Originally posted by bwalker
Bob, I agree with most of your points.(cant believe I said that)</b>
Wow, I never expected that... I'm embarrassed.
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Think about this though. Who are Enron, Untied, and Worldcom? The answer is you and I. We are the stock holders via our 401k, union pensions, etc.
We are the ones that demand stock prices the go nothing but up regardless of who gets screwed or how shortsigthed such gains are.</b>
That's not true. I have never seen an ethical survey produced by employers or corporations asking us what the moral posture of their business should be. They've never asked me who they should hurt or stiff--or leave alone.
We are, in fact, the screwees in most of this. It used to be that they screwed us individually; now, we have the collective shafings that reach into pensions, health plans, and our electric bills, with all sorts of unimanaged consequences.
WorldCom et al., involved the collapse of agencies and laws that were supposed to be the guardians of the great national trust we called our economy. What's outrageous is not so much that it happened, but the incredible amout of lobbying money spent so they can keep on doing it.
<b>Seems to me like everyone has a get rich quick mentality nowdays. This might be one of the ills of capitalism. That being said marxism isnt any better. Both abuse the individual.
I guess the point is governments of men are allways destined to failure in the long run. History bears this true. That being said the system that least abuses the individual is a limited goverment, free market system.
If you disagree with me on this last point. Make a suggestion.</b>
I think the real evil is the bureaucracy, not the label it happens to have at the time. After a while, every bureaucracy loses sight of its original mussion and becomes self-serving. Its people get shallow and usually greedy in the little ways they can, which then translates into the larger behavior of the full group.
Label it Marxism, Socialism, Republicanism, Democracy or Monarchy; it never matters after a while. Free enterprise is the frenzied manipulations of many little and big bureaucracies intent on getting bigger and harvesting more wealth for themselves. They is the extractors; generally, we is the extractees.
I've faced that old, "Why don't you do somethin' about it?" all my career. So far, I've been pretty good at providing meaningful alternatives, but I have no illusions about what kind of stage one has to climb on in trying to change the complexities of economies and justice.
Let's be honest and say it's yet another chicken or egg thing. Where does the stink really come from? The bureaucracies, or the people inside them?
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Bob, One guy comes to mind when I made this comment. He is a steel worker in Gary. Being a chicagoan I am sure you know about that town the town. Anyways, The short of his problems is he suffers from massive exposure to heavy metals. I am talking about nasties like chromium, and cadmium in his tissue at levels that makes docs shake there heads.
The union didnt go to bat for the guy because he wasnt a commitee mans son. Much like your acquantance "slash" this man is truely a spent specimin. Where was his safteynet? What did his dues buy for him except to line some lazzy slugs pocket?
I don't exempt unions from having the stink of losing sight of why they evolved and who they were supposed to protect. It's the same thing; after a while...whatever might have been noble gets submerged under the boils and sores of greed and self interest.
In my third month as a naive apprentice, I stood up at a union hall microphone asked asked why we should vote on a dues increase without anyone explaining why. I said the members should be shown what the expenses were, so we could make an informed decision. The Business Manager sent some people over to 'find out who this punk was."
The increase was voted down that evening. It showed up again the next month, replete with charts and handouts. It passed, as it should have, but there were lessons all the way round.
I learned the remarkable power of a single voice; they learned, never take anything for granted; and the level of information provided for meetings thereafter got permanently pushed up a notch.
My writing about Ernie as slash, or standing up to fight against the injustices for the Gary guy, are all part and parcel of the same lesson.
I feel the obligation to speak up for little people who can't have a loud voice. My fuming about censorship here is my anger at arbitrarily snuffing out anyone's voice.
Ernie is just literate enough to get by. His speech would be halting; his prose uninteresting and clumsy. No newspaer is going to pick up his story and bring some magical solution. He's slash.
Now multiply Ernie by the hundreds of thousands who got, and still get, carpel tunneled, chromiated, mangled, mashed, and granted an occupational disorder for the rest of their lives. That's a lot of slash,
I can't work those scales. I'm too funny looking and callused--and too close to the age of wanting to nap.
So, I don'r have a grand suggestion, I simply stick to keeping my thumb in some bureaucrat's eye ay any given moment, or trying to write with some principle and purpose about our common frailities and stupidities--still maintaing a belief in our potentials and triumphs.
If more people do that, in their own way and time, the bureaucracies are in trouble; the death of a thousand cuts..But, what you said earlier is true, and as Pogo muttered, "We have seen the enemy, and they is us."
Ethics and morals become all soft and pretty misty when we look in the mirror.
Bob Wulkowicz
PS: And for those who dislike my use of slash as human debris, please submit your own substitutes that capture both despair and injustice. I'll forward them to Ernie and the guy in Gary for their approval.
