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.