The Business Presidency: Move Fast, Break Laws

The movement that’s been calling for a “business presidency” is fundamentally an autocratic movement.

Because businesses are autocracies.

OK, they don’t have to be.

I’ve been involved with democratic businesses; that’s what cooperatives are, after all.

But the norm for U.S. businesses is a corporate dictatorship, with the CEO as an unchallenged and unquestionable ruler.

And that’s the part these folks want to import to the Presidency anyway: the “President as CEO” is just another way of saying the “President as Dictator”.

And now they’ve gotten it.

Not officially; officially, pretty much everything their CEO President has been doing is still illegal.

But practically, with a collaborationist Supreme Court, supportive majorities in Congress and no opposition from the Congressional minority, they now have a President who can (and does) treat the Presidency as his personal fiefdom and the rest of the government as wholly-owned subsidiaries.

And the treasury as his personal checkbook.

It’s going pretty much exactly as can be expected.

From distributing patronage to his sycophants to raiding the executive offices of Venezuela and launching a hostile takeover bid for Iran, the business Presidency views everything as a transaction and weighs everything in terms of its cost or benefit to the chief executive.

Like a business.

It’s not like this is any kind of surprise.

That anyone could have looked at how U.S. business has behaved in the past 50 years and thought that the State needed to get some of that is completely beyond me.

But they did, and so they went and elected these dim-witted, ignorant psychopaths and now the whole world gets to deal with the (hopefully not-literal) fallout of that foolishness.

And with the way the U.S. system is set up, only opposition from inside Congress is really able to do anything about this.

If the Congressional Democrats chose to stop this, they could.

Like any U.S. business, all this Presidency understands is money and power; it needs money to keep committing its crimes and to consolidate its power.

And the Democrats do actually have sufficient power in Congress to cut off the flow of money.

I am just not feeling very hopeful about them doing anything about it, though.