The story referenced below is a sad tale but a common one.
A young man feeling pressured by his employer worked long hour days for a long period of time and as a result died.
A small sacrifice for predatory capitalism.
I believe in righteousness but there is small part of me that admires the complete ruthlessness of working people to death for maximum profit.
If you can work a human being for forty hours a week, you get the benefit of a regular employee but if you can classify his job as not being covered by hourly limits, you can get him to work eighty hours a work, two workers for the price of one. My understanding is that a hundred hours is the current popular number.
Do I need to tell you that this is a cruel from of exploitation?
We live in a society that worships mammon. The fact that the Bible expressly prohibits the worship of money does not seem to have any traction at all.
Of course any sort of Christian based belief system parted ways with American capitalism long ago.
So, people are being sacrificed to the bottom line. In this case, worked extreme hours for long periods ot time. Dying young saves the company from the problems of paying retirement and there are many other benefits besides.
I remember studying child labor in the late 19th Century. They worked six days a week, 12 hour days. Of course, that is only 72 hours. One could be impressed at the kindness of management.
It is well understood that when huge multi-national corporations mistreat their workers, that they have little individual recourse. They are an atom alone in the universe to paraphrase one of predatory capitalism’s most revered leaders, Margaret Thatcher. Alone and helpless against politically influential and in the case of the United States, politically invulnerable.
Overworking people is just a corporation and its leadership mistreating and exploiting human beings. It is simple abuse.
Why hasn’t anything been done about this?
Because we have two political parties, one dominated by oligarchs and the other has a thing called corporate Democrats which means they attempt at times to appear to be friends of the working class but their abject corporate servility and devotion to corporate contributions are so ingrained they find that any action that might benefit common workers is in their view unrealistic and radical.
In fact, it is quite clear that corporate Democrats find voters a bit intimidating and troublesome. That is why they employ think tank and professional to avoid contact with the teaming masses praying for help.
And so the abuse of workers, unpaid overtime, illegal firings, union busting and sometimes simply working a human being to death is beneath the concern of those running our government.
In the United States corporate profits are superb even magnificent.
Do you know why?
It is hard to fail as an American corporation because you pay few or any taxes, you can legally treat your workers as little more than cattle, and largely exist outside all the rules — and if rules get in your way, you can get them fixed.
It is a very comfortable place for a corporation to exist, not so much for the worker though or the citizen or any human being with moral fiber.
Read the story below and realize that he died for corporate profits.
James Pilant
Madison E. Goldberg writing for People Magazine has a article: Microsoft Engineer Dies at Work at 35 as His Family Warns of Overworking Employees.
A 35-year-old Microsoft engineer died at work in Silicon Valley last month and his family is now warning companies of overworking their employees.
Pratik Pandey was “found face-down” at 2 a.m. local time on Aug. 20 in Mountain View, Calif., on Microsoft’s campus, according to the Palo Alto Daily Post.
Starbucks’ CEO, Brian Niccol, made 6,666 times more than his average worker last year, according to a report on the growing gap between top executives and their workers.
The inequality gap between CEOs’ pay and that of their median workers rose in 2024 to 285 to 1 from 268 to 1 in 2023, according to a report released this week by the largest federation of labor unions in the US, the AFL-CIO.
I will freely disclose that I find the CEO in question, Brian Niccol, reptilian and repulsive, and that is beside the fact that he is paid way too much.
But there’s more. Here’s an article from 2023 By Nik Popli. He writes about an investor advocacy group that calls out CEO’s who get generous pay packages while their companies suffer losses particularly in shareholder returns. I recommend you read the entire article.
The typical CEO of a company listed on the S&P 500—a stock market index with 500 large publicly traded corporations—earned $18.8 million last year. That’s up roughly 21% from 2021, even though the S&P 500 index was down 20%. Company boards gave particularly big grants of stock to reward those in charge of navigating their companies through high inflation, continued supply chain problems, and rising wages—as well as meeting performance metrics.
But an investor advocacy group says some of the nation’s most well-known companies overpaid their chief executives. A new report from As You Sow listed 100 “overpaid” CEOs who received high compensation in 2022 despite mixed shareholder returns for their companies.
At the top of the list: Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav, who received $246 million in 2022 even though the company’s stock fell 60% in the same year and roughly 40% of shares voted against his pay package. The second most overpaid CEO was Estée Lauder’s Fabrizio Freda, who earned $66 million in 2022 while the company’s stock fell 33%. Penn National Gaming’s Jay Snowden, who was paid $65.9 million, comes in at no. 3 on the list; his company’s stock fell 42.7%.
And for the year before, we have the magazine Fortune in an article by Chris Morris, Maria Aspan entitled rather directly These are the 10 most overpaid CEOs in the 2022 Fortune 500. Once again, I liked the article and recommend you read it in full.
Overall hourly U.S. wages fell 2.4% on average last year (after adjusting for inflation), but the median total compensation of CEOs Fortune studied as part of this year’s Fortune 500 ranking jumped 30% from a year earlier to $15.9 million.
That made us curious. Did those CEOs deserve the compensation packages they received? Fortune’s Maria Aspan and Scott DeCarlo analyzed the compensation and stock performance of the 280 Fortune 500 CEOs who have held their jobs for at least three years, ranking them on pay vs. performance.
Apparently factual analysis based on the statistics of market performance does not paint an appealing picture of CEO pay. I am not surprised. The media celebrates these figures as fearless leaders and innovative entrepreneurs with little actual examination of the facts. And the way corporate power is structured, an obedient board of directors is just a matter of time for an aggressive CEO.
The Progressive Shopper posts the “Overpaid CEO Score Card.”
The list identifies the 100 Most Overpaid CEOs from the S&P 500 index, highlighting those CEOs deemed excessively compensated based on their performance. It specifically focuses on CEOs who were addressed at annual meetings held between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023. This year’s findings also incorporate insights from annual voting patterns and regression analysis conducted by HIP Investor.
Mentioned previously was the Shareholder Advocacy Group, “As You Sow.” This is a ten year study they published about CEO compensation entitled 10 Years of Study Shows Overpaid CEOs Underperform.
Listed below the link are its most damning conclusions.
Companies with the most overpaid CEOs have had lower returns to shareholders than the average S&P 500 company. The typical S&P 500 firm made 8.5% per year annualized from February 2015 to September 2023, the 100 Most Overpaid CEOs’ annual returns lagged at 7.9%, the worst 25 dragged at 6.0%, and the ten worst were behind at 6.5% per year. As a group, over a decade, overpaid CEOs underperformed.
Total pay for the most overpaid CEOs continues to grow. When As You Sow compiled its first overpaid CEO list ten years ago, the average pay of the 10 Most Overpaid was $56 million. This year, the average of the top ten was $88 million, an increase over that time period of 59%.
There were more articles and many opinion pieces. All these sources saying that CEO’s are over paid — and, yet, they continue to be overpaid!
But it seems likely that AI and an increasingly darkening economic horizon under our current regime’s bizarre decision making may very well diminish these payouts.
(Quoted directly from the article above.) The statistics are surprising. While psychopathy affects about 1% of the general population, the numbers are significantly higher in the business world. According to research cited in “Philonomist,” psychopathy affects 4% to 20% of employees, with a particular concentration in leadership positions. Simon Croom, a professor and researcher at the University of San Diego, claims that about 12% of senior corporate leaders exhibit psychopathic traits, meaning “psychopathy is up to 12 times more common among executives than in the general population.” Recent studies suggest an even higher percentage: about 20% of CEOs may exhibit psychopathic traits. This overrepresentation is not accidental – psychopaths are attracted to power, and some of their personality traits can actually aid in advancing through the corporate hierarchy.
Twenty percent of CEO’s is a very high proportion of working CEO’s with a serious personality disorder. What are the implications? I have had the misfortune to encounter psychopaths in my work in criminal justice. As you might imagine they were wrongdoers, remorseless liars and miscreants without a shred of human feeling. It was best to lock them up and remove them from the larger population. And while we have this choice when their behavior results in criminality, what choices do we have when their behavior produces corporate success?
Not many. We live in a CEO worshiping culture where it is assumed that CEO’s are geniuses and swashbuckling entrepreneurs. I do find any of this to be true and my opinion of American CEO’s is barely printable or speakable in polite company. But in a culture where CEO’s are given free rein to commit economic havoc (and they do), the psychopathic CEO and all others are well protected from interference or any form of justice. I could point to hundreds of examples but Boeing’s decisions resulting in the crashes of two aircraft with more than three hundred dead resulted in no criminal charges.
You might say a psychopath functioning as a CEO has found his natural environment much like a lion on the plains of the Serengeti.
America’s wars have been a study of mine for some years. In the military it often said that you learn a great deal about a nation by the people who serve, their willingness to act bravely and on behalf of others. I can’t help but believe that our willingness as a nation to use psychopaths to run important organizations says a lot about us as a nation.
A sort of a post religious world sort of decision would be one conclusion. An utter emphasis on success measured in dollar amounts would be another.
It would seem that for much of our leadership in the United States, any consideration of religion, patriotism, or any other human quality like empathy or kindness is simply irrelevant. The only thing that matters is narrowly defined set of personal economic goals, you know, so much money, so many houses, the trophy spouse and the political influence. It creates and maintains a cruel and rapacious word where spouses age and must be replaced, neighborhoods go out of style so you have to move and friends and allies are little more than simple pawns to be discarded when convenient.
And of course, the planet itself is to squeezed like an orange for every last bit of use without any regard for sustainability or our posterity. In the world of the psychopath, things and people exist only for use.
From my point of view entrusting societal resources to the mentally ill is a bad idea. But apparently for many of our “leadership” class, they are too useful to give up.
I will return to the topic of psychopaths in business in later posts. The subject fascinates me and should concern you.
James Alan Pilant
The article above that was linked to and quoted from is entitled:
Is Psychopathy an Asset in Business? Facts and Myths About Ruthless Leaders
Home Depot is paying a settlement of around two million dollars for “scanner violations.”
Here is a direct quote from the article referenced at the top:
The complaint filed in San Diego Superior Court said that when people at Home Depot brought an item to checkout, they would be charged more money than was written on the shelf tag or on the item itself. Such violations are called “scanner violations,” the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office said in a press release Thursday.
Why isn’t this a crime? These customers were charged more than the listed price. Is there anyone, anywhere who believes this was just a mistake?
And missing from the article is the most important piece of information of all — how much did Home Depot profit from this nefarious scheme? I suspect that the two million dollars penalty is but a tiny fraction of the amount taken from consumers.
Apparently living as we do in the declining and predatory phase of capitalism this is regarded as a success ful business decision. It is also, evil, morally bankrupt, and a profound insult to the duty of honesty and fair dealing. Jack Welch and Milton Friedman would undoubtedly be impressed by the business skills here displayed by Home Depot.
Do we want morality and ethics in our business dealings in the United States? Apparently not very much or hardly at all. A fine which appears to be but a small fraction of the amount stolen by scanner violations is not going to discourage the company from stealing again.
What are we becoming as a nation, as a people and as a civilization where we routinize simple theft as just part of doing business? It is not too much to demand that businesses abide by the listed prices. It is not too much to demand that businesses abstain from theft. It is not too much to expect that businesses treat their customers as guests and assets rather than easy marks.
We do what is right because it is right, not because it is profitable, or that people might like us. We have duties as Americans to our fellow citizens and the nation as a whole. And if I may speak frankly, a duty to Almighty God to live as just human beings.
Let’s start with the facts of the matters as explained in the top article above:
On Feb. 10, 2022, the woman was hospitalized after experiencing high blood pressure at work, according to the lawsuit. When she returned to her office, she noticed a new employee, who was about 30 years younger, sitting at her desk, the lawsuit says. That day, the woman met with the general manager, who questioned her about how long she planned to work for the company, according to the suit. “Where do you see yourself? Do you need to keep working? Don’t you want to travel? See your brother?” are questions the manager is accused of asking her, the lawsuit says. The woman made it clear she wanted to continue working for two or three more years, according to the EEOC.
The resolution of the case, again from the article above:
Now Covenant Woods has agreed to settle the lawsuit for $78,000, the EEOC, the federal agency in charge of protecting workers against discrimination, announced in an April 30 news release. Covenant Woods is to pay the woman the amount in full, according to a consent decree filed April 29. She will receive $50,000 for compensatory damages and $28,000 for wages.
When I was teaching, I often got a very fine question from my students about these matters. Since, you can fire anyone for any cause, how does a business get caught for discrimination? It’s very simple, they explain it to the victim and the world. I have literally seen cases where people were fired and the business in question sent them a letter explaining that they were being fired for being old. (And then I would explain how businesses very often think they know the law when they clearly don’t.)
The business here didn’t leave us in much doubt as to their motives. I have to admire them for the cold blooded villainy with which the whole matter was executed.
This is one of the standard business ethics things we see over and over again. I don’t think it is as common as being fired for getting pregnant (You are not supposed to fire women for getting pregnant either.) but it is right up there.
Why do business owners keep doing stupid stuff like this? It’s very simple. Our society doesn’t place much value on age and experience — and so they feel safe in exercising that prejudice.
Do they realize they’re being stupid? No, generally stupid, incompetent and greedy people are the very last people to realize their inherent bad qualities. And since they are invoking the values, the corrupt and foolish values – mind you, of the larger society, they think they are just making your average “American” decisions.
Here is what should be done.
We need to change the way we educate business majors. Currently we teach them the current beliefs in the field of business largely unvarnished by research. So, we get a whole bunch of people with little real education in any of the human endeavors that make whole human beings. Specifically there should be a Business Law II course which goes into more depth about our laws and society.
We should teach a business profession imbued with human values and ethics. We should teach a business regime where businesses form a partnership, a symbiosis, with our greater society, participants in the health and welfare of the people of the nation.
What we get now in many cases are morally blank pursuers of cash at all costs and over any obstacle. Now, some would deny this – they are wrong – and I know they are wrong because I taught in a business department and running across a student whose one abiding desire was to make a ton of money legally or otherwise was a regular event.
Let’s create a new crop of businessman fit to live among us in a democratic society based on law and ethical virtue.
It is the very least a morally responsible teaching profession should do.
An essay in Vox suggests that there is real hope for climate improvement provided we don’t see a second Trump Term. (From the article:)
Last year, more solar panels were installed in China — the world’s largest carbon emitter — than the US has installed in its entire history. More electric vehicles were sold worldwide than ever. Energy efficiency is improving. Dozens of countries are widening the gap between their economic growth and their greenhouse gas emissions. And governments stepped up their ambitions to curb their impact on the climate, particularly when it comes to potent greenhouse gases like methane. If these trends continue, global emissions may actually start to decline.
Climate change is a critical business ethics issue. The danger of rising temperatures calls into question the social utility of many common industries and business practices. We are at a critical point. The article is optimistic but very guardedly and there are dozens of caveats. We are in dangerous waters with very few sure ways to go on these matters.
Ellen DeGeneres is back on the comedy circuit.
Now she tells it as a joke but back in the day, while the show was running, it was a classic case of power corrupting a celebrity.
The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday voted 3-2 in favor of adopting a historic and far-reaching ban on noncompete agreements, potentially giving more leverage in the job market to millions of U.S. workers. The agency has said that the agreements, in which workers are forbidden from seeking a job with a competing business for a certain period of time, lead to an “unfair method of competition” and violate federal law. The vote by the agency’s five commissioners this week means the ban will move forward.
From time to time, the world of business ethics coughs up a good story, a positive story. The Federal Trade Commission has approved a ban on noncompete agreements. This has been long overdue. Originally non-compete agreements were targeted at employees whose inside knowledge of the company would give an unfair advantage to any company that hired them. Unfortunately, many employers realized they could use the agreements to make it difficult for employees to leave since the agreement made it very difficult for them to get a job in the same field. They argued that knowledge given in fast food places like how to make a sandwich were proprietary and required a non-compete agreement. This legal bufoonery did not disguise the intent of making life more difficult for employees and empowering the company to treat them badly since the workers had difficulty finding new jobs with the agreement in place.
Musk on Tuesday responded to an interim court order from Australia’s eSafety Commission requesting that X hide graphic and distressing videos of the recent Sydney stabbing within 24 hours with a Wizard of Oz meme: it’s all shits and giggles over at X. In further posts, he took aim at the eSafety commissioner, claiming she wants “authority over all countries on Earth”, after labelling her a “Commissar” for requesting the removal of the video in the first place, which depicted an attack that the NSW police have since classified as a terrorist incident.
The idea that freedom of speech is served by these horror postings of crimes and other savagery is just nonsense. Media has the power to exalt, to educate and to entertain. But here it is simply a horror fest in which demented criminals are given free publicity encouraging copycats and universal cynicism from the nihilistic values on display by these internet companies.
We have a right to see that evil deeds not be celebrated, to not see vicious anti-social clowns in action and absolutely a right to not ever have to be treated to the half wit, degenerate manifestos of mass murderers and terrorists.
If the auto company has your car connected to the internet, your driving can be monitored and your insurance costs can increase.
Automakers have been selling data about the driving behavior of millions of people to the insurance industry. In the case of General Motors, affected drivers weren’t informed, and the tracking led insurance companies to charge some of them more for premiums. I’m the reporter who broke the story. I recently discovered that I’m among the drivers who were spied on.
People were led to believe that OnStar got you help when you had car or travel problems but that is not all that the program does. Get a load of this:
My husband’s LexisNexis report had a breakdown of the 203 trips we had taken in the car since January, including the distance, the start and end times, and how often we hard-braked or accelerated rapidly. The Verisk report, which dated to mid-December and recounted 297 trips, had a high-level summary at the top: 1,890.89 miles driven; 4,251 driving minutes; 170 hard-brake events; 24 rapid accelerations; and, on a positive note, zero speeding events.
Once they’ve got your data, it can be sold to anyone at anytime and it never goes away. It can raise your insurance rates. It has raised insurance rates on many individuals. Your data is in real way, digital currency and when stacked with other such digital data, you pay the costs of that knowledge.
Google is going to delay its plan to eliminate cookies. I find this a depressing development. We consumers should have the right to not have our internet choices tracked and reported. However, Google still plans on eliminating cookies, just when is still up in the air.
Quote below from the link above from Yahoo Finance:
Google has spent years preparing to get rid of cookies following similar moves by Apple and Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox browser. It has promoted the change as a way to improve consumer privacy and developed an alternative set of technologies known as the Privacy Sandbox to replace many of their features. The plans have encountered several roadblocks from industry participants. Google first announced plans to block cookies in early 2020, targeting the end of 2022 for their elimination.
Gateway Pundit is seeking bankruptcy protections as it attempt to deal with a flood of lawsuits.
Quote from the link listed above:
For two decades, the site has published falsehoods and conspiracy theories on everything from vaccines to election fraud. Donald Trumpfrequentlyshares its material. The most notable lawsuit against the website is from Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. In 2021, they sued the Gateway Pundit, Hoft and his twin brother, and website contributor Joe Hoft in St. Louis Circuit Court for defamation and emotional distress. The website had falsely alleged that the mother-daughter pair had purposefully manipulated the vote count in Joe Biden’s favor.
I won’t miss them. They deserve the economic penalties derived from their misbehavior.
An Iranian court sentenced outspoken rapper Toomaj Salehi to death after his arrest over songs that criticized the government, his lawyer said Wednesday.
This is an extremely sad story, a tragedy. Civilizations advance along a number of different avenues simultaneously although often at different speeds. Artistic movements are often less noticed than economic or technological or even political developments but it can be argued that artistic developments are the most important in the long term. Songs are strong indicators of the health of a society. If songwriters have great freedom to create, that says a lot about the creative environment in which they function.
We may safely conclude that Iran is a zone devoid of progress for artistic expression. This is a sure sign of a fearful, incompetent and reactionary government. The United States even with its turbulent political activity and struggling factions is a far more healthy environment for art. That is a good sign for the nation’s future and its effect on the larger development of worldwide civilization.
I’m sure most of my kind readers are of the law abiding type. I would like you to imagine what it would feel like to be surrounded by heavily armed policemen who believe that you are a dangerous felon right in the middle of committing a crime. Watch the film below to get the details of what happened to Jamie Rodgers in that same situation. God forbid anything like this should ever happen to you!
Rodgers’ car was in the shop at the dealership. He was given a loaner car so he could drive to work. The dealership mislaid his paperwork and reported the car as stolen. The police stopped him on the highway, surrounded his car with heavily armed officers. He was finally released when the situation was clarified. It is only a matter of chance and luck that he wasn’t killed or seriously injured.
I’m flabbergasted at this error. Is it just routine to report cars as stolen? I did some internet searches looking for dealerships who had reported loaners as stolen but all I got were references to the current case. So, apparently this is far outside the norm.
In my opinion the dealership is liable for pain and suffering. It was a very serious error and they have to be responsible for what they did.
The more I thought about the case, the more I saw the similarities to “swatting.” A bad actor can use the police to harm enemies with this kind of report. Fortunately, there was none of that here. But the strategy of “lets you and him fight” has been a regular ploy throughout all recorded history. Of course, I’m just a cynic. Let’s hope that nothing like this every happens again.
Rodgers, who was on his way to his job as an athletic trainer, told KTLA, “I’m thinking I’m going to get shot. I’m a Black man being pulled over in Orange County. … I’ve heard too many stories of this happening.” A fleet of sheriff’s patrol cars had tailed him, leading to suddenly being stopped and faced with about a dozen officers aiming their guns at him, as they had been mistakenly informed that Rodgers was armed and dangerous.
In Great Britain, austerity was imposed on the public and lasted for many years. The decline in the quality and quantity of the infrastructure, schools, public facilities like libraries and medical care has been very hard on the population and is considered a major factor in British economic decline. . It also was cruel and it seems both in fore and hind sight to be unnecessary. But the Tories basked in their “get tough” attitude toward the public. They has showed themselves to be “manly” men, willing to put hard limits on the disorganized mob of citizenry always “looking for a handout.”
The Tories in Britain are watched closely by their American counterparts and the Americans bounce ideas between themselves and as far as I can tell, almost all right wing think tanks and a good number of right leaning politicians find these ideas compelling.
So, all over the United States, Republicans are doing cruel, obnoxious and borderline evil acts to prove that they too have the cojones to deprive the public of important things. So, we have cuts in food to school children, laws against giving water to waiting voters, regular attempts to gut child labor laws and finally — and our topic for today, denying municipalities the right to require water and shade for workers.
Florida under the “leadership” of Gov. DeSantis have a adopted a law banning municipalities from requiring heat protections for worker beyond those provided by state and federal law. This follows adoption of a similar law in Texas. You would think that heat isn’t much of a problem if two legislatures feel that nothing needs to be done locally but people do die: (link below)
A sugar cane worker on a work visa from Mexico died just the other day. Is that the only death? I very much doubt it but I don’t know of any data base I can find more extensive data from. The sugar cane worker death made the news because they’re contesting the OSHA fine. I suspect that foreign worker deaths rarely make the news.
A study from the University of Florida shows that heat deaths in the stare are on the rise with the changes caused by global warming. (Link Below)
What do Republicans say about these cruel measures. Well, let me quote:
Republican Rep. Tiffany Esposito of Fort Myers, who sponsored the House version of the bill, told reporters that her husband has worked in South Florida’s construction sector for two decades and that she knows the industry takes worker safety seriously. “This is very much a people-centric bill,” Esposito said. “If we want to talk about Floridians thriving, they do that by having good job opportunities. And if you want to talk about health and wellness, and you want to talk about how we can make sure that all Floridians are healthy, you do that by making sure that they have a good job. And in order to provide good jobs, we need to not put businesses out of business.” (This quote is from the link below.)
“People-centric.” Sometimes you get the impression that the Republican Party is actually some sort of satirical variation on an actual political party. Dead workers are not a demonstration of people centered legislature. And the idea that companies will go out of business if they have to follow heat rules is nonsense.
So, in conclusion, the cruelty is the point. Although there is a certain element of corporate boot licking and servile obedience to the construction industry, inflicting pain on workers is a considered a mark of virtue in the current Republican Party and I am appalled by this pseudo-masculine nonsense.
It is better to feed children, protect the weak and maintain worker protections from danger than to aspire to some kind keyboard machismo.
If your one desire is to get rich, I only have one thing to say to you. If you are working, going to school, and studying in your spare time, so you can get rich, this essay is for you.
Do something else.
It’s okay to have money but it is just stuff. Trust me. I am old man now and I’ve seen a lot of stuff, you can always get more.
(Just in case, you still want to get rich, below is a link to one of those constantly appearing article where wealthy people give you useless advice on how to be incredibly wealthy. They tell you to scrimp and save when obviously they did not. They tell you to invest sometimes in specific stocks that will add to their bottom line. They tell you to work hard when every picture and every article ever written about them discusses their sexual adventures, their times at resorts (and rehabs), their enormous homes and the huge sums they began with. If you are ready to believe this stuff, well, good luck with that.)
Let me explain. Do you know what the problem is at Boeing? Right now, all that the leadership intends, the board and the executives, is to make money. There is a laser like devotion to bonuses and stock profits. It is a perfect example of an organization built on greed and perhaps, even Milton Friedman’s silly concept of shareholder value. What happens when you seek profit at all cost? Your product safety and quality go down and people die — and they did. Eventually no one wants your product as they realize that being a customer means the only, the absolutely only purpose a customer has, is to be a source of revenue. There is no recognition of the customer as a human being, a brother or sister in the flesh, a value beyond revenue in at least some tiny sense. In other words, you are just dust as far as the company is concerned. Should you die, they will send a carefully composed form letter and check to make sure the insurance refunded them their losses, just the cost of doing business.
What made Boeing the incredible success that it was once? They were engineers and men of vision. They loved building aircraft, they loved overcoming challenges and above all, they loved the concept of flight. In a real way, a miracle of the 20th century. The aircraft they created were things of beauty. The other commercial values, fuel economy, customer service and long term value, all followed in the wake of engineering and visionary goals. Because the creators of Boeing knew what the current crop of fools do not, building airplanes and flying millions of people around the world is a calling, something to live for.
And that is what your life goal should be. Instead of contemplating being rich, contemplate making a new product, working to serve humankind, being a lady or gentleman, living a good life with an appreciation of literature, science and the arts. In other words, have a goal worthy of an intelligent moral being.
To reiterate, making money is okay but it should not be an end in itself.
Look below at the picture of a Boeing 707. It is not just a plane. In a real way, it was a revolution in travel and in technology of the this small planet. Have you ever looked at pictures of planes from the Second World War? After a while, you can very often tell what nation the aircraft belongs to without seeing any insignia at all. That is because our creations mirror their creators, their backgrounds and experience. The Boeing 707 was embodied vision of the people who built them.
Be someone that makes a difference in our lives, a positive one. Make a new product, sell a new idea, write, think and contemplate. Money is to a certain extent necessary. That while true does not mean getting value is more important than anything else.
Have a life. Form an idea of the eternal and get in touch with it. Have a strong relationship with someone — I’ll leave the choice to you. You don’t need my recommendation for your personal life. Just know that I hope you have a good one.
Live a life that at the end, you can stand before your creator or your nation or your philosophy and feel that you can stand proud as one who was the best human being possible.
James Alan Pilant
(My thanks to Wikipedia for the use of their 707 picture. I have followed the instructions on credit carefully. If you wish any changed or can suggest and improvement in how I use your material, please let me know. And I want to remind all my readers that Wikipedia is a worthy cause to donate to.)
I want to write today about three business ethics topics. The first one is a Guardian article that says “all billionaires under thirty have inherited their wealth.” I find this very concerning. Large concentrations of inherited wealth have unfortunate effects in democratic societies, even a limited democracy like the United States.
The article goes on to describe the incredible amount of inherited wealth we’re talking about as one generation give way to another, 5.2 Trillion dollars. These are world-wide numbers, of course. It would not be much of a stretch to suggests that the monarchies that dominated global politics in the 19th century are being replicated today in this dragon’s horde of incredible wealth and power. It does not bode well for the health, safety and financial security of the great mass of the population.
I have written about this often. In the United States, loony billionaires have gained more and more political power as their dark money dominates political advertising in state after state. It certainly give the impression of living in an oligarchy of inherited and incompetent wealth and power.
I will continue to cover our deteriorating governing system in later writing.
California is considering a law mandating rules that allow workers “the right to disconnect,” that is, not to be available by phone or computer twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to their employers. The horrifying and tragic effects of our always online culture include – never being able to not be at work. Literally, many jobs follow you everywhere and demand that you be available. I don’t think I need to tell you that people need sleep, family time, vacations and simply time to regenerate their interest in life – and yet we allow businesses to place out size and fairly irrational burdens on workers.
There needs to be compensation for making people constantly accessible at home and their absolutely needs to be rules about how much of an employees life is accessible to the moment by moment needs of a business. Apparently there is some awareness of this and I am pleased that the world is seemingly moving in a positive direction.
And now in the world of business ethics, the massive dead pus filled corpse of the elephant in the room, Boeing.
I found the troubled company, Boeing’s mission statement. I must confess I was amused. Let me quote:
“To connect, protect, explore, and inspire the world through aerospace innovation.”
I have been reading about Boeing for weeks now and none of it was “nice.” Let me suggest an alternative mission statement in my own satirical way:
“To squeeze as much money as possible out of our suppliers, the airlines and the government while evading regulations, taxes and responsibility in a determined pursuit of short term profits and year-end bonuses.”
Now, you might say, “James, that is not very nice. Do you think you might go easier on the company??”
And the answer is NO. I got radicalized when the two Boeing aircraft self-crashed. This company literally built planes that flew themselves into the ground. When the blood of the innocent cries out for justice, I try and listen. I am not a friend of the company and proud not to be a friend of the company.
The worst thing about this situation is the simple fact that there is no path to redemption. You can’t take a company, strip away its engineering excellence and reputation and then go out and find people to put that genie back in the bottle. The company is dead centered on maximizing profit at all costs. It is just like diving a plane into the ground. There is no coming back from that.
I would suggest that in the interest of national security, the government of the United States provide financials incentives to tune of many billions of dollars to create two or three producers of civilian aircraft so that we have that capability in the United States. It is absolutely vital to our nation’s commercial success and national security that we have this capability. The only thing I see at Boeing is a slow and eventual corporate demise.
And a well deserved one at that.
Let me close with one of my standard gripes. There seems to be no agreement at all about what responsibilities a company has in regard to ethics or to the nation and people where they exist. The Milton Friedman school of nuttiness assumes that if you play by “the rules of the game,” your only purpose should be maximized shareholder value and this appears to be the common current “standard,” that is, if you can call a complete and total renunciation of duty, honor and religion, a standard.
Every company and every individual has a duty to obey the law, bear the common burden of taxes, as well as the duties of a common patriot, of neighbors and participant in the democratic process. We are more that atoms flying about in a free economic system. We have the ability to live not as vicious advantage seeking profit grubbing monsters but as ladies and gentlemen.
Let us aspire to higher values and reject cheap appeals to greed, gluttony and selfishness.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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