Purpose or Business?

I have been talking on talk radio since its inception many years ago, locally and nationally. Larry King didn’t like me because I never asked a politically correct question. One of my friends, who died two years ago said, “Tom, I’ve heard you say a thousand times that people no longer care about anything, but they don’t. They don’t care.”

The present recession is more a loss of a sense of purpose than a sense of business. The Pope said recently that democracy has its weaknesses, and it does. We have the freedom to propose and try to accomplish anything that capitalism will enjoy.

I graduated from a very small country school. I still remember the day that Mr. Bryson, the school principal, said to the seven boys who were in my high school graduating class “You are Americans. You can do anything you want to do.” Three are dead, but all did succeed. If I were an official or a director of one of the largest corporations in this nation (GM, Chrysler, Ford, AIG, GE, etc.) or if I were an official or a director of one of the largest banks or financial institutions in this country, such as Wachovia (Ken Thompson, UNC-CH, Morehead scholar), I would be ashamed to show my face around the power brokers of this country. But the corporate heads have so little respect for the corrupt politician before which they appear in Washington (and they know there’s no honor among puppets). Like John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, they just hide within the genome in which they feel more comfortable.

Can you even imagine Henry Ford or Charles Wilson with hat in hand, asking for a bailout of their competitive companies, to which nearly 7,000 dealers depend? In my lifetime, I have seen competitive, capitalistic American businesses bow down to corrupt government officials and instead of taking pride in a superior product, depend on highly-paid lobbyists to keep them afloat.

I was always too much of an American patriot to buy a foreign-made car with some foreign name on it. To me, there was a sacredness in the Ford or General Motors emblem. I own my thirteenth Cadillac at present. I had some difficulty with the car, which even now has very low mileage, and I called the Cadillac headquarters. An official from General Motors, a woman, called and told me that there was nothing they could do. I said, “In your advertisements, you say that there is plenty you can do for a car like mine, almost new.” I further told her, “General Motors will not self-destruct, but the American people will stop buying your product.” It seems that both have happened.


Tragically, we come in contact with businesses every day in our everyday life where all purpose for their existence seems to have vanished. How many times have you been in a place of business, perhaps a restaurant, even a fast-food place, and thought “I would like to manage this place for about ten minutes“? When you lose interest in your business, when your employees are no longer loyal to your business, the public on which you must depend will recognize your problem, as you go out of business. In New York City, 100 restaurants open every day and 100 restaurants close every day. The greatest cost of business operation is not rent, utilities, or overhead, but your loss of purpose.

In my business activities, I write many letters to agencies, locally, statewide, and nationally. If you get any answer at all, it is usually a generic response, easily sent to anyone about anything, and saying absolutely nothing. You can depend on one sentence in any letter from any government agency where, evidently, they are just paid to sleep: “YOU NEED TO HIRE A LAWYER.” The most insulting result of citizen inquiry is the sending of printed pamphlets. I wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission recently about the total lack of transparency with a large corporation and the fact that I had been unable to communicate with this company at all. I fully explained my dilemma, enclosing supporting evidence. I received a pamphlet from FTC with a generic letter which said “If you do not find your answer in the enclosed pamphlet, please write us a letter explaining your problem.”

You are a fortunate patient if your doctor touches you anymore. The routine now and for many years is this: an assistant who knows how to read a weight scale and automatic blood pressure instrument writes down why you are in to see your physician. In the assembly line, you wait for the doctor until he runs in breathlessly, peruses today’s data, might look at an old chart, and since he knows you only feel you have seen a doctor if you get a prescription from him so you can buy some expensive drugs, you leave, trying to decide his purpose for studying medicine. To pay his large overhead, to keep two expensive cars in the driveway, and to support an expensive wife and more expensive children, his brain is busy calculating the number of patients he must suffer through every hour.

The Hippocratic oath was thrown out years ago. Bioethics determines everything from conception to death. We have enough intelligence to know that if a nation will slaughter sixty-three million of its most innocent and valuable citizens in the abortion clinics, citizens who might have made great musicians, artists, scientists, perhaps a bishop or President. Old, worn-out seniors who can contribute nothing anymore, but who eat up most of the healthcare dollars in their last months of life, will most certainly be euthanized. A proposed purpose for this is already in the thinking of the most pro-abortion politicians ever pushed by you and the media.

When Hitler started his book-burning and cleansing of the libraries of Germany in 1933, the first book on his list was the 1904 biography of Helen Keller. The disabled were the first to be eliminated. Hitler’s doctrine of Aryan supremacy did not have room for disabled people. I am a totally blind, 100% disabled, service-connected veteran. I represent the largest minority in this country (estimated 38 million). We are well aware that the purpose of many politicians is our extinction.

In God's economy, every life is important, we do not know why, some are born less fortunate than others. On remote islands in the south Pacific, in the poverty of Asia, in the bush of Africa, I saw young people who probably do not have a future of enlightenment. There challenge in life is just as important as anyone's. Now matter how difficult, I have never known anyone who wishes that he had been aborted, instead of facing the struggle. Their future, and preparation for the future is up to the individual, the state can have a part. In Singapore, the cleanest city I have visited, the funds in the employee's retirement funds is matched by the employer, the combination is then matched by the state, this is called the “Forbidden Fund”. The citizens of Singapore know they have a fund for their retirement, it cannot be touched until retirement. There is actual spending money there, not an IOU, as in the American social security trust fund.