Except it’s not, and can’t be. At least, not with the way things are.
Reporting on the closure of Boeing’s Wichita factory, CBS Evening News interviewed a former Boeing engineer who criticized the company’s decision, and the way that decision was announced, saying “It’s not just a company—it’s a community.”
It’s a community if you’re a worker, but if you’re the company, it’s not; it is just a company. If the company tried to take care of the community rather than do whatever was best for its bottom line, regardless of cost to that company, it would open itself to shareholder lawsuits, among other things.
That engineer was naive to think otherwise, to expect Boeing to have any loyalty to the “community” where it had built planes since the 1920s.
So too was the congressman naive who complained about the huge amount of money spent providing Boeing with tax breaks and other incentives for their plant in Wichita. Boeing took the money when it could, and left when it wanted; I can’t believe he expected anything different.
Corporations are not persons, whatever Republicans say. And companies are not communities, and have no loyalty to communities. They are not part of the web of society. As Wichita has found out to its cost, big companies like Boeing are often more like parasites, or predators. #occupy
