Big Business, the term never used to turn my stomach. Now it does.
In my years of naiveté, the words “big business” meant industry, lots of jobs, lots of money, philanthropy. Corporate America was dependable, responsible. Men and women chose a career, worked until retirement, and then lived off their pensions. Corporations were benevolent structures, the backbone of the American economy.
Then I watched as baby boomers, who worked for the same corporations for years, were suddenly laid off. Men and women in their forties started over as younger workers were hired to replace them for less pay. Company loyalty was not repaid in kind.
Then internal corruption made headlines with mishandled pension funds and poor business practices. Rich CEOs were handed golden parachutes and our government bailed out corporation after corporation.
But to be honest, I still had blinders on. It wasn’t until I began working with OLM that I learned how pervasive greed and corruption are in corporate America, how often death and environmental devastation result. How can anyone with a conscience work for these companies that have looked the other way when they realized their chemicals were polluting groundwater, that their mercury was contaminating the ocean and our seafood, that their pills might be the root cause of mass shootings, that their vaccinations caused an epidemic of autism?
Whatever we do, we need to stop burying our heads in the sand, pretending we don’t see what’s really going on.
Step one: stop buying their products.
Step two: tell your friends why they should stop buying their products.
If a company does not practice environmentally sound principles, if their products are not good for us or for the planet, we have the power to put them out of business. All we have to do is STOP BUYING THEIR PRODUCTS!
Big business did not build our economy; microenterprise built our economy—small businesses with five or fewer employees, often family owned and run enterprises. Let’s support those small businesses. Let’s buy our food from local farmers and CSAs. Let’s look online or better yet through the pages of OLM to find natural and organic products from microenterprises or small businesses. Buy smart, stay safe, protect the planet. It’s really quite simple.
