CONTRACT AND POLITICAL BULLYING

Bullying as a mode of operation is becoming more and not less pervasive in the United States. An incident of “contract bullying” called my attention to it but once noted, bullying is not just happening with business contracts, it is happening in almost everything we do. My first example is this; I signed a contract with an annuity company several years ago. The contract guaranteed to pay me 3% interest on funds transferred into my account with that company. I was in the process of transferring funds as they became available from other accounts; a process that would take a number of years to complete all the transfers I had in mind. I was surprised to receive a “substitute” wording for the contract lowering the interest rate to 1% on all “future” money transfers. In other words, the annuity company did not like the contract so they changed it. Can you imagine what the annuity company response would be if I decided if I did not like the contract and changed it?

We recently had an incident in Colorado over gun control legislation. A lobby organization, the NRA, legislators decided to “bully” two legislators for voting their conscience; when they refused, they were recalled in a clear manipulation of election laws. This form of “political bullying” is prevalent across the entire country but especially in Washington and in small political contests ranging from school boards to state level representatives. In the past, the culprits hide their nefarious activities but lately the bullies do their dirt boldly and in the open. The chest thumping NRA is parading around bragging that any legislature that does not do their bidding, they will destroy. The names given to this type operation is either “ face a recall election” or  “primary challenge”; a rich person funds an opposition candidate that will vote the way the rich person tells him or her to vote.

Taxpayer subsidies to oil companies, no gun control regulations, no consumer protection, banks to big to fail, no control on health costs, transfer of tax funds to private schools, privately operated prisons, and on and on. These things are all results of moneyed interests bullying legislators. Exon mobile, gun manufactures Art Pope, the Koch brothers and their lobbyist do all of this bullying yet their CEO’s sleep well at night. How can that be?

News reports quote Pope Francis as saying, “Sin is when you go against your conscious”. The thing that has shocked me is that the people doing all this bullying see what they are doing as right. It is morally right to win. It is morally right to work hard and be rewarded for your work. The reward is money and you are free to do what ever you want with it because it is yours. In their eyes, what they are doing are not “sins”. To the 99%, it is a strange calculus where two rights makes a wrong, two positives equal a negative; the combination of liberty and hard work does not make bullying acceptable.

When you think about it, it is no different from a “family head” beating a disobedient wife or child; for a so-called “family values” person to believe beating another person is not a sin, is morally wrong. It is not morally correct to use force or bullying to solve disagreements. “Natural order” or a genetically endowed sense of father authority may have made sense in our pre-culture period and make sense in certain family value “moral church groups” but I hope we would learn to view as nonsense in modern society.  Sadly, we seem to have retained more of this bestial nonsense into our culture than is acceptable.    

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