‘There’s all kinds of dirty stuff going on – a lot of hush, hush discrimination.’ That’s how one Executive Recruiter described his experience with client employers and the staffing companies he worked for, in a news story that appeared in 2010.
In 2002, years after he cleaned up Denny’s, CEO Jim Adamson said, ‘I firmly believe that Denny’s reflects most Fortune 500 companies. Diversity and inclusiveness is nothing more than a memo, as opposed to being part of the corporate culture.’
In 2005 Lawrence Roberts, CEO of RadioShack told a Fort Worth group of business leaders: ‘The Glass ceiling for people of diversity is still an unfortunate reality, including our own company. Shame on every one of us who is or has been a CEO, for allowing it to stand.’
In 2011, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced that of the record number of employment discrimination complaints filed in, for the first time the number of complaints filed for retaliation surpassed the number filed for race discrimination.
Secret codes, double standards, pretext – these are the tactics and strategies of an inherently corrupt and discriminatory recruiting and hiring process. At the core of these strategies – is the destruction of individualism.
Institutional Discrimination is part and parcel to the overall threat corporations pose to the United States, and thereby individual freedoms, which we have been warned about by voices far greater than mine.
Thomas Jefferson, FDR, Abraham Lincoln all warned America about corporations. Jefferson said: ‘I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our Government to trial, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.’
Abraham Lincoln said: ‘The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes… corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to prolong it's reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.’
Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned: ‘The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism-- ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power.’
At the end of his presidency, Dwight Eisenhower gave a farewell address to the nation. In it, he warned Americans of the military industrial complex: ‘we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.’
Over the past ten years, Journalist, political spokesman, and broadcaster, Bill Moyers, plying over fifty years of experiencing and studying the world, passionately writes about how our government works and the role of the individual in society. He has warned of a political system increasingly at the mercy of a corporate ruling class.
The only true threat to losing our democracy – comes through and by the apathy of the citizenry. Collective power whether it is the military-industrial complex, or the corporate industrial complex, or as FDR said, by one individual, cannot succeed if we don’t allow it.
Of all the many tactics the corporate complex has utilized to accomplish the dominance warned of by these great Americans of history and our current time, none has been more insidious than that which was predicted by Lincoln.
‘It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.’
It was Margaret Meade, US Anthropologist, who said: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’
The corporate attack on individualism, is out of knowledge that Margaret Meade’s words ring true and thus, destruction of those of us who would defy, question methods, or throw light upon it’s crimes, is essential in order to complete the kind of domination we have been warned of throughout history.
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