Forum Post: The Reason MBAs Are Trained To Destroy The Middle Class

Why is it that "business" is somehow a field of unified study, be it fishing, factory, or furniture? Why is it okay to the average MBA grad that unemployment, pollution and corruption of government should all sharply rise, chalked up to "externalities" to the corporate bottom line? Ever notice that MBAs come out of their programs all saying more or less the same economically libertarian things? That government regulation is the greatest sin? That the "free market" exists and is an unambiguous good in all cases? That they study Adam Smith, but somehow not the part where he hated giant concentrations of business power?

It wasn't always like this. How did this indoctrination in fundamentalist laissez-faire capitalism, in short, in big business at any cost, become the expectation of MBA education?

Because 40 years ago, influential corporatists, terrified of intellectual competition from social activists and seeing commies under every chair, acted to make it that way.

The current Supreme Court's overwhelmingly pro-big business makeup has its origin in the work of a very pro-big business SCOTUS justice named Lewis Powell in the 1970s. Powell, a Nixon appointee, urged in 1971 that business schools should be targeted specifically for pro-big business ideological indoctrination in what's known as the Powell Memo:

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/powell_memo_lewis.html

Read this memo and see, in plain English, how much attention the pro-big business right paid in the coming decades to schools, what ideas are driving the business school's educational priorities, and why 99% of MBAs come out of these programs today as little more than indoctrinated haircuts, as blinkered and ideologically hidebound to unregulated capitalism as can be.