by Egon Lass

Created on: April 08, 2009

BUSINESS MORALS?

On Tuesday, November 18, 2008, the heads of the big three automakers pleaded with the Senate banking committee for aid. The government did what it could, short of taking over the industry. In this spring of 2009 we have put ourselves on hold for bailing out the auto industry again, specifically GM, but there is every reason to believe that we will do so, after they have restructured themselves. Regretfully, during the hearings last year not a single person asked the most relevant question: "Since the 1970's you have known how to build a car that goes in excess of one-hundred miles per gallon (See the Helium articles under Energy Issues: Tom Ogle and his environmental car). You have never taken the opportunity to do something with this knowledge. You have continued to build gas-guzzling, air-polluting monstrosities. Now you are asking us to fund you, so that you can continue building gas-guzzling, air-polluting monstrosities. Why on earth do you think you deserve to be bailed out?"

I, for one, do not think that the auto industry deserves to be bailed out. They, and the oil companies, have behaved in a manner that is beneath contempt. They have had more than thirty years to accommodate their product to the market, to build an environmental car that would have a wide appeal to the public. They have chosen not to do so, and this failure is a deeply amoral act, repeated ad nauseam throughout the entire auto-manufacturing industry.

There appears to be a wide-spread moral bankruptcy among business leaders, and it seems to be nothing new. The echelon, or stratum, of CEOs have always gotten away with murder. If these leaders are not watched closely, a vacuum is created that needs to be filled at all cost. Without regulation there MUST be theft, corruption, graft, an orgy of amoral behavior. They hire their own economists who tell self-serving fairytales about what is really good for America and its inhabitants. They say that they are worried that President Obama is not up to the job, which is their way of throwing sand in your eyes. What exactly is the job? I suppose that anyone who is not dancing to their whip is not up to the job. Fix the mess that we've made, so that given half a chance, we can create a new mess for you just as soon as you focus on something else. In the words of Charles Bukowski, "Humanity, you never had it to begin with."

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