STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Tuesday, 26 June 2012

[Demeter]

16. Romney and the Rise of the Superpredator Corporate Class By Richard (RJ) Eskow

http://www.nationofchange.org/romney-and-rise-superpredator-corporate-class-1340633447

Remember the "superpredators"? They were the supposedly super-violent youngsters of dark complexion that conservatives kept screaming about in the 1990s. We were told they were about to unleash an unprecedented wave of vicious crime any day now. Those superpredators don't exist, and never did. But the myth of the "superpredator" offers us a new (and, admittedly, partially ironic) lens through which to view today's corporate executives, a class of people which is apparently remorseless about the harm it causes in the pursuit of self-enrichment. Let's be clear: No group of human beings is uniquely predisposed toward evil. But society and government are supposed to discourage people from from acting on their worst impulses, and when it comes to the corporate class they - and we - have failed. Now the rise of the Corporate Superpredator Class could culminate in the election of one of its own to the highest office in the land.


Fear of Children

The myth of the juvenile "superpredator" was promoted by conservatives in the 1990s and 2000s. As Fairness and Accuracy in Media reported in 1998, politicized professors and mainstream commentators were terrifying the public with stories about the "remorseless brutality" we can expect to see from the "teenaged time bomb" that TIME Magazine's scare piece described as follows: "They are just four, five and six years old now, but already they are making criminologists nervous." But those superpredator children never existed. In fact, juvenile crime rates have declined "significantly" since the early 1990s, according to FBI statistics. But the fear engendered by superpredator scare tactics has distracted millions of Americans from their economic plight, and the forces behind it. Maybe that's why ALEC and other corporate-sponsored organizations have funded the "Stand Your Ground" laws that led to the death of Trayvon Martin and a number of other young people. If stoking fear of our minority children was a tactic to divert attention from the behavior of corporate leaders, it's been remarkably successful. Stories that "superpredators" were preying on the survivors of Hurricane Katrina helped distract the public temporarily from the real horror taking place there - the horror of government neglect.

The "superpredator" described in now-discredited sociological works was a person who was inherently amoral and criminal because he lived in a social milieu which lacked both a moral framework and a means of restraining and punishing bad behavior. Which gets us to Mitt Romney and today's top corporate executives. A highly wealthy American is now running for the highest office in the land with a nomination bought and paid for by his ultra-wealthy backers. The corporate class finally has the chance to elect one of its own, rather than depending on the compliance of someone else in that office. Am I saying that the country's top executives, some of whom I have known and worked with, are the real-life equivalent of those mythical, ultra-violent young people described in the "superpredator" scare stories? No. Many of them are good, decent people who are doing the best job they can. But there is a new culture of corporate leadership, one that's been growing over the last thirty to forty years. This new culture is less moral and more selfish then the leadership culture that preceded it, and it is almost sociopathically indifferent to the effects of its own behavior on other people.

Spotting a Superpredator

The now-discredited theory laid out the characteristics of those mythical teen superpredators. DeIulio said each generation of predator would be "three times as dangerous" as the generation that preceded it. They would, said DeIulio, be amoral, "radically impulsive," and "brutally remorseless. " Consider the evidence regarding corporate America: No current bank CEO has expressed remorse for the global impact of their misbehavior: tens of trillions of dollars in lost wealth, hundreds of millions of un- or under-employed people worldwide (and roughly 24 million of them here in the US), millions of foreclosures, nearly one home in three underwater, and a steep rise of families (including children) living in poverty. Many of these bank CEOs are second- and third-generation bankers. But then, as John DiIulio wrote, "kids of whatever race, creed, or color are most likely to become criminally depraved when they are morally deprived" in their upbringing. The near-sociopathic disregard for others isn't limited to Wall Street, either. When I flew from New York to Los Angeles on Saturday I stood in a crowd of people for over an hour waiting to pass through security. The temperature was high, there was no water, no place to sit, nobody coming through to check on the well-being of the people in line (some of whom were elderly, disabled, or carrying small children). This radical disregard for customer well-being on behalf of an entire industry would have been considered unthinkable a couple of decades ago......The corporate-superpredator mentality isn't limited to customers, either, or even to innocent bystanders. Shareholders, once considered the true owners of a publicly traded company, are now considered just another class of human being to be bilked, swindled, and misled. That viewpoint has been encouraged by the SEC, through the collusion of the Justice Department, which has often allowed investor fraud to be settled with no criminal charges for the wrongdoers and a big settlement that's paid by ... the swindled shareholders themselves.


John Iulio: &quot T)he super-predators are radically self-regarding. They regret getting caught."

The only banker who has publicly expressed real remorse at what the industry has done is former Citigroup chair John Reed, in his thoughtful interview with Bill Moyers. But Reed's a member of the earlier, non-predatory breed of corporate executive who believed in the executive's traditional mission: to deliver a service or product well, to build a company that will last for the long haul, and to treat everyone fairly in the process. That's the ethic that typically motivated executives across political boundaries. Even industrialists like Howard Hughes and Henry Ford, both of whom became virulently right-wing (Ford also became publicly anti-Semitic), were genuine engineering and business innovators. That distinguishes them from the executives in today's bloated financial sector, or predatory executives in non-innovative businesses...

Superpredators Are Made, Not Born...There's a moral to this story, and it's a simple one: If you reward predatory behavior, you will create more predators....Stopping the Superpredators: It's Everybody's Job

THERE'S A LOT I EDITED OUT (DOES NOT CONTRIBUTE MUCH TO THE ARGUMENT, BUT YOU CAN READ IT AT LINK)