The problem with capitalism today is that it works really well for some people. Then those people do everything they can to make it keep working for them. It only takes a relatively small group of people with this lack of morals to make it work. The plurality of people with <i>flexible</i> morals are the grease that moves the machine forward. A topmost layer must at least have some awareness of the lives they're co-opting for their own gain, but those myriad layers in between, in which each simply bends a rule or two in order to get ahead, ignoring the whimpers of conscience, are what makes it work. The carrot of personal gain easily works often enough. Rationalization is the greatest enemy of ethics. "I've got to support a family" is the rallying cry of those that do jobs they know are wrong. The blame lays partially with them, but also much with those that take advantage of their situation. There are so many industries today that have started out as a good middle-class employment, but, through consolidation, have become low-income, low-skill wage slave factories with no moral compunction. These industries also exert tremendous control through the revenue and tax streams that they generate and can, therefore, write their own legislation and break laws in order to maintain and extend their fortunes. The interests, livelihoods and quality of life of the human grist that moves this mill are never considered or given a second thought. The size of these industries and the massive information blackout of their consumers (mostly maintained through the selfsame industries' propaganda and media outlet purchases) provides steady income. It is the same industry that promulgates the myth that low price is everything that then benefits from a populace that doesn't have any other consideration outside of the financial. The capitalist (corporate) ideal, the main and only tenet is "maximize profit". What people don't realize is how deadly powerful this is when taken as the rallying cry by those without morals. Additionally, we live in a society that has been carefully arranged to raise us from birth to believe that this make sense. Of course, you maximize production, you make things better, you make it easier to get what you need and make it easier for more people to get what they want --- but, <i>not at the expense of others</i>. Without this crucial second clause, companies are free to buy massive amounts of advertising to convince people they want the products the company offers without bothering with what the people actually need or want, they are free to buy legislation that makes facets of their operations cheaper to operate, usually to the financial or health detriment of the people actually doing the work. This doesn't take a large, concentrated amount of evil, but rather an evenly distributed lack of moral empathy, a heavily instilled duty to get ahead at all costs, and a careful alleviation of responsibility so that, at every step of the way, any of the cogs can claim their hands are tied. That, in fact, "is just the way it is." Witness the homogenization of labor. By capitalist tenets, this makes a lot of sense. Unskilled workers are a lot easier to find and can be paid less. However, the decision to rework an industrial process to rely mostly or exclusively on unskilled labor never takes into account the quality of life of that labor --- so we have millions of employees whose sole job is to perform the same mindless action over and over again, for a mind-numbing 8 or 10 or 12 hours per shift. I don't say "per day" because many of them are then incentivized to pull multiple shifts per day. With maximization of profit in mind, it then makes sense to maintain a high turnover rate, then to withhold insurance or vacation benefits until a worker has stayed longer than the average turnover time. It makes sense to reduce or destroy the worker's compensation process, so that workplace safety is no longer maintained, adding more to the profit. Nowhere in all of this extremely logical progression is the health or happiness of the worker taken into account, because capitalism has but the one simplistic axiom - "maximize profit". Full stop. That's not the worst of it, either. Once a massive unskilled workforce has been cultivated, they are manipulated further into becoming migrant, in search of a place that treats them better and perhaps pays them more. This is, for most, purest fantasy. Such a place no longer exists, because companies that maximize profit don't allow such loopholes, and companies that care about workers don't stay in business. With workplace safety nonexistent, many workers are injured, no longer able to work, have no compensation system to fall back on and then, to add insult to injury, the same <i>leaders</i> that give them such a system in which to earn a livelihood will wonderingly ask why they "don't pull themselves up by their bootstraps", like their these selfsame leaders presumably did (or their fathers before them). This is what happens when empathy and ethics are removed from the social system, when people are treated as expendable resources, as "human resources". Of course, the next corner to cut, as it were, is consumer safety. The same axiom is held forth as paramount as legislation is bought to prevent more costly consumer safety measures from being put into place; to prevent liability and responsibility from being assigned to the company. With low enough wages, self-policing is a joke, since the workers will either not be educated as to consumer safety, won't be paid enough to care, or will simply not believe that an accident could happen to them. Imagine a safety measure put into place, say a gauge of some sort, that guarantees a quality product arrives safely to the consumer. The gauge does nothing on its own, someone must read it. Someone must also have been educated to know what it means. Most importantly, that person must either be paid enough to care when it's out of range or must have the ethics to care when it's out of range. Additionaly that person must have the authority to call a halt to the delivery of the product. None of these conditions are met, in general. Economics dictates that the worker will likely be either uneducatable as to the importance of the gauge, will not have been told about its importance or is not being paid enough to care. In most cases, society has also failed to instill an empathy or ethics that would make that person stick their neck out in order to prevent the delivery of a product dangerous to consumers. Even were that instinct in place, despite industry's best efforts, that person would then likely not have the authority to do anything about it and the likelihood decreases by orders of magnitude as several levels of authority must all pass the same tests above before something is done. All of these things cost money and affect the bottom line. Once a company becomes large enough, as many of them are, safety accidents cease to have a significant effect on the bottom line since problems can be denied by less-costly PR departments or lawsuits and filed motions. The sheer size of the service provided will then give the company enough power to resist legislation that controls it, since the loss of tax income would be crippling to the state or nation in which it resides. A few dead is an acceptable loss in exchange for the tax revenue --- a conclusion most governments pragmatically reach. And the company generally knows this and uses it. Even if some customers abandon the service, the company has expanded 10 times that much in the meantime, either from sheer momentum or by hook or by crook. What does it matter if existing customers aren't satisfied. Statistics shows that not enough will leave and attempt to find service elsewhere <i>because it's the same everywhere</i>. In fact, we see many industries that are controlled by so few, large players that the service they provide is deemed essential enough that the government then bails them out if they start to fail or encounter difficulty as a result of poor investment or poor business practices. The food, telecom and airline industries are all good examples of this. These behaviors are a natural consequence, easily predictable from the societal axioms and mores in place, provable and supported by evidence that is there for those looking for it. Don't expect to find it on the front page though. No one wants to talk about how our affluence can possible survive. The mind veers away when considering how our own lives could possibly be so simple. You don't want to think about the mounds of poor on which you stand, no do you want to think of who's standing on you. <span class="notes">Some ideas and examples inspired by reading Herman and Chomsky's <u>Manufacturing Consent</u> and others taken from Schlosser's <u>Fast Food Nation</u></span>