After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

After the Crash

Report: Whites More Likely To Be Named CEOs Than Equally Sociopathic Black Candidates

americanpsycho8

Editor’s Note: Good satire always has a firm basis in truth.

Source: The Onion

ALEXANDRIA, VA—Shedding light on the striking lack of diversity within the highest ranks of corporate America, a report from the Executive Leadership Council released Tuesday reveals that white individuals are far more likely to be named CEOs than equally sociopathic black candidates.

Despite widespread evidence that minority executives are just as misanthropic and unprincipled as their Caucasian peers, the study found that less than 1 percent of Fortune 500 companies have black chief executives, demonstrating that the upper levels of the business world frequently remain inaccessible to even the most morally bankrupt of African-Americans.

“Our data shows that when white megalomaniacs and black megalomaniacs contend for the highest corporate positions in the U.S., the latter are routinely passed over,” said the report’s lead author, Sandra Norwood, pointing to dozens of recent instances in which African-American individuals who had proven track records of undermining their colleagues’, employees’, and shareholders’ interests in order to further their own selfish ambitions were not even offered an interview for a company’s top seat. “Vindictive, unscrupulous blacks simply aren’t granted these leadership opportunities, despite possessing the same willingness to maximize short-term profit by eliminating health insurance benefits for part-time employees or commit accounting fraud in order to inflate the value of their personal stock options.”

“These are heartless sadists who have put in countless hours of backstabbing and forsaken all ethical constraints in order to bolster their own power, and yet time and time again they are denied a place at the top of the corporate ladder simply because of the color of their skin,” she continued.

According to the report, even when companies were presented with numerous highly qualified minority candidates with no moral compass and a history of increasing earnings by knowingly rushing an unsafe product to market or outsourcing thousands of manufacturing jobs to overseas sweatshops, the top-tier positions still tended to be awarded almost exclusively to deceitful, empathy-devoid whites.

In fact, the study found that, when presented with identical résumés of potential CEOs who had hid billions of dollars of revenue in offshore tax havens and poached several engineers from a rival business in order to illegally gain confidential trade secrets—one labeled with a common Caucasian name and the other with a traditionally African-American name—boards of directors were far more likely to select the applicant with the white-sounding name. Such findings suggest that many at the highest corporate level still hold inherent biases against amoral, power-hungry egotists of color.

“Even in 2015, many corporate boards will automatically discount a black candidate even if they have demonstrated that they are fully capable of using aggressive intimidation tactics to prevent their company’s workers from forming a labor union,” Norwood said. “Board members often are more comfortable working with lying, underhanded double-crossers who are similar to themselves. Therefore, the individual that they ultimately promote to CEO tends to come from the same cultural background that turned them into destructive, unrepentant monsters.”

According to sources, the dearth of black CEOs within corporate America has prompted a number of companies to institute personnel outreach programs to identify and cultivate malevolent young African-Americans who they believe have the potential to one day violate insider trading laws and initiate spurious patent lawsuits against smaller competitors in order to overwhelm them with legal fees and force them out of the industry.

However, after years of confronting the “glass ceiling” that prevents them from advancing as far as their white peers, many blindly ambitious blacks told reporters they are skeptical that these programs will have a meaningful impact on African-Americans who aspire to become CEOs so that they can immediately downsize as many low-level personnel as necessary to hit profit targets that trigger lucrative personal bonuses.

“When you’re black, you have to be twice as ruthless and deceptive just to reach the senior level, but then you can pretty much forget about ever having a shot at the corner office,” said William Coleman, the sole African-American vice president at a prominent Wall Street financial services group, who says he has yet to be recognized for allocating the risk of his firm’s portfolio of unstable derivatives investments entirely onto the municipal worker pension funds it administers. “My company just elected a white external candidate for our CEO role even after I successfully shifted the blame for a botched merger onto a fellow senior manager before personally firing him and claiming his successes as my own. It’s like they refuse to see how deeply predatory and full of hatred I am.”

“My race shouldn’t be a factor when I’ve proven that I’m a borderline psychopath who will step over anybody in my way to sate my fanatical lust for power,” he continued. “When it comes to succeeding in the business world, that’s all that should matter.”

 

Related Video:

 

Surprise: The Drug War Isn’t About Drugs

Drug-War1By Kevin Carson

Source: Center for a Stateless Society

On the morning of November 6 the US Federal Bureau of Investigation trumpeted its takedown of the Silk Road 2.0 website and the arrest of  alleged operator Blake Benthall.

In so doing the FBI demonstrated, once again, that the War on Drugs has nothing to do with anything its propagandists claim it’s about. If drug criminalization is a public safety issue — about fighting violent crime and gangs, or preventing overdoses and poisoning — shutting down Silk Road is one of the dumbest things the feds can do. Silk Road was a secure, anonymous marketplace in which buyers and sellers could do business without the risk of violence associated with street trade. And the seller reputational system meant that drugs sold on Silk Road were far purer and safer than their street counterparts.

This is true of all the other selling points for the Drug War. Hillary Clinton, in possibly one of the stupidest remarks ever uttered by a human being, says legalizing narcotics is a bad idea “because there’s too much money in it” — referring, presumably, to the lucrative drug trade and the cartels fighting over it.

But there’s so much money in it, and the cartels fight to control it, only because it’s illegal. That’s what happens when you criminalize stuff people want to buy: You create black markets with much higher prices, which organized crime gangs fight to control. Alcohol prohibition created the gangster culture of the 1920s. It’s been with us ever since. When Prohibition was repealed, organized crime just shifted to fighting over other illegal markets. The more consensual, non-violent activities are made illegal, the larger the portion of the economy that’s turned into black markets for gangs to fight over.

In related news, the Mexican drug cartels are reportedly making less money since the legalization or decriminalization of pot in several American states. I wonder why.

Perhaps the biggest joke is that the War on Drugs is fought to reduce drug use. No doubt many people involved in the domestic enforcement side of the Drug War actually believe this, but the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing. The narcotics trade is an enormous source of money for the criminal gangs that control it, and guess what? The US intelligence community is one of the biggest criminal drug gangs in the world, and the global drug trade is a great way for it to raise money to do morally repugnant stuff it can’t get openly funded by Congress. It’s been twenty years since journalist Gary Webb revealed the Reagan cabinet’s collusion with drug cartels in marketing cocaine inside the United States, to raise money for the right-wing Contra death squads in Nicaragua — a revelation he was gaslighted and driven to suicide for by the US intelligence community and mainstream press.

Now we hear that the US is “losing the drug war in Afghanistan.” Well, obviously — it’s a war that’s designed to be lost. The Taliban were so easy to overthrown in the fall of 2001 because they really did try to stamp out opium poppy cultivation, and with a fair degree of success. This didn’t sit well with the Afghan populace, which traditionally makes a lot of money growing poppies. But the Northern Alliance — which the United States turned into the national government of Afghanistan — was quite friendly to poppy cultivation in its territory. When the Taliban was overthrown, poppy and heroin cultivation resumed normal levels. Putting the US in charge of a “war on drugs in Afghanistan” is like putting Al Capone in charge of alcohol prohibition.

Besides, actually “winning” the drug war would mean ending it. And who in US domestic law enforcement wants to cut off the source of billions in federal aid and military equipment, militarized SWAT teams and unprecedented surveillance and civil forfeiture powers? This is a war meant to go on forever, just like the so-called War on Terror.

The state always encourages moral panic and “wars” on one thing or another in order to keep us afraid, so we’ll give it more power over our lives. Don’t believe its lies.

 

At the Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know podcast Ben and Matt share their views on the War on Drugs.

mp3 link: http://podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/stdwytk-audio/2014-11-14-stdwytk-war-on-drugs.mp3

Podcast Roundup: Halloween Edition

Photo: The Onion

Photo: The Onion

Though I don’t regularly feature podcasts delving into horror/sci-fi aspects of pop culture or the world of metaphysics and the paranormal, today seems an appropriate time to share a few in observance of Halloween, All Hallow’s Eve, Samhain, Day of the Dead, etc.

10/27 Maja D’Aoust and Erik Davis discuss magical and synchronistic aspects of politics and modern culture at Expanding Mind: Show link: http://prn.fm/category/archives/expanding-mind/

10/28 A great discussion on John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of “The Thing” and what makes it a classic horror film at the Debatable Podcast: Show link: http://debatablepodcast.tumblr.com/post/65307821240/episode-56-the-thing-with-sip-eric-sipple-joins

10/29 Guillermo Jimenez and Dr. Paul Cantor have a conversation about the political meaning of apocalyptic “end of the world” narratives in shows like The Walking Dead, X- Files, Fringe, and Falling Skies from a libertarian perspective: Show Link: http://tracesofreality.com/2013/10/29/tor-radio-the-truth-behind-the-walking-dead-liberty-vs-authority-in-pop-culture-with-dr-paul-cantor/

10/30 Tim Binnall and David Acord commemorate the 75th anniversary of Orson Welles’ infamous “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast with an analysis of the program, how it came to be, its importance in the context of emerging technology and the field of media literacy, and how it’s connected to conspiracy and UFOlogy: Show link: http://www.binnallofamerica.com/boaa103013.html

Judging from the last few minutes of this trailer for his film “F For Fake”, Welles himself was involved in perpetuating the mystery and speculation surrounding his War of the Worlds broadcast:

10/30 The always educational “Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know” video podcast covers the origins of Halloween traditions:

Show link: http://www.howstuffworks.com/podcasts/stuff-they-dont-want-you-to-know.rss

Lara Trace Hentz

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