Beware corporate psychopaths

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday January 01, 2012 · 9:19 PM PST

2012/01/01 · 21:19

The full title of this article from The Independent is Beware corporate psychopaths – they are still occupying positions of power. It was written by Brian Basham shortly before the year ended. Something like this terrifies me. Ron Paul would not stop this, by the way. I'm not saying that Obama would either, but we must take this into consideration about our political priorities.

Here is the link for the whole article. Please read it.

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics entitled "The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis", Clive R Boddy identifies these people as psychopaths.
"They are," he says, "simply the 1 per cent of people who have no conscience or empathy." And he argues: "Psychopaths, rising to key senior positions within modern financial corporations, where they are able to influence the moral climate of the whole organisation and yield considerable power, have largely caused the [banking] crisis'.

More after the fold.

Cut to a pleasantly warm evening in Bahrain. My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.
He then makes an astonishing confession: "At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles."

Making those cuts doesn't make psychopaths of the cutters, but the financial sector's lack of remorse for the pain it encourages people to inflict is purely psychopathic. Surely the action of cutting should be a matter for sorrow and regret? People's lives are damaged, even destroyed. However, that's not how the financial sector sees it.

As Mr Boddy warns: "The very same corporate psychopaths, who probably caused the crisis by their self-seeking greed and avarice, are now advising governments on how to get out of the crisis. Further, if the corporate psychopaths theory of the global financial crisis is correct, then we are now far from the end of the crisis. Indeed, it is only the end of the beginning."

Once again, please read the whole article.

This content was created by a Daily Kos Community member.

Make YOUR voice heard!

Comments are closed on this story.