Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Document Notes
There seemed to be a converted effort in 1970s to switch people from common good to financial security and dominance.
Highlights
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research indicating that the 1970s saw a growing emphasis on individual happiness over the collective well-being that was celebrated by the hippie counterculture and New Left social movements of the ’60s.
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The number of students graduating with MBAs began to skyrocket in the 1970s. At the same time, more and more young people gravitated toward cities in pursuit of a cosmopolitan experience, chic with a touch of urban grit. More importantly, though, major cities began to host the burgeoning so-called “ideas industry,” which included financial services, and the Yuppies wanted in.
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Deregulation and technological advances, combined with this “rush of new blood” as McGrath calls it, incentivized investment banks to lean into money-making operations, using their own money to buy and sell securities to generate profits.
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the advent of shareholder primacy — the idea that corporations’ sole responsibility is to their shareholders — as a useful justification for corporations to abandon social responsibility.
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the memo “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” that Lewis Powell authored in 1971, months before acceding to the Supreme Court. The confidential memo advocated for a more aggressive approach to instilling free-market values in the face of what he considered to be a broad-based attack on corporate freedom.
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Its publication helped establish a framework for organizations like the Federalist Society and Young America’s Foundation, which undertook to infiltrate college campuses and promote right-wing economic ideas.
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Fifteen years earlier, graduates of the country’s most elite colleges had often been concerned with trying to improve the state of the world. Now, the focus was different: How can I be as financially successful as possible?
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the ritualistic culture, promise of high-level business exposure, and competition for limited positions naturally fostered exclusivity. This cycle was further legitimized by the elite universities whose graduates were the targets of the initial recruitment efforts, and later, whose business schools would accept any applicant coming from a two-year analyst role. Those graduates would become alumni, players in the all-important networking charade.
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. To illustrate the point, the Peace Corps was enrolling fifteen thousand graduates per year in the 1960s and ’70s, but only five thousand by the end of the 1980s. It had been replaced by the Finance Corps, where nobody even pretended to be making the world a better place.
id799701972
The fines that Goldman has been obligated to pay as a result of its crimes pale in comparison to the amount of taxpayer funds it has received from government bailouts, implicitly validating its illegal and immoral behavior.