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This is how business has corrupted our national moral character.
For those of us who were raised to be hard working, honest and to treat our fellow human being as we would wish to be treated ourselves, our first day on the job usually is one of cultural shock. We are taught to be good citizens and patriots who are loyal to their country, yet on the job we are expected to show uncompromising loyalty to the company above any other loyalty we may have.
For me, the cultural shock came on my first day. I was sitting at my new job as a receptionist in the corporate headquarters of a large and powerful bank. As I was learning how to field and direct calls, a call came in for one of the Senior Vice Presidents. I properly asked who was calling and asked them to state their business. When I buzzed Mr. ****. He immediately said. Tell him I’ve left the building.
“You want me to lie?” I blurted.
“Yes, this is a business, not Sunday school,” he replied. “Take a message and I’ll call him later.”
I know this is done all the time, however, fresh out of convent school and broken of a fibbing habit myself by the sisters with many hours of penance, I felt I had stepped into a moral abyss. Actually, I was right. Following the lies, were a laundry list of “sins” over the years.
Overcharging for goods that could be cheaper was fine if the customer didn’t object to it. Billing for services not performed because you could get away with it. Legal ways of creative bookkeeping to make a company look more robust to the stockholders were used.
Casting couch promotion of women in business; rounding off the billing in favor of the company; contracts with fine print and legalese; bait and switch promotions; promises to employees that changed at the whim of the Board of Directors all were in a day’s work. Firing an employee for trumped up charges often happened instead of laying him off so that he could collect unemployment.
Within a week, I learned that I was a different moral person on the job than I was when not at work. I found I spent my time at work trying not to get fired, trying to get a pay raise and trying to get a promotion, not necessarily in that order. When my workday was over, I could go home and change back into the nice person I really wanted to be. I couldn’t do that on the job. There were the demands of the company for what I did on the one hand and watching my back from the backstabbing office politics on the other. I often wondered that I got any real work done at all.
Yet, most of us still knew what was right and what was wrong. I supposed economic necessity caused us to compartmentalize those two opposing forces in our lives. Yet, we could still distinguish that the business model was not the one we wanted to pass on to our children.
However, it seems that now the business model is how most Americans live their lives. This is the principles of laissez faire economics, Darwin socialism and fascist politics. It’s a philosophy of winner take all and the rest are left behind to struggle the best they can. It now has become the national morality off the job as well. This is not what America was founded on.
Now we find that if we aren’t in lockstep with the present powers in charge we are somehow unAmerican and disloyal. Questioning authority is not allowed. Cindy Sheehan demanding a meeting with the person who caused the unecessary death of her son is somehow considered a publicity seeking slut because she dares question that authority. (On the other hand, Paula Jones was for some reason, not considered a publicity seeking slut because she was in step with and loyal to the “company”.)
When a memorial exhibit was placed outside the President’s Western White House (their identification, not mine), it was considered disrespectful of the authorities, the “company”, so some misguided gob drives over them with his pick-up truck because he seems to no longer know be able to distinguish what right and wrong is. His loyalty is to the “company” not to basic human moral principles. Whatever the company tells him is what is right.
Now that the company has merged with religion, the other corporate entities, in the business of selling salvation and the afterlife, you can’t accept anything as the truth, unless it’s in the Bible as interpreted by the lastest annointed of God. I mean we really can’t trust what Jesus said unless they dissect it for us and tell us what he really meant.
We no longer have a national moral character. Even as recent as fifty years ago, in most places of the USA, a man’s handshake was his word, not to be broken. He knew he had an obligation to help those who were struggling to help themselves. Infringing on another’s rights and property was considered taboo. Now look at where we are.
If we don’t start taking back our ethics and true moral values, we will lose everything. The company then will own us lock, stock and soul.
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