Cadillac-Driving Welfare Queens in the 21st Century

Right-Wing Free-Marketeers Scream "Socialism" at News that GM CEO Asked to Resign by White House

Nobody listens~

Your Demon's "quote of the day," from the Washington Post/Slate website commentary on the sudden precipitous decline of confidence in the MBA degree:

"If we ask why no one stopped these people, however, we come right back to business school. It was the market fundamentalism that dominates business school thinking that assured us that markets are self-regulating. It was the management myth—the idea that there is some specialized, teachable body of expertise that constitutes management—that confirmed the strange notion that these people were capable of regulating themselves. And it was the shareholder-value model from Business 101 that said all you need to do is load up managers with tons of stock options and they'll be sure to do the right thing. These aren't just ideas that happen to be taught at business school; these are the ideas that provide the rationale for the existence of the schools.

"The only semblance of a theory behind modern business education is that it purportedly produces 'experts' in shareholder-value maximization who are capable of forming an ideal, self-regulating market.

"It's a neat theory, of course, and pretty radical, too. But not since the fall of the Soviet Union has a system of belief woken up with so many parking tickets on its windshield."

Extra-Credit reading assignment: on the GOP's exploitation of the "Lemon Populism" eight years of their concerted efforts did so much to bring about:

"The clearest sign that the recent strain of populism may turn out to be a lemon is how quickly the GOP rushed to embrace it. Conservatives are now running attack ads against AIG bonuses—which is pretty rich, considering that the AIG bailout began under a conservative administration whose guiding economic theory was to reward risk and to lower taxes on high compensation. Republicans aren't running those ads to usher in a new era of equality; they want to poison the well against government action of any kind, from the economy to health care."

http://www.slate.com/id/2214946/?from=rss