dwot (99.57)

Wall Street Ethics Hit the Classroom Hard

February 03, 2008 – Comments (2)

Read the Bloomberg article on how JPMorgan Chase targets small school districts that were struggling for cash. 

A few years back I saw a documentary on brain research.  One of the profound things in the research was about various active parts of the brain and what researchers were finding it associated with.  For example, the children born in the 80s in Romania (what happened to them?) that lived in the grossly understaffed orphanages had severely under developed regions associated with empathy and nurturing.  I remember the stories about people who adopted these children at early school ages and the stories of tremendous problems with dealing with their behaviours (like these).

Anyway, back to the point of the video, these undeveloped parts of the brain were associated with sociopathic behaviour.  What was profound to me about the documentary was that the researchers found that the brain activity of corporate executives had the same type of brain development as sociopaths, underdeveloped parts of the brain associated with empathy and the ability to feel for what their actions do to others.

People with these sections of their brain properly developed have a great deal more trouble laying off workers and making some of these kinds of decisions that are labeled "hard."  These decisions are not hard for sociopaths.

I think the link which defines a sociopath has real problems in the definition.  We only identify the sociopaths in our society that have the appearance of causing social problems, as in those unable to hold a job because of it, or where the violation of the wellbeing or sexual rights of another is highly apparent. 

I would suggest that those involved in systematically targeting the school districts in the Bloomberg article are full blown sociopaths.