Corporate Spin

Was listening to NPR yesterday. A commentator was earnestly saying that the reason corporations are sitting on big piles of money instead of investing and hiring is because of their perception Obama is being mean to them.

Big chunks of the american public are underwater on their mortgage, or in foreclosure, credit has become difficult to come by, unemployment is up around 10%, polls show that consumers are tightening their belts more each month. I may have low regard for corporate spin doctors veracity, but Corporations become successful by knowing when to hold them and when to fold them. They are sitting on piles of money (which they piled up in large part by firing lots of employees) because it is not a good time to invest.

We are in the mess we are in now because beginning in the 1980's government bought more and more into corporate spin and let the corporations run the show for their benefit. Remember George Bush's immortal words after 9/11 that the best thing people could do was "go shopping"?In the US and Europe consumers are suffering from the long term hangover that 20 years of debt fueled spending entails. Recovery from this debt hangover is going to take years of consumers rebuilding their finances.

The Corporate spin doctors complaints that Obama is being anti-business is just one more episode in their eternal efforts to have complete control over how they run their business regardless of the consequences on the economy, workers and the rest of us. Enron, Lehman Brothers, AIG, BP. The biggest and most successful businesses have run themselves and the economy off a cliff when left to their own clever schemes and obsessive focus on the immediate bottom line.