CONNECT: 'The business of America is business," said Calvin Coolidge, Republican president of the US from 1923 to 1929. He was right - so it was and, eight decades later, so it is. There are positive aspects implicit in Coolidge's observation.
The dynamism of the United States' cities, the country's technological advances and its wealth, for instance, are undeniable.
There are also, however, as with every political philosophy, negative aspects. We are witnessing those negative aspects bloating alarmingly. They are casting an ominous shadow over the world. It's striking - frightening, too - how the looming shape and style of George Bush's prospective world order mirrors the shape and style of US-inspired corporate order.
The ruthlessness of authoritarian business is being normalised within politics. We are, as the US's spurning of the United Nations shows, seeing the unashamed imposition of put-up-or- shut-up politics. The Bush line says: engage in frenetic diplomatic lobbying, have your UN debates and Security Council votes, but we're going to do whatever we want anyway.
As corporate order refuses to recognise unions, Bush's political order ignores vast popular protest. As middle managers in corporations are coerced to parrot top management's aims and methods, so too are governments of countries less powerful than the US. As corporate wealth becomes ever more obscenely concentrated, so too does the relative wealth of nations.
In the US in 1980, the average chief executive made 42 times the average worker's hourly pay; in 1990, he or she made 85 times the amount; by 2001, 411 times the amount. Excluding China, the richest 10 per cent - or about 500 million - of the world's population had, on average, 90 times as much as the world's poorest 10 per cent in 1980, 136 times more in 1990, 155 times more by 1999.
You don't need to be a statistician to see the trend. It's true that increased exporting of US-style business methods during the 1990s slowed the rate at which the discrepancy grew as other countries - Ireland included - became relatively wealthier and parts of their populations joined the lucky 10 per cent. Nonetheless, though the rate of discrepancy decelerated from what it had been in the 1980s, discrepancy still continued to increase. If you compared the richest 5 per cent with the poorest 5 per cent, the difference would be colossal.
The looming war - though the military discrepancy between the sides is such that "war" is an obscene description of the impending attack - is centrally about furthering that trend. It's about greed and naked power.
The aim of big-business-backed Bush is to consolidate and expand his self- appointed role as CEO of the world. He's not unique in this world- domination ambition but, at present, he's the only person who has the means to try to enforce it. Yet even with big business and much of the global media - Rupert Murdoch's Fox, CNN and the US networks, all big businesses too - backing him, relatively few people are fooled.
Bush's political executives - Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and others - are widely seen as a cast of grotesques. If the likely consequences of their hawkishness were not so grim, they might have a pantomime quality. Never in living memory has a prospective military onslaught been sold so unconvincingly. This time the hawks are unbelievable.
Such, however, is their shamelessness that they remain determined to defy world opinion. Few countries want to be reduced to vassalage, but that is what the Bush project implies for every state outside the US. As in a hierarchical corporation, in which people are rigidly allocated their rung, countries are being banged into line for the proposed new order.
Politicians know that, of course. To many of them it's just realpolitik to accept the consolidation of US power and hope to secure a favourable perch within the corporate-style hierarchy of the new political order. Indeed, in Ireland, Cheltenham Charlie McCreevy, a champion of big business, appears to be warming quickly to the blunter, more ruthless tone of the planned new order. Dismissing incontrovertible criticism that diluting the Freedom of Information Act bolsters state secrecy, Charlie wants the Government left free "to govern". He wants no truck with any of that interfering, democracy-enhancing transparency nonsense.
The boss is the boss, eh, Chas? You tell 'em.
Such transposing of anti-democratic business methods on allegedly democratic political methods cannot but promote the risk of tyranny. The anti-globalisation protesters of Seattle, Washington and Genoa realised the dangers. Being mostly young, often suspiciously image-conscious and subject to a hostile media, their effectiveness was limited.
Arrogance and rudeness proliferate with put- up-or-shut-up attitudes. Michael O'Leary of Ryanair is perhaps Ireland's best-known rude-boy CEO. He's not prepared to be hamstrung by public opinion or unions, and he makes hundred-fold multiples of the average Ryanair worker's hourly wage. To some he's a hero, to others a prat.Bush is a global-scale version. But unlike O'Leary, Bush is armed and seems hell-bent on bombing Iraq - for humanitarian reasons, of course. Still, even businessised politics and its cheerleading media haven't been able to market the "humanitarian bombing" of Iraq. There's still hope.