leadership will suck up to any Administration that’s in charge. Climate change was the clarion call under Biden; energy independence under Trump. Their lack of principles I utterly despise.
What’s distressing (and this is the world the Democrats have made, although Republicans are implicated) is the degree to which incomes are politically determined. Contracts, subsidies, grants, tax preferences, regulatory sluicing, &c. Makes for lucrative careers for a class of door openers (many of them former officials). An end to grants to corporate bodies bar in a short-menu of circumstances, an end to sectoral tax preferences, systematized scrutiny of contract specifications by third-party agencies to detect specifications written to benefit a particular firm, near elimination of no-bid contracting, and evaluations of regulatory schemes by third-party agencies staffed with economists ought to be the order of the day. An end to collective bargaining for public employees ought to be the order of the day. Transparent compensation schemes for public employees should be the order of the day. It should be nearly universal in the public sector that recruitment and promotion be regulated by timely examinations, with examinations acting as true screens and with hiring supervisors given only a short list of candidates from which to choose. However, the three signatures on a letter of dismissal from supervisors and managers in an employee’s chain of command should suffice to dismiss a public employee. You can have a set of post-termination reviews where certain complaints are hashed out, but it should not take more than three signatures on a letter to unload someone.
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We aren’t Bourbon France, but some of the challenges Bourbon France faced in 1786 are ours. The distribution of benefits from economic activity has to be qualified to some extent by an ethic of common provision and the necessity of providing ‘public goods’. That aside, you want institutions and practices which distribute benefits to man-hours, skills, and entrepreneurship. You don’t want benefits distributed to people with status or connections.
The implication of my babble is that businessmen qua businessmen should regard politicians as fungible. In a well-ordered world, trade associations make stances on behalf of their member businesses and their primary object is to protect their members from ill-considered regulatory schemes. What’s maddening about characters like the schmucks who have been running Disney and Target is what terrible fiduciaries they are (and in the service of nefarious ends).
Tallow is beef fat. Lard is pork fat. Always read the ingredients.
You say that like we aren’t excited precisely because it is beef fat.
Years ago at McDonald’s the potatoes were fried in beef fat then sprinkled with season salt. The fries had taste.
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