Audacity of Corporate America

I can’t believe the audacity of corporate America. Days after receiving BILLIONS in bailout money, Bank of America hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business leaders to discuss how to defeat the Union bill. Instead of dealing with the current financial problems, they feel more compelled to take government money and spend millions attacking a legislation thats aimed at improving and protecting workers’ lives from the greedy.

Co-Founder of Home Depot called the upcoming Employee Free Choice legislation as the “demise of the civilization”. Are you kidding me? By giving workers the ability to unionize more freely, it would be the demise of our civilization? Other business representatives said that “out of control labor leaders” have damaged businesses?!?! Out of control CEOs and corporations have damaged their own businesses and threatens to take down the world with their selfishness, greed and corporate mismanagement.

When CEOs get fired, they walk away with millions of dollars in severance packages. When some one walks away from one of the bailed out corporations, they walk away with months of severance. Bailed-out corporations like Merrill Lynch used billions of government money to pay bonuses to their people in the midst of the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. How I pity them. When a non-union worker gets laid off, they will probably walk away only with their upcoming paycheck as the their protection. They don’t get the bonuses and severance packages that people in the “business” world get. How is that fair? Corporate America has their way of protecting their “own” people, at the same time, ignoring the livelihood of their foundation, working class employees, and they call that fair. Perhaps if they stopped giving out millions and billions in bonus, they can afford improved health care for their employee and fair wages.

Stephen Lerner, Director of the Private Equity Project at SEIU, said it best, “The biggest corporations who have created the problem are, at the very time, asking us to bail them out and then using that money to stop workers from improving their lives.”

Maybe the CEOs of this world need to reevaluate what is important. If they had ceased with their greed and selfishness, or at least cut back on it, we would’ve probably be in a better place financially. It’s the perfect example of the classic soldier’s dilemma (at least that’s what I think it’s called). If we work together, we will all survive, however, if we choose only to protect our own self interests and leave others out to dry, we will all perish. It’s time for corporate America to decide. Do we all live or all die.