It's Not Hard to Be a Job-Slashing, Pension-Grabbing CEO -- If You're a Sociopath

is more Thom Hartmanns...

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They reflect the dysfunctional cultural (and Calvinist/Darwinian) belief that wealth is proof of goodness, and that that goodness then justifies taking more of the wealth.

Just FYI, it was not Darwin who proposed these ideas. Darwin's focus was on biological processes. It was actually economist Herbert Spencer who coined the term "survival of the fittest" when he read about Darwin's theory of natural selection. Spencer then applied this idea to his own economic theories thus creating the wholly imaginary idea of an economic equivalent of the biological process of natural selection.

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Sadly, there are all too many people who would LOVE to be heartless, money-grubbing CEO's. For most of these brethren, they unfortunately (or for us, FOR-tunately) occupy much of the bottom-rungs of society to even dream of Donald Trump-style living in the high-rise corner office.
Goes along with the phrase, "If you had any brains, you'd be dangerous".

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Given the low level of political discourse these days, I'm not big on calling other individuals sociopaths, as it has become one of the primary tools of dirty politics. If we disapprove of someone, he/she becomes a sociopath.

Clinton haters--who define ad hominem politics today--are fond of saying the Clintons are sociopaths--suggesting an alarmingly low opinion of American voters, among other things. So caution is advised in psychoanalyzing public figures whose policies we disapprove.

But I agree that the Republican Revolution was the elevation of sociopathy to a social ideal.

It got started with the dingbat President, Ronald Reagan. All of a sudden, the worst corporate behavior was upheld as the ideal of humankind. It turned out businessmen were the superrace and greed was good.

Money would trickle down (after eons, one presumes); business was efficient and government was inefficient; business methods should be applied to all areas of human activity. Life was an Ayn Rand novel.

Keep in mind, IQs in America had sunk to an all-time low at this point.

So, as we contemplate our situation, we should keep in mind America just spent the last 30 years rigging the institutions of business, government, the media, and education to put sociopathy firmly in the driver's seat, forever.

The sociopathy machine that is the U.S.A. has tremendous momentum and resources. We see this being played out in the disheartening health care debate, not to mention the fact that our new President is some kinda neocon. Even if our luck improves, it's going to take some time to turn this juggernaut of greed around.

Symbolic YouTube video--Holes in History

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CEO pay relative to other employees varies over time and by country, even as the percentage of psychopaths probably remains constant. And as some have mentioned above--and in my experience--there are plenty of slimy, slithery characters at the rank or middle management levels who know enough about business to run a company into the ground as well as any overpaid CEO.

It seems to me that the answer is more cultural, sociological, and political than economic or statistical. We simply let them get away with it. We place a subjective value on them because we think we need to give them incentives to perform, or that we need to reward them simply for being CEOs, even though they often make more money by screwing up or retiring than doing anything productive.

CEOs are more like tulips and pet rocks than surgeons, engineers, and others whose pay is more or less justified by their skill set and education. As humans, and especially as Americans, we tend to be a hierarchical breed that has some collective psychological need to deify and spoil our so-called "leaders." I don't understand exactly why we're so stupid, but that's how it seems to work.

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The peculiar conditions of corporations and the unnatural legal fiction of their personhood combined with modern capitalism has given rise to a social and business environment that favors the type of evil creatures that Thom Hartman describes.

The fossils of terrible and fierce, but thankfully long-dead predators which paleontologists find gives us hope that like their antediluvian cousins, these sociopathic CEOs and their many-initialed brethren will go the way of the dinosaurs.

But we can't wait for a random comet to do the work of changing the conditions which favor the corporate slimebags. Let's work harder to make them extinct. Let's make the Permian extinction event seem like a Sunday school marshmallow roast compared to what we do to these guys.

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he/she will shortly be replaced by someone who is. Or at least that is the likly assesment most CEO's would currently have. If they don't act in this horrible way they will be replaced by someone less scrupuless then they. So they are self justifeied

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Like the pols in Washington, CEOs need to be reined in for not only how much they earn but also how they spend what they earned. For example, for a lot of "too big to fail" companies going bust, it's no surprise that nearly all those CEOs were wasting their pay on bribing Congress when they could have spent that on maintaining the company's good name and paying employees fairly. With obscene pay raises, you'd think that they wouldn't be so pathologically insane enough to slit their own company's wrists just to scavenge their profits. Unfortunately, when it comes to teaching finance in colleges, pleasing the stockholders while gutting the employees is somehow framed as a "good" thing. The same goes for CEOs bribing Congress and soon to come pols bailing out Wall $treet so that stockholders can continue the perpetual greed madness and keep employees gutted.

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Being upset about a CEO slashing jobs and taking bonuses is like getting mad at a lion for chasing down a caribu. The CEO is contractually and legally obligated to increase share value. That's his/her job. The problem isn't individuals who willingly sacrifice the well being of their fellow man for personal gain. That behavior couldn't be more human. The problem is finance laws that not only turn a blind eye to the devastation the profit over people ideal causes but, actually mandates it.

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Being upset about a CEO slashing jobs and taking bonuses is like getting mad at a lion for chasing down a caribu. The CEO is contractually and legally obligated to increase share value. That's his/her job. The problem isn't individuals who willingly sacrifice the well being of their fellow man for personal gain. That behavior couldn't be more human. The problem is finance laws that not only turn a blind eye to the devastation the profit over people ideal causes but, actually mandates it.

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Here is my concept for a new kind of business:

The name of the new company is called The Human Agenda and it can be run from a small office with just a few employees. Corporations and even governments subscribe to the service on a yearly basis and that's where the cash flow comes in. Here's what the company does: Corporation A has a job opening for some management position. Several qualified humans are being considered for the job as well as a narcissan and a sociopath. Corporation A sends a message to The Human Agenda who sends over an agent from another subscriber organization, let's say Corporation J. This agent has been chosen completely at random, there was no way to predict who the agent will be, and since she lives in a different city or even country, there will be no way of "repercussing" her once her job is done. She sets up in an empty office and spends the next 2 or 3 days interviewing all the prospective people vying for the position.

She is no ordinary HR person however, she has been trained to spot Anti Social Personality Disorder. She sees that the narcissan has been clumsily sleeping with, blackmailing and bribing around to get the promotion and that the sociopath has been doing the same evil stuff just more devious and invisible.
At the end of her stay she writes a report listing her observations and making her recommendations which is delivered somewhere "upstairs". Then she disappears back to Corporation J, where in time some other random agent from another subscriber company will show up to recommend promotions just like in this case.

So the concept is that promotions are too important to be left to those who can be influenced by the people who really REALLY want the job and who will do anything to get it. It's like a random judge appearing on the panel at a figure skating competition. If sociopaths can be stopped at every step on the ladder, they will never make it to the top. If we can stop the flow of new sociopaths into the upper echelons, we can turn the world around. Another service that The Human Agenda can provide is certification: people being considered for high level jobs can get themselves tested and become certified sensitive humans.

If we can attack the Sociopathic Agenda at the level of every little promotion then we can turn this battle around. If you can't see that the last 10,000 years of human history has been a war between humans versus the psychopaths, then you need to look closer.

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CEO's are the figure heads and mouthpieces for the board of directors... if the board wants big profit, if the CEO doesn't perform to their expectations, they get replaced with someone who will comply at any price...

these board of directors members sit on lots of other boards so they co-ordinate with each other to keep their cut of the profits at a minimum high...

C.Wright Mills in the '60's saw this and called it the power elite and it still exists to this day... same thing for politicians, they are the second string, the targets, handsomely paid to shut up and do what they are told...

to break up this monopoly, you have to get at the boards and we really don't know who is doing what at a particular time... if we fire politicians and CEO's, the game still continues...

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Political Ponereology.

The work on this subject began in Europe when Hitler took over Poland and the term and initial studies were created by Andrew M. Lobaczewski (click on the above link) -- WHILE SURVIVING UNDER HITLER'S RULE.

These sociopathic people (about 6% of our population) have "been with us" ever since the beginning of recorded history. They can and should be identified and then restrained from control positions in certain critical endeavors in our society (politics, business, religion, etc.).

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Hartmann makes some good points, but it's easy to miss the bigger picture if one focuses too tightly on the guys at the top. Go back to Hannah Arendt's discussions of the "banality of evil." Eichmann, Hitler, and the worst of the CEOs don't function in a vacuum. They have the power they do not just because no one is stopping them, but because it's in the interest of so many people to support what they're doing. Start with the board of directors, sure, but then move down the food chain to the stockbrokers and fund managers, and further down to the "investors" (aka "gamblers") who want the biggest bang for their little bucks. From top to bottom the financial system encourages, even demands, that people focus on the quantifiable (money, profits, stock market prices, market share, etc.) and deal with everything else in their spare time.

It's a sick and dangerous system. The collapse of so many financial institutions, not to mention national economies, should make that clear -- and so should the possibility that it may be impossible to even begin to repair the damage without drastically overhauling the system. To get an idea of how hard "drastically overhauling the system" is to even think about, never mind plan for and accomplish, take a look at what's going down with health-care reform. Does it remind anyone else of how HAL 9000 responded when it realized the people were trying to curb its power?

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Once Again, Idiot Thom Hartmann Doesn't Know What the HELL She's Talking About


sociopaths do what they do and either live in complete denial that they are hurting people or don't realize their actions are hurting people.

psychopaths do what they do knowing full well they are hurting people.....but don't care.



CEOs are the latter.


that said, Thom Hartmann is a rabid zionist who not only excuses the bloodlust of Israeli extermination of the Palestinians but relishes and enables it.


so let's ask Hartmann.....just who in the hell is the psychopath here? she should also add HYPOCRITE to her own curriculum vitae and ALTERNET should be ashamed for giving a platform for such neoNAZIism.

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I understand that that the percentage of sociopath citizens may be as high as 25%. My guess it is much higher for politicians. Most hide their dysfunction very well as seemingly gregarious types, like G W Bush. They are incapable of having feelings of empathy. For them what passes as empathy is just expressing personal pain as when perhaps one of their children is in trouble. There are now so many distorted values and greed has become so accepted in America that this travesty of human justice expands. The solution is for all of us to care more about one another. We must begin to think about who is being exploited in every product we buy. And especially for the shareholders who profit hugely from the actions of their chosen henchmen.
This is a much more complicated problem than I outline here and the cure is even more difficult.
I say and the evidence is clear to me, “there will be no change.” We have been scammed.
Terrytom

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REPUBLICANISM: In order to maximize profit, all labor would be so minimally compensated that workers would practically be slaves. Wealth could only be inherited, as it would not be taxed. The small elitist base would continually shrink. Elections would be perfunctory, as the outcome was already determined.

What we need is some good old-fashioned Trust-busting!

By definition, the average Republican Party voter has below average intelligence.
a) Half of all humanity has a below average IQ.
b) Predominantly Republican states have below average IQs.
c) By definition, the average Republican Party voter has below average intelligence.
d) In American History, the contemporary Republican philosophy is a failed concept.
e) History has shown that implemented Republican philosophy leads to failure.

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Rheinhard Heydrich is one name that comes to mind. This dedicated Nazi was the perfect executive---dedicated, highly intelligent, quick-thinking. He was not a crazed blabbering ax-murderer. He was a loving father and husband. He also coolly planned the extermination of European Jewry. Eichmann carried out the plan after Heydrich was assasinated, but it was Heydrich who did all the "executive planning" that put everything together.

I have met several CEOs, and believe me they are a vain, ruthless, and downright mean bunch. They are totally detached from the rest of humanity. Indeed, they truly think they are DIFFERENT--in a superior sort of way--then the rest of us.

A great and perceptive article. Thanks Alternet!

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robert hare has been working on psychopathy for over a quarter century.

http://www.snakesinsuits.com/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13150054/

http://hare.org/

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But the message is not getting across to the masses connected to the Matrix Machine.

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don't participate.
We cannot fight them with money, we cannot fight them with weapons.
We fight them with the power we have, which is all ours through the simple fact that capitalism wholly depends on our spending money and doing activities which supports their greed.
Honestly examine what you do with your money and time and make spending decisions and have activities that do not contribute to their agenda.
This at the very least will make you feel better and if it reached a critical mass, worldcorp would be toast.
It's already happening to some degree.
Local food interest, bored to tears with their entertainment, the real cost of so-called convenience.
I never felt so liberated and better off since I took the ring out of my nose.

peter g

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He was a true sociopath. He would have an appointment with a client, and would never even leave the office until 1/2 hour after the appointment was supposed to start. What was amazing was that the foolish clients didn't fire him after he pulled that the second time.

It wasn't unusual for him to leave without the person he was supposed to take to be part of the meeting.

There had been no raises in 3 years.

When the stock market dropped, he laid off employees so he could still support his six homes throughout the country, including Hawaii.

He had pictures all over his office with him and all the big Republican politicos over the ages.

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I’m a poor person. One of the 58% of Americans who fall below the poverty line at some time during their life. I’m poor not through lack of education or ability to work, I’m poor because of a lack of decent paying jobs.
I wonder if anyone on Wall St, in our banking system, or in government has any idea how it feels to watch how our taxpayer money is spent? How to comprehend $700,000.00 bonus’s for three months work to the employees of a company my taxes just bailed out? Or to hear that Republicans main goal is to scuttle President Obama’s attempt at health care reform?
I can tell you this, I know of nobody who does not think that Wall St, The Fed and our government are in cahoots. I see, as do many others, a large class of people running our country who have grown rich of the system at the expense of the American people. All the winks and the nods, the lobbyists, the sweet deals, the pork, within this group that is supposed to represent we the people, but in actuality represent the biggest businesses, have become so appallingly obvious that it is jaw dropping.
Most Americans simply want to work a decent job and live a decent life. We don’t need millions in our bank accounts, we don’t need real estate all over the world and we don’t need gated communities to live in. We could care less for $4000.00 suits and caviar. We simply want to live our lives with an eye toward our children's and granchildren’s future’s, to see that they are educated and healthy and free of violence, and live in a better world for all. Is that too much to ask of the people who have very comfortably sat in Washington making decisions and deals that have made American people ever poorer as they have grown richer?
So why is there such an ever increasing and obscene imbalance between the monied people who buy our government and the rest of us?
Surely, as a nation, we can show more equality than this. It isn’t a matter of not enough. It’s purely a matter of distribution. Some people have so much excess they could on their own, literally build hospitals and schools and end hunger in their home states. Far, far too many others like me, spiral down for lack of work. We lose our houses, our transportation, our families break up, we end up on the streets, homeless and without health care. Yet someohow the rich continue to amass more and more wealth.

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"One of the questions often asked when the subject of CEO pay comes up is, 'What could a person such as William McGuire or Lee Raymond (the former CEOs of UnitedHealth and ExxonMobil, respectively) possibly do to justify a $1.7 billion paycheck or a $400 million retirement bonus?' "
. . . . .

Here's a little story that might help answer the question. Years ago, when I worked for a large entertainment company, our department head - a manager running a department of over 100 employees – was promoted upstairs, but the company failed to replace him.

The result? No change. The department functioned just as well without him.

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There is much attention focused right now - understandably so - on the preposterously obscene volumes of riches that are thrown in the direction of those catastrophically incompetent executives of crumbling mega corporations. What amazes me more than the hundreds of millions of dollars that these pathologically unscrupulous rich pigs are being payed, is the surprise with which average folk react to these revelations of excessive executive pay. People react as though it is some kind of surprising contradiction or irony, that stands out starkly as out of place: that it is unexpected that these executives should get such high karat golden parachutes, even as the collapsing firms that they once ran suck hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money into them - as if they were the financial equivalent of black holes.

I would argue that, in actual fact, it is more of an unsurprising causal connection than a surprising contradiction. We hear defences of the insane executive pay that corporations lavish upon their top executives. Were it not for this flexiblity in paying top dollars, we are told, the top corporations would lose out in their competition in the marketplace for top CEO material. They would not be able to secure the best and the brightest, for the most important responsibility in a company, we are told.

Well, it sure seems like they've managed to enlist the best and the brightest. I would argue that "the best and the brightest" is really a euphemism for "the shrewdest and the sleaziest". As it turns out, corporations and their shareholders - with their insatiable greed - are willing to pay the highest price for those willing to stoop the lowest. Whatever it takes. Whoever's moral inhibitions are sufficiently muted as to be able to exploit the most vulnerable and leave the most damage in their wake for others to clean up, without so much as the slightest twitching of their shriveled conscience - those are the people that the biggest financial stakeholders want.

They specifically want the people who would be willing to turn a blind eye to accounting and business practices that are likely to result in a wholesale fleecing of taxpayers when their all-promise-and-no-deliver corporations fall flat on their faces. It is the ones who have carefully cauterized their compassion, who have developed the kind of detachment that would allow even the very Holocaust to be rationalized away as "in the shareholders' best interests". Yes, these are the people that corporations have sought and installed in the top positions.

Because corporations are alien entities within our society that take on a life of their own, and they act not in the interests of the society within which they operate, but in the interests of feeding their own growth and survival. They tolerate the humans that make up their corporate body, to the extent that those humans have utility to them, and then they toss them out to the cold when those humans become inconvenient. The corporation takes humans and poisons them. It first turns the humans against all the other creatures on Earth, and the humans are willing to go along with it, because they don't feel the pain of the habitat loss and the hardship that is imposed upon the other creatures of Earth. And then, the corporation turns the humans against other classes of humans, and the humans are willing to go along with it, because they are detached and don't feel the pain and the hardship of the humans that are turned into feedstock to build the corporation's riches.

And it is "the best and the brightest" that rise to top rank in these pyramids of exploitation. And when the pyramid fractures apart and crumbles to the ground, those perched at the top fall safely to Earth with their gilded parachutes, while those down below are crushed under the rubble of the shattered juggernaut.

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If one examines history one sees that sociopathology tends to prevail in settled, hierarchical society i.e civilization. As subsistance "hunter-gatherers the sociopath would be exiled or at least kept in his place as a danger to a fragile and sensitive economy. Unfortunatly sociopathic men served a function in pre-state level society in that they would ruthlessly kill to protect their wives and daughters (who were subject to raiding parties). Thus the socipath tended to pass on his genes. Once settled societies (civilizations) came about, the sociopaths tended to (by dint of their ruthlessness)rise to the top of the hierarchy. In that sense, nothing has changed in the 4,000 years of civilization.

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The GE and Jack Welsh story- get to be the CEO of a superb company, sell off the profitable businesses, fire all employees, loot the company, retire, marry a new wife, live happily, watch your old company go down the drain.

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While the American dream may be that you can make it with hard work and perserverance, the reality is that it's harder and less likely for the masses! Sociopaths are created by nurturing those ugly qualities, that the rest of us "normal" people don't encourage in our children! Of course it could be that the "business models" taught in schools, emphasize too much of the bottom line at the cost of everything else! And then there is Congress, who if they weren't as interested in prostituting themselves for their own aggrandizement and glory - they too might actually work for the "INTEREST OF THE PUBLIC" and regulate these companies that are ditching the American worker in favor of the slave wages paid in overseas markets to boost those bottom lines even more!!!

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Great post!

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the plethora of incompetent CEOs who seem to play musical chairs for top executive positions that they fail into, round and round, one after another.

On one side of the economy, employees practically shit themselves with worry over a few dollars of office supplies or some such. On the other side it's A-OK to run the company into the ground because you've got your golden parachute and a plum position waiting for you somewhere else.

I gag whenever I hear, "But we have to offer these compensation packages in order to recruit top talent." I've been unemployed and underemployed since October of 20001 and this the fifth round of bullshit we've seen in eight years and no one except the workers gets fucked.

Dot com bubble: "No one could've seen it coming." No, even my mentally handicapped father had enough common sense to say, "How can they be making money?" whenever a dot com commercial came on the TV.

9/11 & 7/7: "No one could've seen that coming." No, I was on an international phone call from NYC to the UK on 9/7/2001 talking about the effectiveness of using airplanes as guided missiles to attack NY. (No one has ever contacted me about this phone call!) No one could've imagined such a scenario, um, despite that terrorism drills for those exact scenarios were being conducted at the same exact times and same exact places that the real attacks happened to occur.

Energy deregulation: After the spectacular failures of telecommunications deregulation and the deregulation of the airline industry, you know what would be a great idea? Deregulating electricity, the lifeblood of modern life. No one could've seen that coming.

Mortgage crisis: Working the numbers involves nothing more complex than basic math skills (adding, subtracting, multiplication and division). Massaging the numbers like they are salt water taffy and they still don't work. "How the hell can these people afford a house?" Answer: they couldn't. Again, no one (without a fourth grade education) could've seen that coming.

Oil bubble: "You don't know what you're talking about," I was told by my boss a year and a half before the oil bubble popped. "But surely this is not sustainable. How are we preparing for when the price of oil falls?" Answer: not a Goddamn thing. The CEO got $13,000,000 in compensation in 2008 and I got a fucken pink slip in February. No one's calling for the CEO to resign either.

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The original article points out an idea that I have held for years. The only problem is, the "free-market" promoters have always supported a Laissez-faire approach, and if anything threatens that, they start screaming "You're encroaching on my rights as an American! Life, Liberty and the persuit of Happiness!!!!"

The only problem with that argument is...where in the Constitution does it state that rights are EVER given to corporations? It doesn't. But the "free-marketers" have obfuscated the argument by assigning personal rights and freedoms to corporations, so that their companies can maximize profits, but minimize losses and possible criminal prosecution when the $4!t hits the fan.

A perfect example...I watched the show "Reaper" this last year. In one episode the devil is running a company whose business is the corruption of souls. When explaining to his son how his business works, this is his exact quote...
"Did you know, beginning in the late 19th century, corporations were granted all the rights of the individual, but none of the annoying responsibilities. They lack, almost by design, any kind of moral compass, conscience, or compassion. Basically, corporations are a way to enact sociopathic behavior on a grand scale. In short, they're what makes this country so damn great."

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Thom! How simple can you be? You want all the pluses that capitalism brings but none of the negatives! Bad chimp Thom! Bad chimp!

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Ah yes, that marvelous mantra of the big 80s. "greed is good", and Gordon Gecko is God . . .

And then, of course, there was the neurotic 90s. the dot com bubble, the strange universe of vast sums of money changing hands to invent a purported business with no tangible assets, except a trendy sounding name and a website . . .

But wait, there's more!

The mother of all Ponzi schemes was quietly in the making - and no, I'm talking about that charming character, Bernie Madoff, former chair of NASDAQ, and scumbag of the moment, now serving life in prison.

I'm talking about all of Wall Street, the biggest conglomerate of investment banking and financial services consortia ever assembled in history, staging the biggest phony investment scheme in all of known history, based on fake real estate valuation schemes, in which the primary product of the US economy sold to the global marketplace was bad paper, phony debt obligations resold at 100 to 1 (or worse) leveraged valuation . . .

Oh, gosh . . . and you suppose, just maybe, possibly, this weird Alice in Wonderland world of inverse economics might have attracted the lowest of the low, self serving soulless scumabgs - oops, I meant CEOs - like moths to a light?

Stop the presses, alert the media, round up the usual suspects!!!

Is anyone, ANYONE, surprised by any of this?

Hmmmmm???

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.......is the moral equivalent of Chainsaw Al (Dunlop of Sunbeam) until proven otherwise. Make the top tax rate 90%, as it was in WW2.

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CEOs do not:
criminalize plants
drop bombs to kill innocent foreigners
take your money and give to wall street
torture prisoners
accept bribes and feign democracy
regulate small business into bankruptcy
and among countless other crimes...
CONTROL SOCIETY WITH THE THREAT AND USE OF VIOLENCE!

CEOs simply exploit the stupidity of people that believe in planned economies. They do not make laws, they buy them. They depend on YOU.

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CEO pay is determined by the board of directors most of whom are friends of the CEO or friends of his friends. Or the CEO sits on the board of the company where the director is CEO.

All this adds up to a heavy incentive to be generous.

Frankly I think that if a company is losing money the CEO should get NO pay because he isn't doing a good job.

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Morality and decency is a thing of the past in America today. CEO's get away with this obscene greed because most Americans have their head up their ass. Juts keep them happy with Michael Jackson, breast enlargers, dick enlargers, and any other bullshit they watch on TV and you can rob them blind.
They can't even provide a decent health care system for the poor bastards that DON'T make billions.
What a despicable country.

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I do not beleive CEO's deserve the pay they get but out of the three big winners in our culture, athletes, celebraties and CEOs, the CEOs probably work the longest hours and are the best educated. An athlete has to work hard to get in the shape needed to perform, but they can be as stupid at a rock. The celebraties are the worst because a rich celeb can be both stupid and lazy. For intsance, what do Paris Hilton and Charlie Sheen have in common? They are both high school drop outs.

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Agree with zigy, above. Hunter-gatherer sociopaths performed a nasty but necessary function in dangerous times. Our lizard brains remember and try to perform the same functions today. Tito beat out the Cetniks for the affections of the Allies because he was ready and willing to shoot his own followers to maintain discipline. A large enough percentage of people today are sociopaths (4, 6, 10% ?) to suggest the trait is not an accidental abnormality. It serves a societal purpose that is valuable enough to pass the genes along. But, to the dismay of empathic people, it is at odds with liberal democratic systems. That may be why Churchill, a ruthless wartime hero, was thrown out on his ear in the peace that followed. (And this may be the real innovation of democracy -- there's little space for sociopathic leadership.) Agree also that we now have reached the tipping point where sociopathic state and national politicians rule the roost -- democracy in America is dying. Starting wars, telling gratuitous lies, throwing every 100th person in prison, silencing the opposition and corporate fascism are now the norm. Cheney is probably the quintessential sociopath, who was smart enough to know that only in a dangerous world would his likes be in demand. The good feelings and good times surrounding the Millennium must have shaken him to his soulless soles. Hence . . .

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So we have this vague notion of the heartless, sociopathic CEOs, but we won't come up with case studies? It really is a good idea to name the worst offenders so we have specific examples, as in Arianna Huffington's book 'Pigs at the Trough.' Talking in generalities will not bring us to a real solution. I suspect that deep down, Americans still worship CEOs, and so perhaps daring to name the most evil of them feels like an unpatriotic act? I hope America comes to a realization that the American dream can only come about by fostering a sense of community, not bowing down to secretive, elitist and corporate cabals.

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Many people who are by American standards successful in the corporate and political spheres are in fact psychopaths. They will spin the most outrageous lies to justify their actions ,with no fear of being "caught" and no remorse whatsoever over their actions. Dick Cheney is a classic example of a psychopathic personality.

Blue Dog Democrats, who are clearly in it for their own benefit (the money), and have no intention of representing their constituents, are another example. They are such adept liars that they are able to convince their constituents they are actually working for them. Like Bill Clinton.

Look around. They are everywhere, and they are generally quite successful. Psychopaths are the ultimate liars and manipulators, and our system is set up, by them, to reward that.

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Read the works of Ayn Rand, a quintessential creature of the '50's thru today.

Measure the idolatry, reverence, and slavish awe and admiration which that "public intellectual" has enjoyed, from the 50's thru today.

Notice the socio-economic and political predilections of those who heap such idolatry, reverence and slavish adimiration upon that person and their cultural, social and moral commitments.

Although there are many, many more influences and trends which value antipathy to society and to social relations which are just and dignified, and fulfilling and beneficial to all, it takes but some attention to those philosophies and perspectives and moralities positivized and popularized by Ayn Rand to help understand our current barbarism.

In the USA, sociopathology is a prevalent cultural, economic and political value; it has long been one. It's a "hereditary trait" from Mother England.

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Would it be sociopathic to build a company from the ground up that is automated, has few to no workers, and all the money goes straight to the owner at the top?

If not, how fundamentally different would this business be from a business that hired and fired lots of workers to cut costs and increase the flow of money to the top?

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I agree that CEO's are heartless monsters. If you showed them the children in Indonesia who work in their sweatshops to produce those cheap goods that the CEO gets rich off of, I doubt they'd bat an eyelash. They look at that and just see it as "the way of things."

But CEO's are just half the problem: The other half is capitalism itself. As mentioned, there IS NO oversight. There is no regulation. There is no control over these corporations. They do what they want, when they want.

Capitalism is a failed experiment. Adam Smith, for all his idealism, is a monster for conceptualizing a world where entities like this are allowed to control everything. It never occurred to him that perhaps some of these "winners" in a free-market system would eventually get so big, that they could rig the game to their own design. People will buy what you tell them to, because not only do you sell the product, but you control the tv network that tells them they need to buy "x."

It's time to decentralize away from one central power force, or else that power is going to be stretched far too thin, and it will break. We've seen towns across New England ban corporations from their water supplies, ban billboards, etc. It's time for other local communities to start doing the same. No more shopping at WalMart. No more support to these behemoths. It's time to create more down to earth realms.

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Actually, I'd bet that the fact that there is a relative handful of CEO's making the big money is more a result of the close-knit, moneyed ruling class in this country. Anybody have any hard data on where these CEO's went to college? Or how many of them are children of high level corporate leaders?

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is quite similar to the culture that dominated Germany starting in the 1920's and gained strength in the 1930's that led rise to the idea that if a person wasn't an ideal German than they were less than human. The odor of death in Germany that Germans allowed to happen and partipated in is not unlike what has happened to middle management and up in corporate culture today. They work to satisfy the bottom line and the bottom line is wealth and power and anything that gets in the way of that is bought off or terminated in the most cost efficent way possible. Busting up unions and buying politicians is what they do and John Q. Public is to be ignored and fleeced just enough to keep them comming back for more. Read "The 12 Year Reich; the Social History Of Germany 1933 to 1945". The ideals and goals of the Nazi party are not unlike the ideals of the republican party.

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For decades it's been clear that the GOP is the Party of Sociopaths. Everything they promote says so and always has. As for "survival of the fittest" that should be rephrased as "survival of the most ruthless." When capitalism and religion rule, we get endless war, endless suffering, endless domination and exploitation. And yet the US is wallowing in both. Makes you wonder about evolution; has it ended and we are stuck with these troglodytes forever?

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Unquestionably this article is parody, that is a piece of work so extreme that it makes rediculous the position it ostensibly means to support. However the question is, is the author serious?
For a start he claims that sociopathy is so rare and highly valued that it garners hundreds of millions of dollars, but his own figures put about 3 million sociopaths in america. Even assuming that only white male sociopaths need apply (and that destroys his contention that there is a competitive market) that still leaves at least 750,000 potential applicants. None of them would work for less that $10m?
This is not however the most rediculous part of his story, although if it was that would still sink it. No the most rediculous part is the insistence that you need sociopaths to run layoffs, when in fact you don't even need them to run torture rooms. Google "Stamford prison experiment" or "milgram experiment" if you're really that ignorant. Not to mention plenty of non-sociopaths refuse to pay people who's services they don't want every day, including the author.
Of course the best test of this idea that high CEO prices result from them having a needed skill set is CEOs that don't have a needed skill set. There are enough of these to form a statisically valid sample (god are there enough of them). We find that plenty of these people are getting paid big bucks for driving their companies into the ground. Whatever value there is in being able to "sack your own mother while whistling showtunes" (Scott Adams) clearly it's not enough for these guys to be worth it. Yet they still get paid.
Another test is whether CEO pay is high in industries where widespread sacking people is likely. Until recently the finance industry had little reason to sack people and was indeed taking people on regardless of age, race, creed or even competence. Yet they had some of the highest CEO pay. Clearly the authors hypothesis conflicts with pretty much all the availible facts. So those of you who praised it, ask yourself why. Why did you jump on any theory, no matter how boneheaded that allowed you to think that people richer than you were richer because they were evil?

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