Another diversity hire success story!

A crash course on exporting your whole life

Dear T,

A phenomenal essay by Julius Burke at The American Thinker:

"Rich people love to outsource jobs, and for a while nobody in the world was richer than Americans. That’s why after we ran out of industries to outsource, we began to outsource our families. Kids are too childish and messy so we send them to daycares. Old people are too, so we outsourced them to the nursing homes. We don’t even have the decency to in-house our nursing homes, so we outsourced those to the Africans and Filipinos.

“300 years ago we also did our outsourcing in-house, and instead of having the Mexicans do our farming we imported some Black people and forced them to do it for free. Undoing this has been the whole trajectory of the past 100 years, with mixed results. We no longer export labor to other races for free. Now you have to pay the people who do all your work for you, and somehow you try to get richer doing it. This is called capitalism, and the trick is to pay as little as possible.

"That’s why you still export. Doing things in-house in a constitutional republic means the neighbors get upset about their rights; but if they’re unemployed you can just blame the Mexicans you imported or the Chinese you exported labor to* — a simple sleight-of-hand that works when you call it free-trade (for the Republicans), or anti-racism (for the Democrats).

“The goal of exporting everything for cheap was to lay around planning what to do with your money while other people have to wipe you and your whole family for pennies. This is the definition of success. But eventually the people you exported labor to catch on and want to export all the work for themselves. Ursula Burns, a black woman who looks like Chris Rock and was named after the sea witch in The Little Mermaid, was one such person, and her story of exporting her family was described by CNBC, in an article they tastefully titled, The first Black woman CEO in the Fortune 500 on work-life balance: 'You don’t have to go to all your kids’ games.'

(Side note: the actual caption for this picture in the CNBC article begins [emphasis mine], “Ursula Burns, chairman and chief executive officer of Xerox Corp., center,”)

"Long story short, she didn’t go to all her kids’ games. CNBC says she didn’t even pay attention while she was there. She says the “work-life balance” argument is silly, and if you go all work you can have somebody else do the life for you. So (I kid you not) she did crossword puzzles at her kids’ games and made her family members watch the kids — a genius trick which tied up the oldest people with the youngest. She says she raised (wink wink!) two “unbelievably good kids.” Nowhere mentioned in the article is how the kids feel about her.

"This last part is important, because there are only two groups who can judge how you raise your kids, and those are your kids and the people they deal with. And there are only two groups of people who can judge how you run a business, and those are the customers and the people in the business. We don’t have a record of what the kids say because CNBC doesn’t care; but unfortunately for Ursula The Sea Witch Burns, we have a record of what the hires say. And she had one of the most-hated records in the history of Xerox.

"Time Magazine, in fact, lists her as one of the (quote) “9 CEOs with the absolute worst reputations,” and says that while she raked in millions yearly and oversaw big raises for upper management, she didn’t give raises to rank-and-file employees, and she laid off so many that she had to call the police to the layoffs. During her reign, over two-thirds of the employees had a negative opinion of her.

"In fact, over about 40 years Xerox went from being rated one of the happiest companies to work at to being one of the worst. This wasn't all Ursula’s' fault, since she was only the CEO from 2009-2016; but she was part of it. Before she arrived, corporate looters came in and started selling and cutting off parts of the company willy-nilly, and this made running the company into the ground look profitable. This is what happens to great companies when the smart leaders die off and the new ones run out of ideas. But eventually the amputations had to slow down, and the company had to focus on other expendable things, like raises. Jobs they used to do in-house were exported to other companies they could pay even less.

"Ursula Burns was still unable to run things profitably. She bought Affiliated Computer Services for 6.4 billion dollars and Time Magazine said it turned out to be a dud. She had a huge spike in revenue the first year and then things went sideways. Two years after she stepped down, Xerox, after a 115 year run, was no longer an independent company. She pissed off the majority who worked for her, and CNBC wants to know how she managed her work-life balance. And her answer was to tell you that she didn’t. She didn’t manage either end of it. She both looted and overbought for her company, and when she finally showed up at her kids’ games, she decided to play crossword puzzles.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the first Black woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company — massive success in the American sense: filthy rich, expert at exporting.”

Yours,

-J

P.S. In other Diversity Equity and Inclusion news, the mainstream media is reporting the downfall of Claudine Gay — Harvard University’s first and worst black woman president.

Aside from the fact that she was caught stealing other people’s bicycles — sorry, I meant research, and passing it off as her own, The BBC says she was interviewed by Congress and said you can’t threaten Jewish students with death — unless it’s "in the right context.” She then failed to define what that context was, but her track record suggests it’s “whenever you’re at Harvard.”

This puts her focus on DEI into question, of course; but not as much as her "commitment” to education. The College Fix reports that Harvard currently employs about 1,352 administrators for every 1,000 students — and almost none of them have anything to do with education. The Fix says many of these are DEI officers, and that they spend their time recruiting imbeciles, coming up with speech codes, harassing the students, and running kangaroo courts. Harvard had 10,120 full-time non-teaching administrators in 2022, and only 7,483 students.

So Claudine Gay looted and bloated and cheated Harvard like Ursula Burns screwed Xerox — and because of tenure, she’ll still be collecting welfare from Harvard as an administrator. She had the shortest reign in Harvard history and easily the most embarrassing. Her biggest fans still say she was a great hero to the DEI movement, and blame her downfall not on her track record, but predictably on racism.

Despite this setback, the DEI community is still proud of the failures they put in charge, and showing zero signs of slowing down. Boeing touted an all woman, racially-diverse group of engineers — right before a door on one of their planes fell off in the middle of a flight, nearly killing some of the passengers (Tesnim Zekeria has a good counterpoint on Popular Information). And the Federal Aviation Administration, not to be outdone, just announced their commitment to hiring people with “severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities.” So if the planes or the food won’t kill you, we can at least be sure the staff will.

Since we're talking diversity, this reminds me that the Japanese commit suicide for the right reason — because they’ve dishonored their families. The Americans commit suicide for the wrong reason — because we don’t love our families enough. What we fail to mention in these discussions about suicide is that many people also stay alive for the wrong reasons. They fly their customers and coworkers into the ground, bail themselves out with a golden parachute, and still congratulate themselves on being inclusive.

*As you'd expect, Ursula Burns’ sense of self-awareness borders on the pathological. She says, in an article by Harvard Business Review titled, I'm Here Because I’m As Good As You, (note: at what?)

Interviewer: Should we think about Peter Drucker’s old maxim that chief executives shouldn’t make more than 20 times what an average worker makes?

Ursula: I don’t know if 20 times is right. Maybe 100? There have to be guidelines, and there has to be a maximum. To understand the problem, just think about bank executives, for example. If you’re an engineer, you create something. If you’re a scientist, you cure something. Bankers basically don’t do anything. They arbitrate risk and make tens of millions. I know I’m going to get in trouble for saying this, but it’s ridiculous.

Comically, her biggest failure listed above is a bad investment — and one of the employees’ biggest gripes was her pay disparity.

Still I think she’s on to something here. The truth is there really is a big difference between a business with a product and a bank; but what she neglects to mention is that it’s nearly the same difference between a business and a corporation. A family-owned business sells a product or a service, but in a corporation, the business is itself the product. One of them makes money off a widget or a service; the other makes money off of the fact that it makes money. That’s what the whole stock market is: the idea that you can just give money to a business and hopefully get more money.

Thus whether or not you can convince people you can make money is the chief aim of the corporate businessman — and his bank account at first is built entirely on faith: on the fact that other people had great ideas, and the belief that the great ideas will keep flowing. But once the first generation of owners dies off and the great ideas run out you have to convince investors you can still make money. And you always can: by freezing wages for the proles; by selling off blueprints; by outsourcing, cutting corners, merging, and amputating. Not a bug in the system, but the main feature. A parasitic business model where third-raters and diversity hires fit comfortably, and can even look successful.

*The “using a whole flood of foreigners to ruin the working classes” tactic was easily recognized, as late as 2015, by the most left-wing elements of the Democratic Party. Barack Obama said to the DNC, in 2008,

“Passions may fly on immigration, but I don’t know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers.”

Not to be outdone in such obvious common sense, Bernie Sanders said, in 2015,

“There is a reason why Wall Street and all of corporate America likes immigration reform, and it is not, in my view, that they’re staying up nights worrying about undocumented workers. What I think they are interested in is seeing a process by which we can bring low-wage labor of all levels into this country to depress wages for Americans, and I strongly disagree with that.”