Say you’re hired when most are not. Say you’re eager to stay employed. Say further you’re allowed, even expected to make decisions as long as they meet a single standard. What is that litmus test for all you will do in your new job? Profit.
Now say you find out something you must decide upon will either cost the company money or hurt, possibly kill customers. Remember, your wife and kids depend on your income. Remember, too, how atrocious the economy is. If you’re fired now, you’ll never work again and your whole family is headed for life on the streets. There is no social safety net and, worse, one of your kids needs the health care your company grants you. You literally cannot afford to lose this job.
You’ll tell yourself, well, maybe it’ll get fixed farther down the line. Or maybe it’ll prove to be an unwarranted worry. Maybe no one will be hurt or killed. That can’t really happy, can it? You tell yourself these platitudes despite having read the report from corporate legal consultants who prorated the cost of paying the expected number of wrongful injury or death lawsuits against the higher cost of actually fixing the problem. They concluded to hell with customers, profit rules supreme.
In fact, you console yourself even more by reminding yourself of the corporate by-laws by which you operate, prime among them being that you are mandated, by law, to increase the profits for the shareholders. You have no choice, and it’s not your fault if someone is hurt or killed because of your decision. It was really no decision at all.
And if you think, as you try to sleep, that maybe you should warn the company that it might be exposing itself to class-action suits and huge penalties, you’ll remember some basic facts of recent history. You’ll remember how your company funded lobbyists, bought its way into the good graces of bad people, and how it manipulated the law to become writers of the very laws that used to regulate business so that, effectively, there are no regulations now.
Even better, corporations are now the same in the eyes of the law as people except for liability. They can vote, using their money, and they can break laws and buy their way out of trouble by burying any opposition, but they can’t be sued effectively any longer because even if a huge settlement is adjudicated against them, the company will be bailed out by government lackeys who shovel tax money at them by the ship load.
This is how corporatism creates sociopathic behavior and sociopaths. It’s easy to embrace evil when it sustains your livelihood.
And this is why we must break up monopolies, reign in the corporate money going to political campaigns, and re-institute the regulations that keep us safe from unfettered capitalism, a scourge of the people and an evil for the world.
A game is not a game without rules and restrictions. People are not human beings without them.
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