Domestic issue number 2.
Obama is "right" on the issue of corporate regulation.
Corporations are artificial entities that have life only through law. They can be Frankensteins or Lee Majors, depending on how they're programmed.
They're programmed through regulation.
When corporations were allowed to go public and became more and more easily traded on national and international markets there was the potential for a disconnect between two very important and seemingly unseverable limbs of the corporate body.
One was a disconnect between ownership and management control, the other was a disconnect between short term profits and the long term health of the corporation.
Ownership and management control...
When the corporations were allowed to grow to huge proportions and the number of owners were allowed to grow exponentially, the ability of any one owner, and therefor of many small, disconnected owners, to exercise effective control over management was critically curtailed.
That created a void that was filled by a combination of boards and management that shared a symbiotic relationship often typified by the personal profit self interest of the management and the boards. A willing group of enablers who also profited were accountants, investment bankers and big money interests.
It was a situation that screamed for better regulation to protect the investors and, because of the importance of these huge corporations to the national economy, the general public as a whole.
But, through the negligence or ignorance, or worse, of our Democratic and Republican legislators and of the Executives in power, there was little regulation, even when it was apparent that corporations were being raided by management and were rife with fraud and graft.
Short term versus long term profits.
Private companies would have not only exercised markedly better control over management but they would have, through self interest, been much more attuned to the long term health of their companies. Let the next guy worry about tomorrow isn't such an appealing concept when the next guy is you. If multinational corporations that help determine the soundness of our economy cannot be structured to factor the long term health of the corporation into their decision making process, we're in big trouble and doomed to repeat the cycle of raiding the company for short term profits and leaving someone else to hold the bag.
Obama sees that, McCain sees little of it. Obama will regulate more disclosure and may place limits on executive pay, McCain will have the same people in place that manned the stations for Bush/Cheney.
Obama is right.
Cont'd with foreign policy. Ed |
