What should your message be?  That every American corporation is the product of someone’s dream.  People like Henry Ford.  Andrew Carnegie.  John D. Rockefeller.  Thomas Edison.  Mark Charles Honeywell.  William Proctor and James Gamble.  John Deere.  Benjamin Holt.  Bill Hewlett and David Packard.  Doris Christopher.  Robert and Sheila Johnson.  Bill Gates.  Michael Dell.  Larry Page and Sergey Brin.  Steve Chen and Jawed Karim.   The American dream may be viewed as dead or dying in Washington, D.C., but it is alive in thousands of companies – public and private – across the United States.  And every company has a compelling narrative.  You all need to remind Americans what those narratives are. 

Entrepreneurial enterprise is the quintessentially American story.  And America is a better place because of American corporations.  Where there was once filth, American companies provided soap and sanitation.   Where travel was once confined to horseback, American ingenuity provided automobiles, trains, airplanes, and ships.  Women once slaved over housework; American companies provided vacuum cleaners, ovens, washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers.  (Even the Vatican opined, to much feminist consternation, that the washing machine was a greater liberator of women than the Pill.)  Northerners went without fruit in the winter until American companies provided refrigerated transportation.  Food spoiled until American manufacturers made freezers and refrigerators available.  Farms could feed far more when machinery made large-scale agricultural production a possibility. Where disease and despair were once rampant, American scientists and American companies have provided life-saving drugs and other medical treatments.  And where geographical distance traditionally meant long spans of time without correspondence with loved ones, Americans invented the telephone, and later commercialized personal computers and the internet, putting communication and information at our fingertips.

American corporations have not just made our lives better with the products and services they have provided for us.  They have helped untold numbers of people in multiple generations achieve personal, if perhaps less grandiose dreams, by providing employment - including for those with little to no education, immigrants who fled unspeakable horrors or intractable poverty in other nations, and others who aspired to political and economic freedom.  American corporations have also made millions more prosperous, financially secure, and even wealthy, with opportunities to invest – often one share at a time – in the growth of the companies themselves.

We are so accustomed to the prosperity that the American corporation has provided that we no longer appreciate it, even though most of us cannot conceive of life without it.  If you want to know what life would be like without American enterprise and American corporations, just look at any third-world country: the poverty, the disease, the violence, the oppression, the truncated life expectancy.

Yes, it’s true that we’ve taken some serious bruises in the past year or so.  But as with everything else, the Pravda press and our craven, opportunistic President love to tell about the extreme exceptions – but don’t tell about the rule: the vast majority of American corporations are not embroiled in financial scandals.  Just as it would be manifestly ignorant to accuse all human beings of murder because some do, so it is that painting all corporations with the same brush of corruption is inaccurate and unfair.  And it is worsening the crisis by undermining American confidence in our companies, our products, our entrepreneurs, ourselves.

Capitalism is under attack.  American enterprise and ingenuity are under attack.  But every entrepreneur knows that a problem contains the seeds of an opportunity.  Americans are growing weary of the daily onslaught of negativity, and the government that is fueling it.  The opportunity here is for visionary corporations to remind Americans about what has always been great and grand about you – and by extension, about themselves.  In the short term, people will buy your products when you make them feel good about being Americans again.  But the larger point is that it’s no longer market share you are fighting for; it’s your very survival.