“A complete loss for words”  Part 2

Last time I talked about how even with church youth present our supposed leaders have a hard time being honest. It is a disease that permeates our entire society today, even our churches. If this wasn’t true then why is it necessary for the Catholic church to reportedly keep a huge library of “secret” documents in the Vatican? What is so earth shattering that they are afraid to let the world know the truth? In fact, if religion is doing such a great job teaching and leading people then why do they feel it necessary to tell us how to think or how to vote? (In my America we have a little thing called separation of church and state. The church SCREAMS if the state tries to get involved with church business. Why doesn’t this work in both directions? “Pigs is Pigs”?) If our lawmakers are doing such a great job of leading then why do they find it necessary to legislate morality. The fact is that our lawmakers for the most part have no intention of following the same laws that they try to force upon us. I once saw a list of how many of our lawmakers either have been convicted of crimes or have legal action pending against them. The average person after seeing this list would be convinced that our lawmakers are a bunch of criminals. It’s no wonder life today is so complicated. It’s simply amazing to me that these same “leaders” will pass laws that make it harder for those that can’t afford to fight the legal system or don’t have the “connections” to make legal problems go away.

It all boils down to two words that most of our leaders seem to have a serious lack of, Honesty and Integrity. In fact it is my belief that honesty and integrity, or the lack there of, may be two of the most powerful economic forces facing our entire planet today.

If a manufacturer or provider of goods or services is honest then he sets the price he intends to charge at a FAIR and reasonable amount. If he’s a crook and thus lacking honesty and integrity he tries to monopolize the market and then make as astronomical a profit as he can get. You need only look at Bill Gates to see that this is true. Does anyone besides me remember how he screwed a guy in California when they introduced the original version of DOS? If an employer/manufacturer is a man of honesty and integrity then he pays his employees a fair wage for the work they do. In turn his employees support many business’s with their income when they buy items that are priced at fair and reasonable prices by other honest manufacturers. If that same manufacturer is short on integrity he pays his employees dirt farmer wages, charges extraordinarily high prices for his product and that’s where the trouble begins. His products don’t sell, his employees loose their jobs and the economic area suffers because of the loss of jobs and that’s just one of the problems..

For starters, underpaid employees will not produce quality goods. Every item our “crooked” manufacturer sells will be in some way flawed. He’ll face dozens of returns of the items he’s sold which he in turn replaces with more inferior product. Soon, no one will by his product and not only does his plant close but all his employees are out of a job. In this instance they’re probably better off anyway. The damage to all off us comes in when we are forced to pay ridiculous prices for flawed items which we in turn must replace frequently thus limiting the amount of money we have to spend with manufacturers or sellers of other goods and services. Everyone suffers.

Our next manufacturer pays a decent wage. He sets a suggested retail price that is reasonable and in line with what other honest producers of these goods or services charge. This guy however has decided that he’ll make his profit by offering an inferior product. Dish soap that is 99% water, a car that is made from cheap inferior parts that has to be replaced every 3 years even though the auto loans are for 4 years, or any other of a host of ways that many manufacturers use to lower their overhead. The problem is they don’t charge any less they just make more short term profit. In all these examples and several dozen I could give our less than honest manufacturer or shop keeper has lost sight of the big picture. Soon people quit doing business with him and those short term profits turn into long term debt. The employer ends up filing bankruptcy and the damage extends to creditors, former employees and everyone that has done business with this individual or corporation.

I used to own a courier service. We had an account that normally only ran a monthly bill of about $100 dollars. All the sudden over a couple of months this business went crazy using my couriers for everything. They monopolized our time to the point that we couldn’t provide our usual level of service for other customers. It became necessary to hire more drivers. After running up an incredible bill over a couple of months these less than honest people filed bankruptcy. It almost cost me my business AND it cost 3 of my employees their job. Some day I intend to track down the owner and get even with the asshole. The point being that in a small way (micro-economics again) there was a negative affect from someone’s dishonesty.

What happens if the price of energy gets so high that consumers can’t afford to buy any other products? That’s easy, someone looses a job. This unemployed person soon can’t make his car payment or purchase ANYTHING he’s been saving for. Another job lost. The cascade affect of one “dishonest business leader or corporation” can be catastrophic when looked at in this light.

Now days we have big corporations. So big in fact that a failure of the corporation can have far reaching and disastrous effects through out our economy. You can’t convince me that the economy isn’t hurt when a couple hundred thousand people loose their job. Lately I’ve wondered what the effect of the bankruptcies of both Enron and K-Mart will have over the long run. That’s an awful lot of people suddenly without jobs and thus without income to spend on not only necessary items but also what are sometimes called luxury items. (Please I’m not implying that K-Mart is filing for bankruptcy due to a lack of integrity or because they are dishonest. Now ENRON is another story and I definitely mean to imply that they are both the above.)

Monopolies are another way that producers of goods or services can show a lack of honesty and integrity. Just look at the stranglehold that the monopoly like organization OPEC has on our entire world. No one will argue that OPEC has the ability to damage or completely destroy the economy of the entire world if they decided to “suck us dry for every penny”. OPEC’s problem is two fold. One, they aren’t quite that organized. Secondly they are smart enough to realize that we are on the verge of alternative energy sources that would make their oil production obsolete. Their decision is a tricky one. Just how much can they get away with before it becomes cost effective to use develop alternatives to foreign oil. In no way are their decisions to limit or raise production based on what they consider to be fair and honest. In fact I’ld be willing to bet they’ve had more than one discussion about what the damage to the world economy would be if they set certain production levels and how would this in turn affect future profits. Just like most suppliers of consumables it’s all about what they can get away with not what is right.

Have you noticed how much a car cost now days? You can’t keep a straight face and tell me that some of the micro-mini’s or giant SUV”s and pickups cost anywhere near what it cost you to buy one. You add in the fact that the favorite strategy of modern corporations is union busting and lowering the cost of labor then how do you explain the constant rise in new car prices? That’s pretty easy, guess who’s the first to go when someone decides to cut cost. It’s not the executive part of the company. The lowest guy on the totem pole is the common worker and guess who’s at the most risk of loosing their job? What employers fail to understand is the effect of the employees lost income in the big picture that is our economy. They fail to realize that with all upper management and only a few people actually producing their product their overhead gets pretty hefty to keep all those “suits” on the payroll. They also fail to realize that by charging ridiculous prices they only hurt themselves because the average person will ultimately buy fewer of what ever they are selling. This in turn leads to fewer workers needed to produce new items and soon it turns into a vicious cycle where everyone looses. A good example would have to include how most large city school districts are run. Talk about ripe with over-management and a sad lack of producing quality results in the form of educated students.

What has led to this circus of dishonesty and unethical practices? Generally it must be the feeling that most people believe our leaders are people of honesty and integrity and we should follow their example. One night I was suffering my normal cycle of insomnia. With some 50 to 80 channels available you’d think that something interesting would be on at 3 in the morning. I happened past one of those stations that only broadcast “religious programming”. During the time period I had tuned in they had Oral Roberts. Our buddy Oral was telling everyone how they were coming to their TV sets live (it was 3 in the morning and Oral is from Tulsa just like I was!). He, his son and his son’s wife were all standing in front of a huge table of “prayer request” and “donation pledges”. He was saying to hurry up and call in your prayer request and at the same time make a donation. Soon he and his little group were going to take this huge stack of “prayer request” up to their prayer tower where they would appeal to god to grant all these request and bless the donors.

If you haven’t seen Oral Roberts University in Tulsa Oklahoma then you are really missing quite a site. Most of the buildings are gold and glass structures. A very expensive and awesome site. Oral Roberts is the guy that a few years ago claimed that god would take his life if his (Oral’s) followers didn’t contribute a total of some multiple millions of dollars. Orals Prayer Tower is a miniature Space Needle complete with the round room at the upper part of the tower and at the very top burns an eternal flame. The room in the prayer tower is completely circled in glass so you get quite a view of Tulsa when you are in it.

I became suspicious that Oral Roberts would be up at 3 in the morning taking prayer request but they kept hammering the point that this was live so I decided to watch. Soon they announced they were going up the elevator to the room surrounded by glass in the prayer tower. They would take a short break and be right back. Of course the commercial they ran was about how great Oral Roberts University is but that’s another story for another time.

When they came back from the self glorification commercial there they were standing in the prayer tower. Over all the windows behind them were thick black curtains covering the windows that overlooked Tulsa. In front of them was a huge table stacked with what were supposedly prayer request and donations. Oral and son were going on and on about how “blessed” all the people represented by these pieces of paper were going to be for making all these calls. That’s when I noticed the space between two of the big black curtains. Sure enough my suspicions about the integrity and honesty of what I was seeing on TV had been justified. It was VERY plain to see that outside the windows of the Prayer Tower located on beautiful Oral Roberts University Campus it was very much broad daylight.

Now, I realize that Oral being the high and mighty religious person that he wants us to believe he is and the fact that GOD personally talks with Oral and gives him instruction on what to do might cause the sun to shine somewhat favorably at all times on Mr. Roberts. However, I have a hard time believing that only a few blocks from where I was watching this supposedly “Live” program at 3:30 in the morning it was completely dark and that GOD had caused the sun to peak between those curtains at 3:30 in the morning in Oral’s Prayer Tower. Don’t get me wrong, I believe GOD had caused that sunlight to come streaming through those curtains. I don’t think GOD did this for Oral Roberts at 3:30 in the morning to glorify Oral’s receiving of all this money. It’s a little easier to believe that maybe GOD had caused that sun to peak through those curtains at that particular moment in order to point out exactly how much honesty and integrity Mr. Roberts was demonstrating on his program.

I mention this because the economic damage of “sucking money” out of the pockets of people for ones own personal gain can cause just as much damage to the economy as any large corporate failure. I also mention this to demonstrate that as I’ve maintained, Honesty and Intregity could possibly be two of the most under rated yet powerful economic forces on our planet.
 

Write to Cliff at  downingc@swbell.net