Sheryl Sandberg and the Crackling Hellfire of Corporate America - The Atlantic - 0 views
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In publishing, there are some books that are too big to fail. Very early on you get the message that this is a Major and Very Important Book. In 2013, that book was Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which sold more than 1.5 million copies in its first year.
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The book was about how women can make it to the top. It was a sort of “work-life balance” category buster, because she was telling women to pretty much forget about the “life” part.
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when I looked through the galley, the whole thing was so manufactured and B-school-ish that I just wanted to put my head on the keyboard and have a little nap.
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Almost immediately I saw that its main problem wasn’t the children. This was a book about how women in corporate America could—and should—strive to get the most money and the most power. But where should they seek such power? In the crackling hellfire of C-suite America.
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During her 14 years at the company, she’s done so much damage to our society that we may never recover. The simple truth is that you cannot simultaneously dedicate yourself to making untold fortunes for a giant corporation and to championing a social good.
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Amy’s a bitch, but an honest bitch,” one man said about her. If I ever write one of these books, I’ll call it A Few Honest Bitches, and explain that if we can get the right kind of women inside these places, we might be able to burn them down.
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Why were the progressive worlds of publishing and journalism embracing this junk as some kind of giant step toward equality? It will surely go down in history as one of white feminism’s greatest achievements.
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Sandberg invoked the name Goldman Sachs multiple times—in a good way. Mind you, this book was published five years after that despicable outfit played a major role in almost bankrupting the country.
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There we were: suckers, lambs to the slaughter. It didn’t even occur to us that all of that information wasn’t “safe.” We didn’t want it to be safe! We wanted our long-lost friends from Brownie Troop 347 to be able to find us! When we realized what we’d done, it was already too late.
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“We made mistakes and I own them,” Sandberg eventually said about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. “They are on me.” The impression was of radical transparency, a Harry Truman of the C-suite: The buck stops here.
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But according to The New York Times, the buck was about to embark on an Oh, the Places You’ll Go! journey to the bottom of the Earth.
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Huge corporations are never, ever on the side of the people. You can’t take your eyes off of them for a second, because any time you look away, they’ll do terrible things
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Today’s young people have been forced to learn that old lesson, because they are the inheritors of 40 years of corporate greed, private equity’s smash and grab, bank deregulation, and the collusion of the very rich and the U.S. government to squeeze every penny it can from the middle class and move it into the counting houses of billionaires. They know the game isn’t rigged against them; they know the game was lost long before they were born.
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Corporations are now faced with labor shortages, and there are rumblings from the owner class about the demise of the great American work ethic. But corporations are the ones who killed it
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Young people today know that work is not your life; it’s how you pay for your life. It’s an exchange of money for labor, and they are not interested in devoting a jot of extra energy to jobs that pay minimum wage and offer no health insurance or savings plan, for employers who show no loyalty to their workers.
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I’ve heard a number of young people lately say they won’t have children because of the climate crisis. That’s a tremendous sacrifice and a principled position
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A Pew Research Center survey from November found that 44 percent of adults without kids say that they probably won’t have any, up from 37 percent in 2018, the last time Pew asked the question
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here’s the thing. Ask any older person when the happiest time in their life was, and they will always, always say it was when their children were young.
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There is no greater joy in this life than having a baby. Here is a person who has been uniquely designed to love you. And here is Goldman Sachs.