On the Boss of All Bosses
On the Boss of All Bosses: One of the first things most people realize when beginning their working lives is that most of your Constitutional rights as a citizen end at the employer’s entrance. Yes, there are anti-discrimination laws, safety requirements and wage and hour provisions, but things like freedom of speech and most of the Bill of Rights are left “outside. In fact, employers can require non-disclosure clauses, restrict the ability to go to court over employment disputes and terminate you for social media postings they find unsuitable”. If you have a union contract, you may have some of those rights restored, but these days that’s less than ten percent of the workforce. Someone like Donald Trump, who is famous for his employer role on “the Apprentice”, knows the power of the boss well.

Yet here he is, suing Twitter, a private company, because they suspended his use of their platform. “They’re violating my freedom of speech” he whines. All of a sudden, the powers that Trump so enjoyed as the head of his company, are illegal when exercised by the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. What’s good for the goose isn’t for the gander.

Trump’s hypocrisy goes deeper, and to a great extent his Twitter ban is of his own making. He and his crowd want to privatize everything. Can’t make money if the non-profit government is doing it. Nothing is off limits. Social Security, healthcare, education, transportation, the National Parks, the Post Office and on it goes. To put a point on it, Trump and his cronies have spent years underfunding and trying to kill any public broadcasting entity, like National Public Radio. Their surface complaint is that NPR is run by liberals. But their real complaint is that they don’t want a model of real “fair and balanced” to exist. They’ve pretty much succeeded in muting the public-owned voices in our media. If they hadn’t, then Trump might just have a complaint, if NPR banned him and ostracized him. Because then, it would be a publicly-funded outlet, that is subject to many rules and laws that private entities are not.

Then there is the direct issue of who owns social media. The right-wing has severe anxiety whenever someone proposes that social media be government-owned or controlled. Efforts to regulate and provide public safeguards against social media abuses have floundered in Congress because of those who feel government has no place in what is essentially an online wild west show. Well Donald, that leaves Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg and all the lesser gods of social media platforms in control. Your politics have dealt you out. No having your cake and eating it too.

Now don’t expect Trump and company to start promoting any reasonable list of guidelines for social media. Because the kinds of rules that are likely to be promulgated would be things like an insistence on truth, facts, accuracy and curbs on little things like plotting the overthrow of democracy. So what Trump really wants is an exception. He sees himself as a special person. An entitled rich guy and a political force with a following. His demand for his “freedom of speech” is limited to who he decides should have it. In essence, he wants to be the “boss” of both public and private entities in our nation. Not bad work, if you can get it.

Of course, Mr. Trump’s supporters dismiss all of this. When it comes to their hero, they’re not much into consequences. They’re also willing to have him bestow liberties upon himself that no one else gets. But for the rest of us, there’s an irony here. The guy who has spent his life exploiting his rights as a boss, is now limited by another “boss”. A megalomaniac getting twisted up in his own shorts.

ihg 10-3-2021

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