Business Media Democracy

This week I’ve been writing a speech to be delivered to a group of small business owners who supply products and services to The Port of Long Beach in California. While mulling over ideas for my brief message, I heard a portion of president Obama’s speech regarding plans to crack down on offshore tax havens used by American businesses. Immediately, what I saw was a classic collision between business and the crusading leader of a democracy that is at least partly fueled by 24 hour media coverage of everything.

The president referred to “ordinary Americans” as if ordinary business owners must be some other strain of Homo sapiens. Just as each young child must learn about touching a hot stove, politicians continue to poke at the entrepreneurial class until something hot blisters their fingers. Even the slowest of them knows enough to stay away from putting their hands on subjects such as unafordability of various entitlement programs for medical and pension costs. But they can’t resist periodic business bashing despite the fact that most of them couldn’t mount a successful campaign for dog catcher without support from the business community.

This wasn’t the first time that I’ve seen business, democracy, and media in a mash up. It was over thirty years ago that the great playwright, Paddy Chayefsky, wrote the script for the Academy Award winning film, “Network,” which contains one of my favorite cinematic speeches. It was delivered in a menacing tone by Ned Beatty as the character Mr. Jensen. When a president or other high level politico wants to roll out the rhetoric and talk about impacting international tax havens they should first have to listen to this thirty three year old speech:

Jensen: “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Beale: But why me?

Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.”

So the speech I’m about to deliver this week seems very tame in comparison. My audience owns medium and small businesses and probably their closest tax haven is Nevada. Their concern is more about attracting new customers and not Wall Street. I don’t say that all business owners are patriotic saints or that unfettered capitalism is perfect. But I do grow tired of politicians or anyone else who tries to create a schism between Americans based on their tax bill.

Amidst all the confusion maybe what we really should be doing is following the explicit instructions of the fictional news anchor Howard Beale from “Network.” He said to get from your chair, open the window and shout, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”


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