Tag Archives: truth

Saturday follow-up to “Truth or Duh” – “Americans for Prosperity” Revealed for What they Are

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Thanks to Gary Flomenhoft at Vermont Commons for the link to this article, “Koch Political Group Brags About Bullying GOP Lawmakers Into Denying Climate Science.”

Here, Koch Brothers-financed Americans for Prosperity president Tim Phillips boasts about AFP’s successes in driving Washington politicians away from support for climate change mitigation and green energy, and into the sleazy embrace of climate change denial. This proves a key point of my blog post yesterday: a dominant majority of politicians, economic policy makers, and (MBA-bedecked) financial industry people are currently standing in the way of reasonable federal energy policy, support for progressive state energy policy, and private investment to develop a post-fossil economy. There is so much money and influence at stake that these puppets are selling their own integrity, scientific truth, country, and children’s futures down the river.

Really, it’s that simple now. For such an outrageous betrayal of their credibility, respected positions in society, education, the public communication spectrum, and civic duty, the likes of Tim Phillips and others named in the above article should not be surprised if mobs demand that they be dragged out of their fancy offices, tarred, feathered, and set out in stocks in the locations recently vacated by occupationists in major cities, and have eggs, rotten vegetables, excrement, and other appropriate matter thrown at them, because what they are inflicting on this nation is no better.

There is no other “theory” that works here.  It’s purely and simply:

Huge Power + Threats to Huge Power = Huge Efforts at All Costs to Preserve Power

Unfortunately for us, this huge power derives from the fossil fuel complex, which is bad for all of us in balance.

Don’t they teach them that stuff in MBA programs?

OccupyMBA!

Truth or Duh – Why Wall Street Doesn’t Do Climate Science

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Jeremy Grantham of GMO came to our MBA program to speak last week.  The title of his talk was “Irrational Avoidance of the Unpleasant: Perspectives on Investing, Resource Limitations & Global Warming.”  It was a fantastic, well-attended talk by one of the most respected investment advisers in the world today, but he accidentally ended up almost duplicating one of his major criticisms of the mentality of Wall Street: climate change denial or willful ignorance.

He never meant to, of course.  Look at his title!  A point early in his talk was that, while 97% of scientists world-wide agree that human-induced global warming is taking place, the ratio is almost the reverse among Wall Street investment banks, brokers, traders, investors, the financial media, etc.  As an extreme case, consider the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, with its endless aspersions toward climate science and climate scientists.  What the heck are those monkeys doing?  Idiots.  Hypocrites, too.  Rupert Murdoch and his editors at the “J” have their trembling tongues so deep in the honey pot of the fossil fuel complex that they’ll do anything to keep them sweet.  And then of course go home to their swank estates in Greenwich and Darien fully aware that the climatologists are probably right.  They are not fools.  But their 1% incomes tell them to shut up about global warming and get with Exxon Mobil’s and Peabody Energy’s program.  Which means keeping Wall Street a truth-free zone as far as climate is concerned.  Beware of people who are paid handsomely to give the truth a wide berth.

Jeremy G. is to be forgiven.  Time was limited, and he became so heavily focused on potential food scarcity, peak oil, mined phosphate and potassium depletion, and population growth that he never got to climate.  There’s enough to be worried about anyway.  But in their eager haste to always sound climatologically correct in front of their bribers, and in passing the contagion along to their even more obedient supplicants in Congress, the Wall Street establishment is doing the 99% a vast, ominous disservice, and you can bet your bottom dollar (which is probably all you have left) that the Masters of the Universe will have better means than you or I to adjust to the consequences of climate change.  Country home near Chicoutimi, anyone?  I hear there’s a new Friday evening shuttle leaving from the Midtown Skyport!

Wonder if that MBA Oath is starting to make a difference…  After all, Wall Street probably has the highest MBA density of anywhere in the world (measured in MBAs per cubic centimeter).  Don’t MBA programs these days emphasize realism, accuracy, and truth?!  (Or is that only when there’s a big payoff at the end?)

Promise #5 of the Oath is:

“•  I will protect the right of future generations to advance their standard of living and enjoy a healthy planet.”

As of today, 6,426 MBAs have sworn their fealty.  Hm.  That’s about 6% of all MBA enrollments in the US, annually.  Considering the Oath has been around for 3 years, and that there are non-US signers, we can guess that perhaps 1% of annual MBA grads stake their self-respect, reputations, and honor before God and (wo)man upon dutifully carrying out Promise Number 5 above, which they are of course doing.  The other 99% (a different 99%, please note) thus continue to swindle and shill, rogues of the hydrocarbon bosses, unannointed and unprotected by the goodness of the Fellowship of the Oath.

We have to save them, so they do us right!  Let the truth prevail.  Let them ALL swear the Oath, dedicate themselves to scientific truth and a healthy planet, and stand with the 97% (of climate scientists), so that people like Jeremy Grantham don’t have to continue revealing such a pathetic, pathologically criminal state of affairs.

That should be enough, right?

OccupyMBA!

 

 

 

Narcissism, fragmentation, loneliness, and death

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The culture of the Master of Business Administration is the culture of narcissism, fragmentation, loneliness, and death… unless it’s tethered by an active, caring commitment to community, to stakeholders, and to a reverence for the great natural and human systems in which we all live.  To say anything less harsh is to succumb to moral passivity, to write yourself a ticket to stand by and not do enough, whatever good you’re doing.

Less unsustainability is not more sustainability, and modern business is starting from a pretty deep level of “un-“, despite a few bright green lights here and there.

It took me three long weeks to summon the clarity and resolve to write the above (after knowing for more than a quarter-century that it had to be written).

Why the tortured hesitation?  All I had done was put out “OccupyMBA” in the warm Occupy Wall Street spirit of early November, with a clever teaser about the arch pokes I would soon be making at conventional MBA programs.  The next move was supposed to be easy.  Directing an MBA program is my job, and ours is a deliberate breakaway from the conventional.  We’re actually doing caring, committed, reverent B-school in an authentic fashion on a routine basis now, four years after our launch.  It’s never perfect, but it’s getting better and better, and it’s no scam.

Where the torture lay was in the hideous emergence of the oppressive whole from a set of seemingly innocuous parts.  There’s no doubt that the dominant global MBA paradigm is fully aligned with the swollen financial sector, each new financial bubble, corporatism, money-tainted politics, consumerism, climate change denial, neocolonialism, and other strands of the rope strangling our world.

Do you see B-school deans out sleeping with the occupationists, or their students getting pepper-sprayed as they protest the future-debasing nature of discounted cash flow analysis?  I haven’t.

Yet, charge a business school academic with the perpetuation of unsustainability and one is likely to hear the defiant scoff that business administration consists of concepts, tools, and practices that are value-neutral, to be evaluated based on how they are used, by whom, to what ends.  One person might put their finance to work developing derivatives that understate risk and cheat investors out of millions.  A classmate might use the same knowledge to build microcredit programs for poor communities.  We’re just honest vendors of neutral knowledge, say the conventional B-schools – research-based “best” practices – and what the world does with it is as diverse and morally ambiguous as the world itself.  Throwing in an ethics course might bias graduates toward the right choices, come to think of it!  Or even an MBA Oath!

That’s nonsense.  It’s worse than that.  It’s evil.

A perceptual challenge with dominant paradigms is that they truly are synergistic and emergent, and vanish from detection at the level of their parts, which are usually human beings and small groups, with their human personalities, warmth, humor, sympathetic non-verbal communication, apparent decency, vulnerability, mortality, and (usually) naïve unawareness of their role in the reproduction and maintenance of the paradigm.  Look too closely, and you see nothing.  When I visit my alma MBA-mater, Wharton, I see comfortable study spaces, friendly faces, stimulating conversations, and nice nooks for a coffee and laptop session under a leafy ficus tree.  I don’t see a system of oppression slowly grinding down the Earth’s life-support systems and moving wealth across the planet from the many poor to the few very rich.  But let’s face it: that’s exactly what’s happening, and Wharton is one of many places where they/we train.

That’s the truth we need to hold on tight to, and speak to power.  There are solutions.  Just because truths vanish upon close inspection doesn’t mean that they will not re-emerge when we pull back.  That is one of the most joyous, heart-rending, tragic, awfully righteous contributions of the OWS movement.  The macro-obvious lack of economic justice and economic democracy is pointed out, transcending all the traps that would suck you down below the level where you know or care.  OWS is a drumbeat now.  I hope it doesn’t falter, because we need to stay aware of the larger truth, even as we devote ourselves to practical change in the local and the micro and the immediate.

OccupyMBA.