Should Shell be criminally investigated in the latest gas-theft death?

Mr. Jayesh Prajapati, a 44 year-old Toronto gas attendant died while trying to prevent a gas-and-dash on September 15, 2012.

Sid Ryan, president of the Ontario Federation of Labour has created a hotline (800-668-9138) to gather information on these vulnerable workers. He calls on police to investigate the business model that resulted in 2 deaths in Ontario within 13 months in the petroleum retail franchise sector.

Click to hear his 7:16 interview with the national public radio program, CBC’s As it Happens.

Did Shell “Know or could have reasonably been expected to know” serious injury could result by not having pre-pay only pumps?

Franchising is processed as if it were a prison.

Phil Zimbardo says evil comes from hierarchy.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

• Franchising harms people, over time by both sides (see Clay/Prisoner 416 and mock guard talk: start at 2:46). No regret, guilt. Only after upon reflection.
• Prisoner 8612 @ 1:36 (after 36 hours ‘incarceration”)
• Let me in on some knowledge…I know you’re a nice guy (You don’t know that).
• People didn’t say anything.
• Prisoner 819 did a bad thing… I have to prove I’m not a bad prisoner.
• The situation degrades over time.
• How program dissenters are treated by peers and guards (one sign of resistance: Prisoner 416). The guards go crazy. Not a hero but a troublemaker.
• The Stanford Prison Experiment Slide Show

Problems with authority. Breaks from reality. Damaged feeling function. Lack of trust. Anger. Barrenness.

What do you think they chose? Most elected to keep their blanket and let their fellow prisoner suffer in solitary all night.

Who gets hurt when hundreds of families are attacked?

Not visible at CFA galas perhaps.

[Copyranter]

Michael Moore and the low cost of killing a U.S. federal judge

Chris Hedges is right: Moore is a more progressive force than the entire Democratic party.

Lots of guns in Canada: So few killings.

Where does the fear come from?

Race and poverty.

MichaelMoore.com

Gaza as a metaphor for the franchise industry

Am I wrong?

In the beginning…

…war looks and feels like love. But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. it destroys the outside world until it is hard ot live outside war’s grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests wareonly to remain numb. The world outside war becomes, as Freud wrote, “uncanny.” The familiar becomes strangely unfamiliar – many who have been in war find this when they return home. The world we once understood and longed to return to stands before us as alien, strange, and beyond our grasp. p. 163

And the hangover?

When the mask of war slips away and the rot and corruption is exposed, when the addiction turns sour and rank, when the myth is exposed as a fraud, we feel soiled and spent. It is then that we sink into despair, a despair that can lead us to welcome death. This despair is more common than many expect.

In the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, almost a third of all Israeli causalities were due to psychiatric causes, and the war lasted only a few weeks. A World War II study determined that after sixty days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties. They found that a common trait among the 2 percent who were able to endure sustained combat was a predispostion toward “aggressive psychopathic personalities.” p. 164

– War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges

The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug

I have seen many franchise wars in+30 years.

Chris Hedges who has been involved with international industrial violence for over 20 years.

Be Attentive:

…I have seen too much of violent death. I have tasted too much of my own fear. I have painful memories that lie buried and untouched most of the time. It is never easy when they surface.

I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers – historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state – all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, powerem chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which become preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface withiin all of us. And this is whey for many war is so hard to discuss once it is over.

The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. it can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living… p. 3

And:

…the lie in war is almost always the lie of omission. p. 21

— War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Hedges, as columnist at Truthdig.com

Litigation lifeboats are only for those willing to choose life

Franchise systems sometimes choose to eat their franchisees (life savings, home equity, dignity).

Life is about choices, timing and trust.

Offers of a spot in the litigation boat are time sensitive.

Just like everything else in life.

Self-help: do not take justice into your own hands

Almost universally a bad idea if done outside of a larger strategy.

Always think:

In two years time, do I want to have a judge see me sink to a franchisor’s level?

Don’t go for the cheese in that trap: Everything in its proper time and place. Discipline, discipline, discipline. Come to the Court with clean hands. Two wrongs do not make a right. The Rule of Law (not the bully).

This is what I have learned over my apprenticeship.

Revenge is best served cold.

Franchising is in the entrepreneur illusion business

Magical thinking.

Chris Hedges gets it right.

@ 5:35: clinging to fantasy; to magical thinking.

In essence, what we’re trying to do is to borrow our way back to a bubble economy of 2006.

And the danger with that, and this is just across popular culture, is that we think if we just dig deeper within ourselves, If we just find the inner strength and fortitude, If you grasp that you are truly exceptional…

…you can have everything you want.

Hedges on TruthDig.

Restoring justice in franchising

When one human right is violated, all human rights are violated.

Upon reflection, many franchisees consider their experiences a violation of their fundamental human rights. While the most obvious one, the one always mentioned in even the weakest franchise law (right to associate) there are several others, principally, violations of the right to enjoy free speech.

If franchising is to “get back” there must be a technology that assists in recognizing and treating this violence. It’s called restorative justice.

South Africa developed one:

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was a court-like restorative justice body assembled in South Africa after the abolition of apartheid. Witnesses who were identified as victims of gross human rights violations were invited to give statements about their experiences, and some were selected for public hearings. Perpetrators of violence could also give testimony and request amnesty from both civil and criminal prosecution. Wikipedia

Canada is working on another for their indigenous peoples.

Franchisees are both a distinct and indigenous people. Ontario had a form of it at the public hearings that preceded the Arthur Wishart Act (Franchise Disclosure) in 2000.

1. Check it out for yourself: of the 40 testimonies, former and honest franchisees speak one language, one experience, one emotion.
2. For the individuals involved, March 6, 7, 8 & 9, 2000 were important dates in their lives because a threat to someone else’s liberty, is a threat to everyone’s. There are no bystanders in a rights war. Many of these are still in public service.
3. I started collecting articles in preparation of these testimonies and from this need, WikidFranchise arose.

Statesmanship: A first step is the state acknowledging that systemic abuse happened and they themselves were a part of the problem. Not the individual politician or civil servant: but that, for their part, a predatory environment was tolerated and enabled that caused family violence to flourish in franchising. This is called leadership.

Public hearings may be an appropriate response.

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