When I was studying at Yonsei Graduate School another student, from just below the Mason Dixie line would try and mock me with these words, “He’s looking out for the little man.”, whenever I made my opinion known. My opinions which I deliver to you in my own stream of consciousness plain speaking style, hopefully void of condescension, haven’t changed much in the intervening years, so perhaps you, more than I, know what he was objecting to. He seemed to believe he was scoring points off me every time he brayed it out.
His attitude puzzled me then, as it puzzles me now, since he wasn’t a rich kid, nor was he from a rich family. I wonder now, as I wondered then, why he thought big capitalist interests needed defending. It seemed to me somewhat like a man defending vampires while his shirt collar turns crimson.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for business and unlike many environmentalists you might come across while out hugging trees, I think the solutions to our problems lies in altering the way we make things, the way we make money from things, and how we manage energy and material flows in our economies. So, any way you look at it there’s really only two groups; consumers and producers, which means that at least half of this equation is business.
My preference for small community based business, run by the ‘little man’, comes from my belief that since they are part of the community they have a stake in its well being, whereas a supermarket chain has concerns only to it’s shareholders who are very much like absentee landlords eternally looking for higher rents as far as senior management is concerned. There is also the sense that a ‘little man’ running his own business has a greater say in how to live his life and the form of the legacy he will leave behind. I’d rather be a citizen than a subject any day of the week. Citizens choose their own destiny to a certain extent, subjects can get neutron jacked out of their jobs. Jack Welch hates that nickname. The joke is that neutron bombs don’t destroy buildings they only kill people, much like Jack himself.
Others will say that there has been increasing interest in ‘corporate responsibility’ and that this will soften the sharp edges of large companies headlong pursuit of monopoly and the market power to squeeze small suppliers until they expire.It’s well known that a great many of Walmarts past suppliers declare bankruptcy while it recorded ever greater profits. It’s abuse of power pure and simple. In politics it would be called a dictatorship, in business it’s called the logic of the market. When did it become ok to elevate something so transparently immoral as this upon the high pedestal it currently rests upon.
However returning to corporate responsibility. That’s rather like saying “military intelligence” and “deafening silence”, it is an oxymoron (why does that sound like zit cream in a non-child proof container?) which gluing two opposing ideas into the one phrase is generally used as vehicle for irony. It is certainly ironic that so many people are using it in a serious, non humorous way. You see corporations are by definition organizations that hide behind their status as limited responsibility entities. So what we have here is an organization which shields itself from responsibility whilst at the same time pursuing it. That’s kind of like a man with claustrophobia trying to stuff himself in a small box. So, if you ask me, any corporation that claims to behave with corporate responsibility is schizophrenic, a danger to society and should be medicated.
Now the only reason they’re getting away with this crap is that you and I are not voting with our dollars as we should. Supermarkets are not cheaper, they just market themselves that way based on an optimal basket of products that no-one ever buys. But the costs are huge – destitute farmers whose slice of the pie gets thinner every year, destitute small vendors whose dwindling earnings remain in the community, providing additional value to customers in the form of government revenues and social services. Most people don’t think about the big picture of how their actions affect their community as a whole. Not only should we be responsible for our actions, we should think about what the consequences are, otherwise we are unconscious citizens at the mercy of the unscrupulous.
So yes, I’m looking out for the little man because he’s me, he’s you, he’s most of us.
