Corporate Morality

Bootleg DVDs--they're not great, but they're not as bad as you'd think. My sister has quite a problem with them, though. A guy sits in a dark theater with a pretty good camera and cuts it off as soon as the lights go up (as a completist, I'm a bit annoyed that the credits always get chopped). I seldom go to the movies. I certainly wouldn't go to see "Friday Night Lights" or "Ladder 49," but sitting around on an odd evening, I might vegetate to them. Oddly, I probably won't even watch them when they come to cable. But I'm supposed to feel some guilt because some millworker got my five bucks instead of Joaquin Phoenix. For a dark image with distorted sound, where sometimes I can see the shadows of people getting up to use the restroom. It's a silly thing, bootleg DVDs, but its not the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of crime.
I had the good fortune to use Napster briefly before it was dismantled (the first time), and then I switched to Kazaa for a while before stories started going around about lawsuits. When I was young, I used to tape songs from the radio to replay whenever I wanted--no one gave me grief for this, but these days? It's odd what some people choose as imperative moral issues, a lot of times rather surface-level things. What I notice is that a number of things that perhaps the segment of America that voted for Bush calls moral issues are things that take a small amount from the profit of corporations. There are a lot of immoral things to be concerned with, but a corporate loss at my hands seems like nothing as compared to the losses corporations inflict on us when they decide to outsource. The two hardly seem comparable, but somehow outsourcing is accepted as a necessary reality while Bush successfully persuaded many that lawsuits against those in medical fields is one of our greatest threats. This of course was a response to the point that so many Americans are without health care; I guess voters' response to that was "we don't care," and we can presume that the situation will only worsen in the next four years.
There are a limited number of means by which the average person has a voice. When your company paid you far less than it should have for more hours than it should have required, you could unionize--until Ronald Reagan began the process of weakening unions. When an untested medication gives you heart failure, you (or someone on your behalf) could file suit against the pharmaceutical company--until George Bush changes that. And voting? Well, how fair that is depends on whom you ask.

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