How America’s cowardly plutocrats debunked the myth of the business hero

The business hero is an enduring myth of American society. This is nothing new, of course: in the 1970s and 1980s, Lee Iacocca was everywhere; certainly Onassis and others had their admirers. Jack Welch lived long enough to play a role in his own self-parody. However, in the old days it was not automatically assumed that the interests of the business class and the interests of the country were always aligned. “Greed is good” – still played as the villain’s aphorism.

Some have forgotten that robber barons were the bad guys in history. We were suspicious of the mega-rich because they were often unscrupulous and mistreated workers. Before he became a philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie was a union buster who hired the Pinkertons to break workers’ backs. Yes, he helped expand the railroads and was probably the nation’s greatest promoter of steel, a technology that truly carried us into the future. However, no one considered him an irreproachable man. When the levee at the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, to which he (along with Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, and many other notable members of the aristocracy) belonged, burst due to poor maintenance, causing the Johnstown Flood and 2,209 deaths, the elites in the club were rightfully accused.

The same cannot be said for the collapsed dams we saw lately. Nowadays, when our ubiquitous social media applications are causing political violence in places like India and Myanmar and can be plausibly linked to a range of social ills such as teen anxiety, depression and negative self-image, Mark Zuckerberg sees that its shares are selling off. up. Error is a feature, an advantage; Chaos is a system functioning as intended. Now, as a new flood – hatred and fascism – threatens to destroy our institutions and morality itself, our oligarchs shrug and distract attention from blame. Of the 10 richest people in America, not one of them publicly supported Kamala Harris or were willing to condemn Donald Trump. These supposed business heroes are mostly business cowards who are the first to bend to obey.