Kendra Langdon Juskus writes this in the website, Evangelicals for Social Action. In an article called “The Danger of Small Steps,” she questions the notion that individual action by itself can produce meaningful change. In fact, she says that it gives a false feeling of doing something successful and significant whereas the larger problems go unaddressed.
The degradation of the environment and the degradation of business morality happen over long periods of time, thus, our perspective is limited. It gives individual action a veneer of success when the problems are long term and not easily understood by individuals.
There is a section I recommend where they discuss “shifting base syndrome.” This is when you measure progress based on your earlier perception not the actual baseline. In other words, you consider normal to be inside your experience when in fact normal is based before or outside your view of the situation.
Small, incremental personal changer is good but not good enough. The forces that confront us ,with their lack of care for the environment and their pervasive lack of moral judgment, are enormous. Those forces can damage society permanently whether we change our own lives or not.
I have no doubt in the wisdom and importance of personal change. But without a larger vision it is inadequate to defend us against moral vacuums and wrongdoing.
My blog posts also appear on my Facebook. One of my friends made some interesting comments and I want to share them with you.
As I understand it the U.S. Military built the main cable grid of the internet in the 60’s or 70’s(my history is maybe a bit hazy here) and out of all the things the government could socialize or keep socialized it seems the information super-highway of the internet would be high on their list of priorities(if protecting those less fortunate was one of ’em) and absolutely within their jurisdiction. It seems obvious to me that the dissemination of information has become a threat to the oligarchy and now they’ll use proxy companies to absolutely fuck the lower-classes into absolute uneducated ignorance. Then when the obvious pitfalls of privatized internet (organized as such) manifest they’ll say “See! This is what happens with capitalism!” Fascism is wily two-headed cobra, I hope I live to see it bombed and sacked back into the stone age.
Joseph Stiglitz, one of my favorite economists, believe that Asia is “decoupling” from the United States and Europe. You see, the United States is a 300 million population but if you sell to India and China alone of the nations in the region, you have 2.6 billion consumers. It’s a better market in the long term than the United States or Europe as well as providing necessary long term benefits to the nations themselves.
But there are other reasons, the great nations of Asia are likely to shift more to domestic production and investment. In the past, China, India, South Korea, Japan, etc. invested in the United States. They as well as many European nations bought into the housing bubble as well as many more reliable investments. They did this in the belief that the United States was reliable investment environment and that, more importantly, Wall Street had great skills in the banking and other investment industries. Of course, the “legendary” expertise of Wall Street was no more than successful propaganda protecting a rotting edifice that through financial “innovation” and simple greed severely damaged the world’s economy.
If you were a government official would you encourage investment in the United States or take the advice of any Wall Street investment firm? I’m sure there are some officials remaining who can hold that view but the long term does not bode well for U.S. investment or purchasing, you see, the development of the domestic market in these countries means a rise in the standard of living, an increase in wages and rise in prices. All of these factor mitigate against the corporate dream of an endless stream of off shored jobs pushing their profits.
But this is an opportunity. As these other nations develop higher standards of living and their purchasing power increases, we can sell them products. We can make things again. If we start now, and by now I mean by the end of this decade, for not only is there no political will, intelligence or leadership, the current business philosophy will not allow the government to encourage such investment. The United States government since the 1980’s has pursued a policy of the financial sector as a priority as opposed to the poor stepchild of manufacturing. The result of this policy are all around us. We can do better.
ABC news reports that many Americans are declining to use their vacation time. Only 57 percent of Americans are taking their full vacation time. And what makes this story even more bizarre, Americans average only 13 days of vacation.
Want to see the numbers?
Italians 42 days
France 37
Canada 26
Japan 25
Korea 25
United States 13 days
How did we get here? Aren’t we supposed to be the richest country on earth? How did Americans wind up with an average of 13 days of vacation and far, far worse, almost half unwilling to use their full time apparently for fear of losing their jobs?
It takes a decoupling of morals from business. When a businessman, when an employer, looks at his workers and says to himself, “That one is using his vacation time. I can do without him,” we have arrived at a bad place.
And yet, where is the outrage (besides mine)? Foreigners in far less wealthy countries give their workers in many cases three times the vacation time of American workers and what’s more they take the time.
“Let’s get rid of the people who work here for fifty weeks a year and take a vacation.” How do you even think like that? What kind of thought process produces that kind of cruel immorality?
It is written: Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.
The King James Bible prescribes better treatment for an ox than that given American workers. The ox gets some share of its labor that could be denied. American workers have no benefits that cannot be denied if even the legal ones put you in danger of being fired.
And I don’t want to hear, “They have to do it to compete.” That’s a nasty age old excuse for any kind of immoral (and often incompetent) act. You could compete better with workers who have no where to go, who don’t get minimum wage or get pregnant or have bad days or get ill or don’t look like other people, etc. Where do you want to stop? You can’t. Talk about slippery slope. If any vile, virtually criminal, act can be justified by the need to compete, there is no bottom standard to stop at, no place of safety, no island of ethics.
You might ask me as a business ethics teacher, what it’s like to teach that subject in a country where taking your vacation days can cost you your job. No fun. It’s preaching against alcoholism in a saloon, safe sex in a Thai brothel, hypocrisy in mega church. In short, it’s hard and it’s not getting any easier. You always think that it’s just got to turn a corner that some limit has been reached and it hasn’t.
That’s the news today. After denying there was going to be a deal, Google and Verizon made one. Goodness, you might think corporations could lie with a straight face.
Very bad. Very, very bad. Essentially, if you are a “carrier” and I mean a giant corporate one, you’re going to make a bundle of money. I mean you’re going to have to go to a hardware store and buy snow shovels just to get the small denominations out of the way. (Maybe you’ll burn them for heat?)
If on the other hand you are a consumer, you are going to have a different deal. Now probably at this very moment you are expecting some satirical jab at trying to encompass the amount of money you are going to have to spend, right? Wrong. You and I already know what’s going to happen. A tiered market like they want to establish is just like your cable service. That’s right, you know that cheap service you get in your house, the one that requires you to pay for extra hookups and offers you hundreds of channels most of which no sane human being could subject himself to without a frontal lobotomy, that one. The cable service which finds new and more interesting ways to charge you for services that used to be free and raise the charges on the ones you get now. That’s the one!
I bet you feel good right now. You look at your monthly hook up for internet and see a bill of what is probably in the neighborhood of fifty dollars but in a few years you could be offered a cornucopia of services (that you used to get for free) running in the hundreds of dollars. But get a load of this, with cable you order stuff you want, with the internet you might have to pay to get sites unblocked. Won’t that be neat? I don’t know what it might be aside from political content, art, films, foreigners (especially news services like Al Jazeera), and a bunch of stuff.
But they’d never censor the internet, right? In 2002, Google censored sites critical of Scientology. Oceana, a non profit advertised against the big cruise lines dumping of sewage, so in February, 2003, Google pulled their ads. I could go on (and on and on). There are a lot of examples of internet censorship, stuff most people would be surprised anybody would want to take off but they do and they have.
Google’s public policy blog (where you can go to complain and I recommend you do!) has the details on the result of their secret negotiations with Verizon.
James Pilant
P.S. A little pep talk.
Well, here we are looking at a mass of money, organization and greed. They intend to take and take and take. Well, you want to give them a fight or what? You want to crawl or beg? You want to hand them your money, one dime at a time until there is nothing left?
Don’t be afraid of these people. They have rationalized away human values for a philosophy of greed. Human beings astonish and surprise them. We speak a language of morality and honor. They simply do not understand. If it isn’t money or you can’t swap it for money, they don’t believe it’s there. When we talk of duty, they laugh. When we speak of sacrifice, they say, “Yes, you must, ” and give up nothing themselves.
These pawns, these caricatures of living things are passing phenomenon like pharisees and know nothings, royalists and brownshirts. This is their time but it won’t always be there time. They will slink off to the Cayman Islands where they can polish their gold in peace, while we human beings put our country back together and build a place where duty, honor and brotherhood are not jokes.
(Now watch a little film and relax, have a laugh. You may enjoy this. It’s a comedic take on inspirational movies speeches.)
Google's CustomersOctober 21st, 2009 Google and Verizon issue joint statement in which they say this – For starters we both think it’s essential that the Internet remains an unrestricted and open platform — where people can access any content (so long as it’s legal), as well as the services and applications of their choice.
January 14th, 2010 Google calls for open internet.
August 4th, 2010 New York Times reports Google and Verizon near secret deal to undermine net neutrality.
August 5th, 2010 FCC abandons talks on net neutrality.
August 5th, 2010
Verizon issues following statement – The NYT article regarding conversations between Google and Verizon is mistaken. It fundamentally misunderstands our purpose. As we said in our earlier FCC filing, our goal is an Internet policy framework that ensures openness and accountability, and incorporates specific FCC authority, while maintaining investment and innovation. To suggest this is a business arrangement between our companies is entirely incorrect. Translation – we’re not making a deal.
August 9th, 2010 Verizon and Google announce a “proposal.” This is apparently strikingly different from a deal, because a deal would imply profits of billions of dollars. You see, a proposal only “implies” profits of billions of dollars. Got it?
What are the results of this deal? Let me quote Craig AaronThe deal would allow ISPs to effectively split the Internet into “two pipes” — one of which would be reserved for “managed services,” a pay-for-pay platform for content and applications. This is the proverbial toll road on the information superhighway, a fast lane reserved for the select few, while the rest of us are stuck on the cyber-equivalent of a winding dirt road.
Probably, you are wondering how you fit into this picture. Now hold on to your hat, gentle reader. Those in the bottom eighty percent make thirty nine point five of all consumer purchases.
So, look on the bright side! The bottom 80% of Americans buys 39.5 % of consumer goods as opposed to 37% of the top five percent of the income earners in the U.S. That means we are 2% up.
I have to admit I feel a little left behind but 2% is 2% and I should take what solace I can from this. Right?
This picture is from the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress. This is from a photo collection of the Great Depression. From The Great Depression
Now, take a look at a more hopeful poster –
This is from a huge collection of pictures. You might take a look.
A BBC report spells out how bad the hiring situation is in the United States. On the very dim bright side of the equation, 143,000 of the jobs lost in July were census jobs which were temporary. So part of the job loss was expected. On the exceptionally bad side of the news, not counting the census workers, United States job growth is very, very slow, too slow for there to be a sustained recovery.
Kendra Langdon Juskus writes this in the website, Evangelicals for Social Action. In an article called “The Danger of Small Steps,” she questions the notion that individual action by itself can produce meaningful change. In fact, she says that it gives a false feeling of doing something successful and significant whereas the larger problems go unaddressed.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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