As more and more big businesses take a dive, should anyone be all that surprised? For twenty years or more I have been of the opinion that "the Market" had been taken over by money manipulators, people who make obscene amounts of money while contributing little to society. Some, as we now see, have not only schemed their way to wealth, but have also ruined businesses and employees' lives in the process.

I sense that a great many Americans are surprised and aghast at what has been happening. So maybe what we all need is a reality check. American business is infected with the ethic "do whatever it takes," which manifests itself in a number of ways: "Don't compete with your competitors, destroy them," "Tell them what they want to hear," "Money talks and bullshit walks," and on and on.

Basically it is endemic dishonesty, so pervasive that we don't even recognize it when it is right in our faces. A few good and even amusing examples are in advertising. I admit that a lot of the garbage in advertising is innocuous and is meant to be stupid or goofy, but a lot of it is still dishonest or a false representation. A few examples: One, a few years old and that I will never forget, was by a local bank. While showing us a scene of the mountains from the air, the announcer proclaims, "Long before time there were the mountains." Now any analysis of this gem might lead you to ask a couple of questions like, how do you get long before time? Does this mean that they have discovered negative time? Also, how do you have mountains before time? And finally, who thought up this asinine sentence? Another good one is, "this car has a soul"...okayyy. One of the newer ones is for the "mach three turbo." Now folks, you might think this is a fighter jet, but it is a shaving razor. By its name we could assume that it has a turbine engine of some sort and shaves at three times the speed of sound. Be very, very careful shaving with this razor. And, of course the classic distortion is the one I call the immaculate hamburger. Clearly, they have to make it look good, but the burgers always shown on television don't exist. You can't buy a burger like that. No burger I have ever bought looked like the ones that are shown four to six inches thick and absolutely perfectly constructed. These advertising examples may seem silly to you, but I think that they show that the business world BS goes all the way from the fast food burger right up to the executives gutting your 401(k). Oh, let's not forget the new buzz phrase "reality TV," which has nothing to do with any reality that I know of.

--Robert Lane

PS: I composed this letter over a year ago, long before President Bush and his administration took us to war with a pack of lies. While TV ads may be amusing, death and destruction are not funny at all.