Business Thinking
"My father always told me that all businessmen are sons of bitches, but I never believed it until now."
— John F. Kennedy
As the world goes through great upheavals, people in many countries have looked toward business as their ultimate salvation, the solution to all of their problems. But, business is actually the process of making exploitation more efficient. The glorified field of business is not anyone's salvation. Whatever is driven by evil, greed, and lust for power cannot have any ultimate good effect. Business is the pursuit of more profitable illusions and exploitation, and as we have seen from Enron, MCI Worldcom, Arthur Anderson, and other business debacles, corporate America has mastered the art of deception, fraud, corruption, and exploitation. The higher up you go, the worse it gets.
As hard to believe as it may be, the chief executive of a hospital chain made $127 million in 1992, more than any other US business employee. How is it even possible for a system that is supposed to help people, to be such a financial drain or mechanism of exploitation? In hospitals, a patient is charged $30 for an aspirin tablet, because he or she is a captive of the system. In the US, doctors and lawyers routinely make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, sometimes millions. In the former Soviet Union, doctors and lawyers made less than bus drivers, less than a hundred dollars per month, because the system was not set up for this type of exploitation. Exploiting means taking undue advantage of someone's need, and capitalizing on their suffering. "Helping" and "success" in the "free market economy" is really just greater exploitation. There is a price to pay for the acute narrowness of mind and vision, and absence of spiritual principles, in business.
In a Newsweek article titled "The Death of Management," Robert J. Samuelson said that "The idea that a good executive could think through any problem is an absurdity." The myth that a manager could rely upon incisive analysis and decisive action to make any company profitable "collapsed with failures at companies that once symbolized U.S. management prowess: Sears, Westinghouse and IBM." He added, "The belief that all problems could be solved by analysis favored the rise of executives who were adept with numbers and making slick presentations." Obviously, it is a mistake to assume that those at the top know more. "The more powerful top executives became, the less they knew. Their information was filtered through staff reports and statistical tables." Samuelson noted, they "feared exposing their ignorance." Sears was exposed for overcharging its automotive repair customers an average of $230 each. Management claimed that it did not really know what was happening; it paid employees on a commission basis, and those employees just seemed to be bringing in a lot of business. Who is management to question greater profit or exploitation?
Of course, feel-good television commercials by a Sears executive to reassure people about their tradition of honesty and integrity ended their problem. Firestone did the same, denying there was anything wrong with their tires despite the fact that many people died in accidents because of blowouts. They put on feel-good television propaganda to appease the public, rather than admitting to the problem or their fault. Notice how businesses, government, and other institutions pander to people's denial, to their desire not to know, not to want to be bothered, not to be troubled with having to think about the problem. They know that society is living in denial, and it takes only the tiniest effort to get people to forget about "yesterday's news," as if all of yesterday's problems have been solved or are over, just because they occurred yesterday. People seem to be willing to overlook wrong and evil on the larger scale, just as they would rather not see those things in their own lives. read more ...
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