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Your point is well taken. Corporate spin efforts are exercises in disinformation, and it is cause for concern whenever governments begin to ape them. They do not allow for the possibility of open discourse because they are structured to preempt any efforts to do so.

Moreover, the ascendancy of economics and economic theory (in particular, at the expense of political economy) in various polities has resulted in what you call this "main game" phenomenon. I wholeheartedly agree that this new-found emphasis in economics and its principles leads to a dominant narrative that has in so many ways shut down modes of inquiry and exploration into the governance of the polis.

However, what is lost in this criticism is that the closing-off of narrative is the result of economics' demands that empirical constraints be placed on flights of fancy. The problem, as I see it, is not the acceptance of economic reality as the only reality, but whether one can (or indeed, why anyone would) resist the demands the empirical make upon us in any discussion relating to the polis.

Moreover, I am not sure that I agree entirely with the idea that the adoption of "corporate speak" is a disconnect from the political language of citizenship and democracy. Corporations and, as you rightly point out, governments, have a consequentialist emphasis that necessitates the use of organizational statements and values, strategies, marketing, etc., to further the demands of accountability from shareholders in public institutions. Investors play this part in the private sector, whereas citizens do this in the public.

I'm not sure that this results is in anyway a move away from democracy, if not a move toward democracy. Corporations, indeed all denizens of the private sector, have a greater ability to respond to the needs and desires of a marketplace than government has ever had with regard to its polity, precisely because the cold, empirical calculus of the marketplace renders indisputable verdicts on the enterprise in the from of profit and loss. Government, on the other hand, can ignore the real needs and desires of its constituents and pursue flights of fancy without any real institutional correction for years.

It's like Kant -- can you really have a pure, moral science that is not bound up in consequences or in the private feelings and desires of the moral agent? I would think not, because the demands of the empirical must be respected, and any attempt to address what are ultimately empirical matters (i.e. the problem of scarcity) in non-empirical language is bound to fail. Can you imagine discussing semiotics or critical theory without "signs" and "signifiers" -- and how quickly would you be laughed out of that dinner party?

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