There is a certain set of “rules,” a code to live by, that we all learned in kindergarten. The most important ones are: Share. Be fair. Be honest. Put things back where you found them; clean up your own mess. If you break something, fix it. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. If you hurt somebody, say sorry. You get what you get and you don’t get upset. Everything will die, everything will come to an end. (Fulghum, 1988) Some people, however seem to have either a complete disregard for these rules or a serious amnesia problem that caused them to forget their entire kindergarten year. These are not psychopaths, nor are they unintelligent. These are people high up in society, most of whom have many business degrees. They are managers and owners of large corporations whose extreme amount of money gives them enormous power in society. This means that the mistakes they make due to their lack of knowledge of kindergarten rules have huge impacts on the general population.

Instead of following rules they learned in kindergarten, most business owners follow corporate maximization of profit: they chose the path that will get them the highest possible profit, even if their decision has a negative effect on their employees, the environment, or the general public. Because of the enormous amount of power their already-large profit brings them, these negative effects tend to be very substantial and often very hurtful. This violates the kindergarten rule “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.” Managers and owners shouldn’t ‘get upset’ about the fact that their profit over a year was $44.78 billion (Gross Profit for BP) instead of $50 billion. Instead, they should remember what they learned in kindergarten and be satisfied with the multi-billion-dollar profit they already make every year and stop trying to increase it at the expense of the 99%.

Currently, the priority list for large business owners looks like this:

1. Money

2. Other personal interests

3. The rest of the world

This type of priority list is the definition of greed and evil. “Money, so they say, is the root of all evil today.” (Pink Floyd, Money)

Most problems in the U.S. are caused by the effects of this issue alone. These effects hit hard in 3 places: the company’s employees, the environment, and the general public.

Think about it. If you were a business owner or corporate manager, and you wanted to get as much money as legally possible, would you pay your workers enough money to have a good life and treat them like fellow humans? Or would you pay them exactly minimum wage and put them in the worst possible conditions that still conform to labor laws? Or maybe you would take the third option and send your factories to China, where there are no labor laws, and employ some kids for $1.20 per hour (Minimum Wages in China). Most of those who have the power to make this kind of decision definitely don’t chose the first option. Some even go so far as to break the labor laws: who can stop them? All of their workers are undocumented immigrants living in constant fear of the government. They’re not about to go asking authority for help. Because of this, most employees of large corporations have terrible lives. “Since 2009, wages have gained 1 percent of national income growth, and corporate profits received 88 percent” (Friedenwald-Fishman, 2011). In addition to low wages, workers’ terrible lives are caused by the insipidity of their jobs and constant fear of their employers. This goes against 2 things we learned in kindergarten: “share” and “be fair.” Would it be fair if your profit was measured in billions while your employees is measured in cents? Share some of your huge income with your employees.

Another important piece of our world that corporation managers and business owners often sacrifice in their quest for billions of dollars is the environment. Possibly the biggest envirocide culprit is the oil industry. It’s strategies for hurting the environment are too many to name here. For starters, their aggressive competition with the green energy industry has kept many technologies from being developed to their full potential. They like to slowly raise the oil prices until green energy starts to look like a viable option, and then drop the price back down again to put all the little green energy companies that just started up out of business. This combined with their enormous amount of lobbying to suppress laws and advertising campaigns about global warming is sufficient to block all attempts at a solution to pollution other than dilution. This breaks several kindergarten rules: the oil companies are not being fair with the green energy industry. They are tantalizing small business owners by jerking the economic ladder just out of their reach whenever it gets low enough for them to grasp. That’s not just corporate greed. That’s corporate cruelty.

Being mean just isn’t good enough for those oil companies, though. They have to do something illegal. Several oil companies regularly violate the terms of their canal-dredging contracts by leaving canals that they dredged completely unfilled, causing a lot of Louisiana to slip into the sea. This has gone largely unnoticed because of the relatively low monetary value of the land that is being destroyed. Nobody cares about cheap land, even if it’s the only thing protecting the LARGEST PORT IN THE COUNTRY from getting destroyed by hurricanes. (Rich, 2014) You learn in kindergarten to clean up your own mess, leave things exactly the way you found them, and be honest. The oil companies not only destroyed something without making any attempt to repair it, but they completely covered it up so they wouldn’t have to pay anything.

The most evil things that corporations do affect the general public, not just their employees or the environment. One well-known corporate evil is Monsanto, the company that sells GMO seeds and chemical pesticides to farmers, but doesn’t let them replant GMO seeds, so they have to buy new seeds every year. They like to sue farmers for finding GMO crops on the side of the road that fell off a truck and replanting them, even if they signed NO CONTRACT with Monsanto. Pharmaceutical companies also have somewhat evil practices; they often invent diseases and then sell people cures, or set the “at risk” level of cholesterol so low that everyone over the age of 60 “needs” their drug. In the auto industry, if part of a car is poorly designed and will endanger driver safety, instead of just fixing it like they learned in kindergarten, they compare the cost of fixing it with the combined cost of all the expected lawsuits they’ll receive from not fixing it, and usually, fixing it costs more. For another story of incomprehensible corporate arrogance, watch the documentary Toxic Hot Seat, directed and produced by James Redford and Kirby Walker. Yet another result of profit maximization is the fact that “a handful of mega multi-national firms have come to dominate their respective industries … Their oligopolistic, price setting behavior tends to exploit the consumer, absent the kinds of government regulation required to oversee the operations of public utilities” (Rudel, 2014). The government shouldn’t need to protect consumers, that should be the companies’ job. A final effect of corporate cruelty is the absence of gun regulation laws. The National Rifle Association has single-handedly stopped every gun prevention law, and as far as I know, the NRA has not yet said sorry to the families of the 6,248 kids killed since 2010 (Mass Pike Billboard) by guns that the NRA refused to regulate. Is it fair that Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the NRA, gets to sit in his office and contemplate how best to get away with making absolutely no effort to regulate gun use while innocent children die because of his decisions?

The thing is, the owners know that what they’re doing is wrong, but they just don’t care. All they want is money. As Bo Burnham imitated, “We know it’s not right, we know it’s not funny, but we’ll stop beating this dead horse when it stops spitting out money.” (Burnham, Repeat Stuff) Why do you want money so badly? None of your giant store of money is going to help you in the long term. You’re still going to die, just like everyone else. “What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.” (Albert Pine)

There is one slight problem with a business owner being a good person: if their decisions negatively impact the amount of money a shareholder’s stock is worth (which is a percentage of the corporate profit), even if the decision benefits their employees, the environment, or the public, the shareholder can sue the corporation. There is one easy way around this, though. The law about maximization of shareholder income only applies to S-Corps and C-Corps, the 2 standard business models, in which the only thing considered in decisions is profit. However, there is a third business model called a Public Benefit Corporation, or B-Corp, in which there are several factors to consider in making decisions: your employees, the environment, and the general public. If a decision you make reduces your profit but positively impacts another factor, then your shareholders can’t sue you for it. If you switch to a B-Corp (like Patagonia or Ben & Jerry’s), then you won’t make as much money, although still more than enough to live off of, but you can use what you learned in business school and in kindergarten, and maybe even help the world.

Obviously, there’s some opposition to B-Corps, mainly coming from overly wealthy and overly powerful business owners and their shareholders. The rich guys say they’ll get less money, and they’re absolutely right. Instead of getting 200 times more money than they need (CEO Pay v. Average Slub), they’ll get 80 to 90 times more than necessary, which is probably still enough to pay the mortgage on their giant mansion. The shareholders argue that it would hurt the stock market, and I agree that it might. But the stock market is pretty good at fixing itself; it’s crashed several times before, but look at it now. No sign of damage. And even if it does hurt it in the long term, who cares? The only thing the stock market’s good for is making rich, powerful people more rich and more powerful and making the poor and powerless more poor and more powerless. And if there’s one thing in this country that we don’t need more of, it’s widening the gap between the rich and the poor.

I don’t want a law that requires companies to be kind: that would be unenforceable and too close to socialism. I just want business owners to take it upon themselves to do good in the world.
With great wealth comes great power. With great power comes great responsibility. Get responsible.

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