We received the following letter in response to our February 19 article "The Alaska Airlines crash: signs point to a wider crisis in air safety"
I agree with your premise of the bottom line driving corporate philosophy. Everybody is working overtime and trying to keep up just to "increase shareholder value". Corporations are being run by people with no expertise in the business that they are overseeing. Railroads, airlines, cruise lines, mining companies, and corporations in general are run by lawyers, financial experts, accountants, etc., who did not come up through the line, but were recently hired because they have expertise in downsizing and increasing quarterly profits. The time is gone when a man could work his way up from the bottom to be head of the company. What happened to customer needs and the safety of others? What about humanity in general? How about the employees that are giving up family and heath just to keep things going during a downsizing?
Corporate America and its current bottom-line-drive philosophy has gotten out of hand; thanks for a well done article.
KP
8 March 2000
"The Christian right and the Republican Party: the dirty secret of American politics" [6 March 2000] ... and you hit it on the head. I could not dispute any single point you made trying to be as dispassionate as possible. We are in for some interesting times. You put words to ideas and observations which I have been heretofore unable to articulate. My parents were right all along.
RTR
7 March 2000
THANK YOU!
I've never visited this site before. I surfed in from your Oscar stuff on Yahoo! and I just wanted to say thanks for finally writing a review of The Green Mile that I can whole-heartedly agree with.
I didn't know I was a Socialist. Hmmmm ...
DM
6 March 2000
As I listen to the Canadian business community applaud its government's latest round of tax cuts, I am becoming more and more convinced that their motivation for championing this brand of fiscal policy is to tighten corporate control over society. Governments in the western world have always been in the pocket of big business, who finance their campaigns in exchange for favours ... but governments do maintain the power to tax and spend the public's money, and to corporations that represents new territory to conquer, in their never-ending quest for growth. Their ultimate aim, I believe, is to see funding for social programs cut to such an extent that people lose faith in the system, and will then be receptive to American-style (and, most likely, American-run) private facilities, which will be run to make enormous profits. It's already happening, with private hospitals, universities and prisons opening in business-friendly Ontario and Alberta. This will, of course, lead to a system of "you get what you can afford", allowing the wealthy to further wall themselves off from the poor, and everyone will quickly find that their "tax savings" don't begin to cover the costs of the new privatized services.
SM
6 March 2000