What Planet Are These People From?

I never intended for this blog to become a bash Goldman Sachs commentary but, OMG, what is with the senior management of this firm? Are they all moral morons? Psychopaths in suits? Ethically challenged to the point of farce? They have proven beyond a doubt they are rip-off artists with how they treated their clients and the world economy in the subprime mortgage scandal that Goldman was at the heart of…their actions show that the term ‘fiduciary responsibility’ is totally meaningless to them. When asked if Goldman had a duty to act in the best interests of its clients, Goldman senior exec. Daniel Sparks replied “I believe (italics mine) we have a duty to serve our clients well.” Uh, no Mr. Sparks, fiduciary duty of Goldman towards its clients is not a mere belief to be applied when, and only when, Goldman stands to make a lot of money by looking out for its clients, fiduciary duty is a moral right that is the very basis of your relationship with your clients. Fiduciary duty is the corner stone upon which the financial services industry is supposed to rest. When Goldman’s own senior execs are sending each other emails describing subprime based investments Goldman are pushing their clients into as “one shitty deal” and making “lemonade from some big old lemons” and “crap” I have to question the very reason for Goldman Sachs being allowed to exist as a firm. Goldman was not providing its clients with the service those clients were entitled to; instead Goldman, acting more like a giant casino than an investment bank, bet against its clients.  If Goldman knew these mortgage based investments were disasters waiting to happen, why didn’t they warn us about them instead of abetting the financial meltdown through its greedy self-serving actions?  Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s CEO, brazenly tells the US Senate panel that he doesn’t “think our clients care or should (my italics) care” what Goldman is planning to do. What?????? The clients of his firm have no stake in what Goldman is doing even when they are knowingly placing those clients in toxic investments? This statement is absolutely mind boggling. Fiduciary responsibility? What’s that asks Goldman.  Corporate social responsibility?  Never crossed our minds.  While Mr. Blankfein is the 2009 Financial Times man of the year because he knows how to profit big time by betting against his clients, the man is clearly demonstrating he is either ethically bankrupt or morally ignorant. Neither of these attributes is what society needs in a man in his influential position. The actions of Goldman Sachs show that it has jettisoned the reasons why investment banks were approved by society in the first place – to be financial intermediaries whose role is to transfer savings from one sector of the economy to another that needs capital and to provide stability and liquidity in the market to allow for the free flow of capital in the market. These were the reasons it was given its charter to operate in the market in order to benefit, be value-added to (in MBA-speak), society. Goldman, by its actions, has shown that it has discarded its given societal role to enhance the overall well-being of society in its heady rush for profit and executive bonuses at any cost. Just what is the social value of this moral black-hole of a firm?

Dehumanizing Language

We live in a business culture. The driving values of business are the underlying values of our culture. Business culture is no longer just confined to business. It is now the underlying ethos behind most aspects of our society. Health care is no longer patient oriented, it is business oriented at its core providing not healing but services. Education is no longer about a more traditional approach to educating our young to think critically; now it is basically concerned with job training skills and thinking critically is definitely not high on list of those skills and so we have a ‘dumb downed’ approach to education. Government is less and less about serving the people and more and more about being run according to “efficient” business principles. Our legal system, once the great equalizer in our society that supported the powerless or less powerful in their interactions with the more powerful (read business elite), if we go by recent Supreme Court decisions, is more pro-business than ever before. Even the artistic expressions of our society are completely at the whim of the business ethos that permeates our society.

A major consequence of our business oriented culture is the degrading of human relationships which are at the heart of ethics. Ethics is how we conduct ourselves in relationships with others to create the trust we need to function effectively as a society. I find one of the key debasing features of our business culture has been the wholesale adoption of business language as the language of human relationships. In the business world people are not referred to as people but as clients or customers. ‘Client’ and ‘customer’ are abstract terms that confer on the object of those terms only a quasi-human status. In the business world of spread sheets, statistics, proposals, and overall ideology, these terms have the great tendency to remove the business person from encountering the humanity of the client/customer. Instead of John Doe or Jane Smith, who by virtue of their names are flesh and blood people demanding the dignity accrued to their persons through their real names, the use of client/customer turns a person into a thing, something on an impersonal ledger that can be moved around and dealt with with minimum attention to the personhood of that person. I think this is why there are so many violations of basic human rights, needs, and fiduciary obligations in the business world. The language of business de-humanizes people; it removes the humanity of people from the consciousness of some business people as it effectively categorizes people as things. It is easier to take advantage of a client/customer when the humanity of that client/customer has been effectively marginalized by the very language used to describe and identify.

This marginalization of personhood through the use of business language also plays itself out in other areas of our society. Just two examples of what I’m writing about. First education. One of the major battles at our universities and colleges (and, unfortunately, in some of our elementary and secondary schools) is the use of the alienating terms of client/customer to refer to what we used to call ‘student’. In education, client/customer as a term has a whole different connotation than does the term student. The former is someone to be dealt with on a far more impersonal level while the latter term demands personal attention from his/her teachers. Client/customer is the preferred terminology used by administrators in academic institutions while student is still the preferred terminology invoked by most teachers/professors and the students themselves (I have yet to hear of a student in a college or university refer to him/herself as a client of the institution). When dealing with the dollars and cents of running an academic institution I think it makes hard decisions a bit easier for administrators when referring to students as clients who are provided services rather than students who learn through their encounters with their teachers. The other example is health care. Again the preferred term for health care administrators to apply to people who require medical attention is client/customer rather than the traditional term of patient. In health care, a client is provided services in the most ‘efficient’ manner while a patient is someone who is looking for a personal relationship with the health care provider (also a business language term, not doctor or nurse) which quite likely makes for an inefficient relationship from a money point of view. Also note that both academic institutions and health care institutions must have business models of operation rather than caring models or patient/student centric models. Another business language (business model) term that distances the user of the term from the humanity of the people who require education and health care.