THE COST OF DOING BUSINESS

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (6/28/10)

“The cost of doing business,” a phrase favored by capitalists, refers to tragedies and corruptions. Bribing officials to ignore the rules as did British Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the death of workers on oil rigs and in refineries by ignoring safety procedures, and paying for defense attorneys rather than building safe products are the “costs of doing business.” The phrase is akin to the military phrase “collateral damage” both of which mean “the innocent be damned.”

A friend of mine, a combat soldier in Vietnam, once said, “It’s no wonder the Vietnamese hated us. One of our damned helicopters would land in a corn field and completely flatten the crop, leaving them without food.” A corn field destroyed was a mild form of collateral damage in comparison to innocent civilians slaughtered by our mercenaries in Iraq and BP’s death toll. The issue is not the common soldier who more often than not is sickened by war, but the military and corporate mindset which sees human beings as units not people and, thus, without empathy. People who think like that have a criminal mind-set.

Automobile manufacturers produce unsafe automobiles because it less costly to settle lawsuits than it is to change the manufacturing process no matter the lives blotted out or ruined. Gas tanks explode, brakes don’t work, and accelerators run wild are a few examples of the examples of collateral damage caused by a sociopathic corporate greed, so profoundly perverse, it is a sickness of the heart.

DYSFUNCTIONAL PERSONALITIES

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.DF., Ph.D. (6/24/10)

Watching tobacco company executives, oil company executives, Wall Street executives on television has been a survey of dysfunctional personalities, specifically their inappropriate facial expressions and their stupidity.

Their ability to lie and express grief without facial affect indicates that they can lie without a twinge of guilt and that, as true sociopaths, they are incapable of sadness or empathy with anyone else’s misfortune. Generally, people like this are housed in maximum security prisons. They are genuinely frightening personalites with about as much charm as oysters. Even more frightening is their power. They are without conscience which makes them sociopaths.

They are also stupid like most of the criminals in prisons. Most criminals are lazy and want to make a fast buck without working for it. These executives aren’t lazy. They put in long hours in the pursuit of greed, mistakenly called profit, and it is this greed that makes them stupid. They are unable to foresee danger or catastrophes so consumed are they by their greed. They’re incapable of thinking contingency. They’re willing to ruin the people’s health, cut corners on safety, pollute the atmosphere, devastate beautiful landscapes, sell shoddy goods, and market poisonous toys all for the sake of greed, all the marks of a sociopath.

I wouldn’t want my granddaughter to marry into the family of one of these corporate executives any more than I’d want her to marry into a Mafia family; however, she’s too smart for that.

THE BENEFITS OF CAPITALISM

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (6/15/10)

As I was listening to one more Republican tout the benefits of capitalism, I thought he surely had suffered a disconnect from reality or had gone stark-raving mad. Apparently, he hadn’t heard of the financial meltdown brought on by those Wall Street capitalists who actually don’t produce anything of value or Toxic Tony and his cohorts at BP (British Petroleum) who didn’t have any contingency plans when things went south.

As it turns out, BP and Toxic Tony like to cut corners so that their profit margin with be greater. That’s nothing new. It’s called greed, one of the least admirable of our emotions and one of the seven deadly sins. We’ve gradually been getting sleazier and more toxic goods from China for years because they are cheaper to produce in China. Good old cutting corners.

Cutting corners, save in executive compensation, is one of the hallmarks of capitalism, the theory being that the less spent the greater the profit. However, when less spent involves the destruction of the environment or poison in our toys, the word profit transmogrifies in sociopathy.

Legally, corporations are persons, but they are persons without souls. Now, I’ve met a few soulless persons in my life, people with dead eyes, and, literally, they’re as scary as hell. So are corporations, the spawn of capitalism. If we have to have them, we should keep them changed to regulation. Remember those deadened eyes of sociopathic capitalism and think Republican.