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Paul Elisha: Change

This Commentator had decided to devote his essay for today to the two documents which have hung above the desk in his work space, since they were awarded to him, by then Governor Mario M. Cuomo, for his participation and help in achieving major ethics legislation in New York State, on August 7th, 1987.  He was going to note how time and trials had wrought changes, which made these documents less important mementos of prior, experience and would then, perhaps, look forward to another time, for yet another, more important change.  This might even surpass what was then achieved, to legislate even more important advances in governmental ethics.  Alas, it now appears that this will not occur.

In his “Principles of  Scientific Management,”  Set forth in 1911, Fredrick Winslow Taylor wrote: “In the past the man has been first.  In the future, the system must be first.”

Given the system this commentator sees prevalent throughout the present political establishment, it’s obvious, no such progress is possible.

“The system,” that Taylor envisaged, if anything, makes such advancement impossible.  What we have, at every juncture of political activity, at present, including those ordained by our Courts, is a conglomerate of leaders and participants, whose involvement is devoted to a system, in which ethics is ordained to further the dominance of a xenophobic few, over a lesser majority, steeped in debt, poverty and a variety of onerous forms of taxation.

Until those of this society’s powerless learn that power derives, not from guns but from collaboration that ignores differences in color, ethnicity and quasi-religious variance, we are doomed to the heartless and conscienceless system, which now controls much of our nation and (for that matter) our ‘systematized’ world.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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