Crime and Punishment
Within the corporate culture in general, achievement is no longer connected to reward or failure to punishment. CEOs routinely see their earnings rise by millions while their companies’ stock plummets. Meanwhile, at lower levels in the hierarchy, white-collar folks get laid off simply because they have been successful enough to make their salaries a tempting cost cut. Thus the relationship between accomplishments and success seems to have been inverted. “Wall Street has traditionally rewarded people who succeeded,” a consultant on executive pay is quoted as telling the New York Times. “Now they are rewarding people who fail.”
Moving into the realm of politics, take the case of Karl Rove, the man who - all the current evidence suggests - outed CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson in retaliation for her husband’s refusal to go along with the myth of an Iraqi nuclear threat. If a Democrat were to reveal the identity of a CIA agent or otherwise leak classified material to the press, you may be sure he or she would be tarred, feathered and suspended from a lamppost within hours of the crime. But Rove carries on with his vicarious presidency - continuing to promote Bush’s voter-repelling social security plan and playing a visible role in the selection of the new supreme court justice.
Far more serious crimes are no less amply rewarded. Of the top perpetrators in the various prisoner abuse scandals, Donald Rumsfeld still holds his post as defence secretary; Condoleezza Rice has been promoted to secretary of state; and torture-memo lawyer Alberto Gonzales has moved up to become the US attorney general. Only one general with a hand in the abuse - Janis Karpinski, the former head officer at Abu Ghraib - has suffered a demotion. Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of US forces in Iraq, is being considered for promotion to four-star general, and Maj Gen Barbara Fast, his head of intelligence-gathering in Iraq, has been given command of an Arizona army base where soldiers are taught interrogation techniques.
And what about the war itself? Four years ago, a Saudi militant, based in Afghanistan, engineered the 9/11 attack, leading the US to invade … Iraq. What message does this send to Norway or Lesotho? That when it comes to US foreign policy, there is no connection between crime and punishment, or even cause and effect?
Barbara Ehrenreich | Guardian (read more. . .)
