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Joseph Heller tried to warn us of MBA's when he wrote the character Milo Minderbinder
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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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The part that stuck with me was how Minderbinder was a patriot. He didn't see any conflict between profiteering and being a loyal American. Even when that meant plain treason.
Contrast this with Harry Truman. A lawmaker who made his name investigating "war profiteering". Truman became a Senator because he had the backing of the notoriously corrupt Missouri political machine headed by the boss Pendergast. Truman was nicknamed "the Senator from Pendergast".
Truman himself wasn't corrupt. But he was a poor businessman, and maybe that makes him the least American of all.
I'd add the fact he was let off the hook due to his enormous profits. He beat the treason charges by having an objective measure of how very American he was. This was, of course, a fiction as usually these guys have to pay a fine, some small fraction of whatever was gained. They sometimes even get fingers wagged at them, I hear