To further hammer home the point that corporations are not people, comes an analysis of the latest 2004 first quarter GDP figures.

If corporations were people would they really have managed a 62% pay raise (increase in net profits) since George Bush came into office? Weren't the last four years a period of massive economic decline, a famous "jobless recovery" and country wide economic malaise. I don't know about you but I know precious few, if any people who've managed that trick and nearly all of them were highly compensated executives.

But wait, it gets worse...

Thanks to George Bush's slash and burn tactics in the taxation department, after tax corporate profits increased by an amazing 94% since he arrived.

So you do the math. Could it be that while executives were doing the typical knee jerk "lay off workers as fast as possible" routine, and outsourcing as many operations overseas as they could get away with, corporations were reaping in the rich rewards of increased profitability? All the while workers were footing the bill from their own savings as they sat out the long dark unemployed-time of their souls?

While economists and MBAs may finger-point at the Europeans for their much tighter controls over workforce changes, they surely temper businesses plans to ramp and down their production and workforces overnight and ultimately must do much to stabilize their economies and benefit their people (not corporations) with the highest standards of living in the world. Similarly more progressive taxation and generous welfare may have an impact on corporate profitability compared to the rest of the world, however such automatic dampers have a very useful role of damping out instabilities in economic output. Lets not forget that economic growth is supposed to be for improving our standard of living to better ourselves. The definition of what "bettering ourselves" means may be up for debate, but surely it can't be just improving corporate profits and increasing stock market valuations by unfettered IPOs and acquisitions-gone-wild?

As we all know it's Republican policy to do their damnedest to reduce taxation and shrink government^*. However just remember that government spending, progressive taxation, and welfare programmes were all things introduced to temper the massive instabilities that existed in the economy before The Great Depression of the 1930's and the birth of socially responsible Keynesian economics. As usual it looks like the corporations and their money centric policies are egging on the government to run as close to the wind before another great catastrophe.

Which reminds me exactly of how they are behaving with regards to the environment...

Or at least that's their advertised policy: we all know that since GWB only taxation has been cut - government spending has actually skyrocketed on the modern day equivalent of the hunt for reds under the bed, or the tooth fairy

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