'Just Business': Capitalism is an Anti-Social Disease

[seafan]

Dave Lindorff writes:


July 8, 2010

Looking at the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, where the results of the greed of corporate executives at British Petroleum, TransOcean and Halliburton, not to mention the greed of paid-off regulators in the Minerals Management Service and the members of the House and Senate who took dirty money to water down drilling regulations are on ready display, I was reminded of a prominent business leader in New York, recently deceased.

Told by his sister of a young woman she knew who had posted a sign on her wall saying, “Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have,” this executive, who had held a top position in the multinational media industry, sniffed, “Ugh! That’s terrible. If people thought like that, no one would strive to do anything.”

Of course, hundreds of thousands of people--teachers, nurses, park rangers, musicians, writers, artists, small farmers and social workers--spend their lives working at low wages trying to make others happy and better educated, or to produce things that people need or that bring joy to others, content that their lives have meaning. Yet this same individual, who was worth perhaps a hundred million of dollars, spent his life simply amassing ever more wealth, which is what the rich and powerful do. He worked hard raking it in, riding roughshod over employees, competitors, and workers, all with the goal of obtaining more wealth, though he had no hope of ever spending what he had. When he died, he left behind a family squabbling over the spoils.

And how different, really, was he from most wealthy, powerful people? To be sure, some give extravagantly to charity, especially when they die, but their bequests can never compensate for the harm they do in their lifetimes.

Let’s face it. Capitalism is a disease--a raging infection that causes its hosts to become sociopaths.

When I lived in Hong Kong, where I worked as a correspondent for Business Week magazine back in the mid-1990s, my wife Joyce and I adopted a baby boy from a local Hong Kong orphanage. For the first six months, under the terms of the adoption process, we had Jed living with us in a foster-care arrangement, which required us to take him to regular visits to Queen Mary Hospital’s toddler clinic. There we often met a British couple who at the same time as us had adopted two boys, both with physical disabilities--one affecting his walking, and the other his vision. The man was someone I knew professionally--a major figure in the international investment banking industry who worked for a large British bank. I knew he had been centrally involved in lucrative deals in Southeast Asia that had financed some poorly planned infrastructure projects that were displacing and destroying the lives of tens of thousands of poor people, and that he had actually been indicted in one country for having misled the government there about the risks involved in the loans. But here he was, with his two adopted kids, just a model father: loving, patient and kind.

I was struck by this man’s ability to segment his personality into two discrete halves--a caring human being, and a profit-maximizing monster.

But over the years, I’ve come to realize that he didn’t realize he was a monster, for this is really the marvel of capitalism: its ability to treat as a virtue the ruthless pursuit of profit.

Another example of smiling sociopathy:


November 9, 2009

(Lloyd) Blankfein, whose firm posted $3 billion in third quarter earnings and plans to hand out over $16 billion in year end bonuses, tries to defend the firm’s compensation by saying that they are linked with long-term performance and don't create systemic risk.

.....

“We’re very important,” Blankfein is quoted as saying in The Times of London. “We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle.”

He goes on to admit to being the focus of public outrage--"I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer"--but then blows the attempt to reconciliation by saying he is "doing God's work."

And another example:



BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg

"We care about the small people," the Swedish-born Svanberg said awkwardly - twice - of the millions of Gulf Coast residents suffering because of the oil spill catastrophe. He apologized to "the American people."

And another example:

"The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume." ---BP Group CEO Tony Hayward

And another example:

"Deficits don't matter." ---Dick Cheney to former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill

More from Lindorff:

.....

Corporate tycoons and managers have for several centuries now wreaked havoc on workers, and on the environment, yet because they also control the government, the schools and the media, we have, especially here in America, come to celebrate their sociopathy. “It’s just business,” we say, as millions of people are laid off when sales are down, or when some investment bank or leveraged buyout house arranges for a takeover of some enterprise and promptly tosses half the workforce out on the sidewalk. “It’s just business,” we say, when a bank tosses thousands of people out of their homes because, laid off from their jobs, they’re late in making a few mortgage payments.

.....

Now we have a well spewing toxic crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico in the biggest purely man-made environmental disaster in the history of the Gulf and of the United States. That’s “just business” too: the company’s managers were paying over $1 million a day to rent the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig from TransOcean, and so they cut some corners to get the well finished so they could cap it, and get rid of the rig. Unfortunately, the corners they cut ended up causing a blowout that killed 11 men, sank the rig, and broke open the wellhead.

“Just business.”

Money trumps peace, sometimes."--- George W. Bush, February 14, 2007

[Oregone]

1. Why do you hate freedom?

j/k

:)