NP? worth reading

[Doug Millison]

An Entire Class of Thieves
Was it all the fault of Ayn Rand, of Carter and Kennedy, of the Chicago
School, of Hollywood, of God's Demise?

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN


[...] You have to go back to Marx and Balzac to get a truly vivid sense of
the rich as a criminal elite. But these giants did bequeath a tradition of
joyful dissection of the morals and ethics of the rich, carried on by
Veblen, Moody, Wright Mills, Domhoff, Lundberg and others. But by the
mid-1960s disruptive political science was not a paying proposition if you
were aiming for tenure. A student studying Mills would be working nights at
the soda fountain while the kid flourishing Robert Dahl and writing rubbish
about pluralism would get the grad fellowship.

Back in the 1950s we were reading stuff about the moral vacuum in affluent
suburbia by people like Vance Packard and David Riesman. I guess inner
loneliness soon became inner joy. There was nothing wrong about putting
one's boot on a colleague's neck and cashing in. Where are the books now
about these forcing grounds for the great corporate criminal cohort of the
1990s, coming of age in the Reagan years?

In fact, it's nearly impossible to locate books that examine the class of
corporate executives through the lens of cool, scientific contempt. As
Charles Derber, professor of sociology at Boston College, explains to our
colleague William Johnson, much of the current writing on CEO culture is
published in magazines like Fortune or BusinessWeek. And though there are a
few authors-like Robert Monks-who focus their attention on executive
culture, nowhere will you find empirical studies on the sociobiological
roots of the criminal tendencies of the executive class.

Why? The rich bought out the opposition. Back in the mists of antiquity,
you had communists and socialists and populists who'd read Marx and who had
a pretty fair notion of what the rich were up to. Even Democrats had a
grasp of the true situation. Then came the witch hunts and the buyouts,
hand in hand. Result, an Enron exec could come to maturity without ever
once hearing an admonitory word about it being wrong to lie, cheat and
steal, sell out your co-workers, defraud your customers.

The finest schools in America produced a criminal elite that stole the
store in less than a decade. Was it all the fault of Ayn Rand, of Carter
and Kennedy, of the Chicago School, of Hollywood, of God's demise? You'd
think there's at least a Time cover in it.


http://www.counterpunch.org