{"id":189514,"date":"2010-03-17T20:03:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-18T01:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/03\/17\/our-overpaid-elites-are-incompetent-corrupt-and-worthless\/"},"modified":"2010-03-17T20:03:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-18T01:03:00","slug":"our-overpaid-elites-are-incompetent-corrupt-and-worthless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/03\/17\/our-overpaid-elites-are-incompetent-corrupt-and-worthless\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Overpaid Elites Are Incompetent, Corrupt, and Worthless"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Christopher Hayes <a href=\"http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/specials\/packages\/article\/0,28804,1971133_1971110_1971117,00.html\">nails it<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>In the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society \u2014 whether it&#8217;s General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media \u2014 has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run these institutions, the bright and industrious minds who occupy the commanding heights of our meritocratic order. In exchange for their power, status and remuneration, they are supposed to make sure everything operates smoothly. But after a cascade of scandals and catastrophes, that implicit social contract lies in ruins, replaced by mass skepticism, contempt and disillusionment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The downfall of empires has always been the replacement of meritocracies with nepotism, because as people become <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">entitled<\/span>, they become <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">stupid<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>Get your pitchforks and torches, get your pitchforks and torches here!<\/p>\n<p>Go read.<\/p>\n<p>H\/t <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eschatonblog.com\/2010\/03\/they-fucked-whole-thing-up.html\">Atrios<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Christopher Hayes nails it: In the past decade, nearly every pillar institution in American society \u2014 whether it&#8217;s General Motors, Congress, Wall Street, Major League Baseball, the Catholic Church or the mainstream media \u2014 has revealed itself to be corrupt, incompetent or both. And at the root of these failures are the people who run &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1002,1058],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-good-writing","category-sociology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189514"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189514\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}