OCCUPATIONAL HAZZARD

 

In principal, I neither hate nor oppose the idea of a business.  I think that it is a completely natural, rational thing, from a human perspective, to organize an entity who's purpose is to create, develop and/or deliver useful and desirable goods and/or services.  I think that it is fair and reasonable to expect some benefit from providing those things.  When done correctly, a business can benefit a community in a myriad of ways as it both provides a livelihood for those who operate it and helps the community through the secondary benefits of creating employees capable of trading with other businesses.  I think it makes sense to create corporations in order to manage and secure investments in businesses and to enable them to function as coherent entities within a "free" market system (defined as an environment which does not use force or coercion to govern the exchange of those goods and services).  I don't have any problem with this concept and I don't think many other reasonable people have a problem with it either. 

However, these entities have to exist within a society (a collection of individuals) and an environment (the natural world we inhabit on this planet).  When they begin to function in a manner which is hostile to their surroundings and the people who inhabit them, then we have a problem.  When a company or a business becomes a destroyer of the environment, causing long term or irreparable damage, it is no longer a benefit to the society which has to live with that damage.  When a company is abusive to its employees, it is not benefiting the community.  When it blatantly engages in fraud and other criminal activities, it should be shut down and prevented from engaging in any further activities of that nature.

This is why we have laws, why we have courts and why we have police.  These exist to protect the population from being harmed or forced into actions which are harmful to others.  We have these laws so that individuals are protected from theft and murder and violence and, lest we forget, negligence.  Yet this is not what is happening in our "business" world today.

Major corporations are not servants of the population, but their masters.  They have been granted rights beyond individual humans.  They are not accountable for their actions.  They are not held culpable when they destroy the environment or cause harm or death to the population.  They buy the politicians, the police and the courts.  They engage in blatantly fraudulent actions, manipulating financial institutions and treating the investments and savings of legitimate working people like gambling chips to be played with until everyone goes bust. 

This is the state of business today.  Rip people off whenever possible.  Abuse workers as much as you can.  Refrain from contributing to the community in which you exist.  Rape the environment.  As long as the money keeps rolling and you have control over the use of force in your society, then it's "anything goes". 

This is what people are protesting as they assemble in city after city to "occupy" the streets and make their voices heard.  They are not, as the people in power would have you believe, "anti business".  They are anti crime and anti abuse and anti death and devastation.  They are concerned for a future which has been sabotaged by a tiny cabal of sociopathic, psychopathic power brokers who have their own agenda for this world and it does not (and never will) have any concern for you or your wellbeing. 

I am not anti business.  I am against crime and cruelty and abuse.  That is what everyone who is engaged in these protests is against.  This is the core of this movement.  We are tired of being ripped off, lied to and left for dead.  We will not stay silent.  We will not go away.