One Way to Start the Restoration of the Greatness of America

Go to every business school in the country, lock the faculty inside and implode the fucking buildings. Then you go to about half of the law schools and repeat the exercise.*

"Professional managers" have had their fingers on the dismantling of the American manufacturing base. Their focus on "the bottom line", on quarterly profits, and their self-interest in arranging things so they get paid based on short-term results have been the overwhelming factor in the decline of manufacturing, which was the major source of decent jobs for high-school graduates.

I also don't want to overlook the corrosive effect of several large retail chains, whose focus on price over any degree of quality helped to push the making of a lot of goods offshore. Between those asswipes and the MBAs, factories have been chasing the cheapest workers, as they moved from the northeast to the south, then to Mexico, Honduras, Taiwan, China and more recently, to Vietnam and Burma. They seek places where workers get paid very little and the governments are unconcerned with issues such as pollution and worker safety.

Because cleaning up one's operation and providing a safe workplace costs money that otherwise would go into the pockets of the MBAs.

The corrosive effect of the focus on the bottom line is also playing out across the state of Connecticut. The main electrical utility in the state, Connecticut Light and Power, has so slashed the number of line repair and maintenance crews that every time there is a little bit of a problem, CL&P has to hire contractors from as far away as Michigan.

It's not just CL&P, of course. All of the utilities have slashed maintenance. You can drive around just about everywhere and see utility lines that have become overgrown with vegetation, to the point that the only ones that they sort of still try to keep clear are very high-tension lines. They have taken a Ford Pinto mentality that it's cheaper to repair line breaks than it is to prevent them.

That is what professional managers do: They figure out whatever will put the most money into their pockets right now. They postpone repairs and maintenance, not only is it more profitable in the short therm to do that, but because they also are betting that by the time the entire house of cards cashes down, it will be somebody else's problem.

That same mentality is behind the underfunded maintenance of American roads. One example which is New York, which has deliberately raided the highway maintenance fund for years, which is not the only dedicated user-funded maintenance fund that they've tried to raid.

You know things are bad when car companies make commercials that say "American roads suck."



We need to get back to making shit right. We can do that, in part, by relegating the MBA degree to the same amount of respect as having a degree in advanced heraldry.**
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*Start by torching every one that has opened since 1975.
** That's not entirely fair. The MBA degree should be regarded as the equivalent of being convicted for being a homicidal pedophile.